In Brief
The docents at Nemacolin Castle in Brownsville, Pennsylvania can name their ghosts. Elizabeth in white, Mary the dark-haired girl, a lady in purple upstairs where visitors say their chest tightens. The names line up with a family that buried four of its six children here.
The Full Story
The volunteers who run Nemacolin Castle in Brownsville, Pennsylvania can tell you their ghosts by name. There's Elizabeth, a proper lady in a flowing white dress seen passing through the hallways. There's Mary, a seven-year-old girl with dark curly hair, reported in the middle of the house. Up in an old servants' bedroom there's a lady in purple, said to have died of a respiratory illness, and visitors who stand in that room sometimes complain their chest tightens and they can't breathe.
The names are specific because the family was real, and the family's grief is on the record. Jacob Bowman started a trading post on this bluff over the Monongahela in the late 1780s and spent decades turning it into a brick castle with a crenellated tower and an arched portico. He raised it near the old site of Fort Burd, and local accounts hold that the whole house sits over an Adena tribe burial mound. His son Nelson added the east wing and a square brick tower on the back, built over an open well, with the nursery on its second floor. Nelson and his wife Elizabeth had six children. Only two lived to adulthood.
So the lady in white shares a name with Nelson's wife. The little girl haunts the rooms where children were kept. The lore here runs to as many as ten ghosts, and the phenomena are the kind an old house produces when no one's looking: heavy stomping footsteps at odd hours, doors that slam when investigators find no closed door to account for them.
Three generations of Bowmans lived and died in the place before Charles's widow Leila, the last of the family, passed in 1959 and left the house to become a museum. The Daughters of the American Revolution ran it first; the Brownsville Historical Society keeps it now, its docents trained for eight weeks before they lead a tour. Roughly 80 to 90 percent of what fills the rooms is still original to the Bowmans, which means the visitors who report Elizabeth and Mary are reporting them among the family's own furniture.
The founder turns up too. Jacob Bowman is seen near the library, where an antique cane is said to move on its own. In May 2010, a team from the Ghost Research Society spent a night in the house with a ghost box. Someone asked the room a question: who was with us in the library?
Investigators reported one word came back. *Nelson.*
