Congress Hall

Congress met here from 1790 to 1800. The ghosts attached to it, Franklin, Washington, a limping Benedict Arnold, are imported from the block.

Congress Hall is where George Washington stood on March 4, 1797, and took the oath for his second term. It's where John Adams was inaugurated a week earlier. It's where the 6th through 10th Congresses met, where the Bill of Rights was ratified, where the First Bank of the United States was chartered, where the Department of the Navy was created, and where Jay's Treaty with England was ratified by a single vote. For ten years, between 1790 and 1800, while Washington D.C. was still a muddy construction site, this red-brick courthouse on Chestnut Street was the functioning legislature of the United States.

That's a lot of history for two stories of Georgian brick. Philadelphia ghost tours have been stopping here for decades and the stories that recur involve the people who worked and died in the neighborhood in the 1790s rather than anything specific to the building itself. Visitors walking past after dark have described a stout man in spectacles and colonial coat reading papers on the Chestnut Street side, interpreted by pretty much every local tour as Benjamin Franklin, whose grave is two blocks away at Christ Church Burial Ground. Others have reported a tall figure in a long coat pacing the upstairs gallery, described as Washington by guides who want it to be Washington. The identifications are confident, the evidence is anecdotal.

The more interesting sighting is Benedict Arnold. Arnold's ghost has been reported around the Independence Hall and Congress Hall block since the 19th century, usually described as limping (his leg wound from Saratoga never fully healed) and looking agitated. The folklore version is that he comes back to the one place his betrayal mattered most, the capitol of the government he turned against. It's good theater and nobody has ever matched a sighting to a verified witness with a name attached.

What the building is actually good for is quiet. The National Park Service runs Congress Hall as part of Independence National Historical Park, and tours are free, and on a weekday afternoon you can stand in the Senate chamber upstairs, where Washington said goodbye to the federal government on March 3, 1797, and hear nothing except your own footsteps on the wide-plank floor. Rangers have mentioned, off the record, that the building does things at night that daytime visitors never see: doors that were shut are open, papers on the ranger desk get shuffled, the alarm system picks up movement in rooms that have been locked since close.

The honest version is that Congress Hall is not the most active haunted site in Philadelphia. It's the most historically loaded. The ghost stories attached to it are largely imported from the adjacent blocks, because the block itself is so thick with Revolutionary-era death that the spectral population gets assigned to the best-preserved building. Whether or not Franklin's ghost actually stops here on his rounds, the room where Washington peacefully handed power to Adams is worth twenty minutes of your time.

Ghost tours meet on the sidewalk out front most nights after dark. Independence Hall and Liberty Bell are directly across the square.