Independence Hall

A bronze Ben Franklin dances in the plaza on moonlit nights. Night watchmen have seen him reading in the Long Gallery since 1820.

A bronze statue of Benjamin Franklin sits in the old American Philosophical Society building across the plaza from Independence Hall. Philadelphia legend has it that on moonlit nights, the statue climbs down from its pedestal and dances along Fifth Street. The story is almost certainly a joke that got repeated straight for two hundred years, but it's the most cheerful ghost story in American history, and it's the one Philadelphians keep telling.

Independence Hall itself has a more sober reputation, and it earned it inside a single room. The Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in the Assembly Room on July 4, 1776. The Constitutional Convention wrote the U.S. Constitution in the same room between May and September 1787. When Abraham Lincoln's funeral train reached Philadelphia in April 1865, his body lay in state on that floor. Over 300,000 mourners filed past the coffin in two days. The original Pennsylvania State House that holds all of this was finished in 1753, which makes the building older than the country it helped invent.

The ghosts people claim to see at Independence Hall are, unsurprisingly, the Founders. Night watchmen in the nineteenth century reported Benjamin Franklin seated in a chair in the Long Gallery, reading by candlelight that wasn't there. A Park Service ranger in the 1970s said she saw a man in breeches and a powdered wig standing at the east window of the Assembly Room at 3 a.m. When she spoke to him, he was gone. She filed a report and kept working the overnight shift.

Visitors keep coming back to the inkwell used to sign the Declaration. The original silver inkwell sits in the Assembly Room under glass, and people have reported it feels warm when you hold your hand near the case, even in January. The Park Service has no official position on this. The Park Service has no official position on any of the ghost reports, which is probably the right call for a National Historical Park.

The building's real unsettling quality is quieter than the apparitions. The Assembly Room is set up to look exactly as it did in 1776, with the delegates' chairs arranged behind the small desks where they signed. The silver inkwell. The blue tablecloth. A single chair at the front, where George Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention. The chair has a half-sun carved into its back. Franklin, near the end of that summer in 1787, looked at the sun and said he had often wondered whether it was rising or setting. "But now," he said, "I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun."

Standing in the room after hours, with the ropes down and the tourists gone, you can see why people leave thinking they heard something.

The Benjamin Franklin statue, by the way, has stayed put every time anyone has looked. The joke is older than most of the people telling it, and that might be the most Philadelphia thing about the whole story.