Fort Mifflin

Philadelphia police get 911 calls from Fort Mifflin about a screaming woman. The fort is locked. Elizabeth Pratt hanged herself there in the 1790s.

Philadelphia police have responded to 911 calls from Fort Mifflin more than once, dispatched to the sound of a woman screaming inside the casemates. They arrive, search the fort, find the buildings locked, and leave.

The screams keep happening.

The woman is Elizabeth Pratt, and her story is the closest thing Fort Mifflin has to a documented legend. She lived on the fort as an officer's wife in the late 1700s, had a daughter she adored, and watched the daughter die of an illness that Elizabeth herself had driven her away from home over some unresolved argument. Elizabeth hanged herself in grief. The screaming comes from Casemate 5, which was her quarters. Staff have recorded it on EVP equipment. Visitors have heard it on the wind. Philadelphia dispatchers have a file on it.

Fort Mifflin sits on a narrow strip of land where the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers meet, five minutes from the end of the Philadelphia airport runway. It was the fort that held the British back during the November 1777 siege that bought Washington the time he needed to dig in at Valley Forge. During those six weeks, 250 American soldiers died defending walls that were being pounded to gravel by 2,000 British cannonballs in a single day. The fort fell. The siege worked anyway. Most people in Philadelphia have never heard of it.

The other named ghost here is William Howe, the faceless man. Howe was a Union soldier executed by hanging at the fort on August 26, 1864, for desertion and the murder of an officer who came to arrest him. Howe's defense was that he'd left his regiment only because he was sick, with no medical care available, and that the officers fired first when they came for him. The court-martial didn't believe him. The hanging was the only public execution ever held at Fort Mifflin, and according to paranormal host Greg O'Brien, Howe's ghost appears without a face because a canvas hood was placed over his head before the drop.

"I think he's not at rest because he was made an example of," O'Brien told the show that investigated the fort. A tour guide in a dark-blue Union four-button sack coat once told a group she felt an unseen arm helping her down the steep stairs into Casemate 11, where Howe had been held before his execution.

The officers' quarters run cold in patches. Investigators have logged drops of fifteen to twenty degrees walking from the parlor into the rear bedroom. A lamplighter, in a long wool greatcoat nobody recognizes, walks the ramparts at dusk and vanishes when approached. The powder magazine registers the same fifteen-to-twenty-degree plunge in the middle of July. And the faceless man has been photographed at least twice, standing in the doorway of Casemate 11 with his uniform visible and his head a blur.

Fort Mifflin runs overnight paranormal investigations through the Haunted Rooms network, and teams have left with hours of EVP audio, thermal camera anomalies, and the shared experience of being touched by something they couldn't see. Skeptics would point out that this is what overnight investigations tend to produce wherever they're held. Believers would point to the dispatch logs.

The fort is one of the few Revolutionary War sites in America where the siege walls themselves remain upright, and the masonry is pockmarked with the damage from 1777. Cannonball craters, splintered beams, the rust of two centuries of river weather.

Whatever you walk out with, Casemate 5 has Elizabeth Pratt's name on the dispatch log.