The Ghosts of Locust

There’s a graveyard underneath Locust Walk.

The bodies lie silent below the footfalls of University of Pennsylvania students, below the children playing inside the statue of the broken button, below the aged limestone buildings where professors lecture on physics and astronomy. Centuries ago, there was an asylum for unmarried women perched upon the hill where David Rittenhouse Laboratory now squats. When the women died, those who managed the asylum buried the bodies to the west.

This campus, I believe, lies in the shadows of ghosts.

It’s not just because of the graveyard. It’s because Penn was the first academic institution, in 1883, to study the existence of ghosts. It’s because, according to the night guards, the Penn Museum transforms into an entirely different place after dark. It’s because it seems like almost every Penn student can tell you about a ghostly encounter they’ve had—if not something they personally experienced, then something that happened to someone close to them.

AYAKA SHIMADA, C’21 AYAKA LEFT BEHIND A GOLDFISH WHEN SHE MOVED FROM JAPAN TO THE UNITED

by ROWANA MILLER designed by TYLER KLIEM

STATES. SHE WAS SIX YEARS OLD, AND WHEN HER FAMILY EMIGRATED, SHE GAVE THE GOLDFISH TO HER GRANDFATHER AND ASKED HIM TO TAKE CARE OF IT. THE GOLDFISH AND HER GRANDFATHER FORMED A BOND, SHE SAID. “ONCE IT GOT SICK, AND MY GRANDFATHER SAVED IT.”

TWO YEARS LATER, HER GRANDFATHER HAD A HEART ATTACK. HE SURVIVED. BUT THAT DAY, THE FAMILY FOUND THE GOLDFISH BOBBING, LIFELESS, ON THE SURFACE OF THE WATER IN ITS TANK.

“IN JAPANESE MYTHS, GOLDFISH ARE SACRED AND SPIRITUAL,” SAID AYAKA. “MY NEIGHBOR THOUGHT THAT THE GOLDFISH TOOK THE DEATH FOR ITS OWNER.”

It might appear odd that a campus like Penn’s would have ties to the paranormal. It’s a world-renowned research university with Nobel Prize-winning physicists and a history of engineering breakthroughs. What place do ghosts have in a university that built the world’s first digital computer?

A significant place, it turns out. Spirits and science aren’t necessarily at odds with each other. “I’ve talked to Harvard physicists and engineers who are convinced that it’s a real possibility,” says Dr. Marjorie Muecke, a former Penn Nursing professor. “For anyone who’s in academia, we have to take confidence in what lead scientists are saying. And they’re saying that there’s something out there.”

Science has always been linked to the spirit world, according to Penn professor Dr. Projit Mukharji. He specializes in the history and sociology of science, and his specific focus is the history of medicine across the 19th century British Empire. But he found that he couldn’t study medicine without also studying ghosts. “Most physicists of the time were interested in energy,” says Mukharji. “And they thought that spirits were basically energy.”

During the late 1800s, Philadelphia became a hub of that strange science-spirit push-and-pull. It was the age of industry, locomotives, manufacturing. And Philadelphia thrived. The city bustled with oil and coal—and with Spiritualism, the not-quite-religion, not-quite-cult whose goal was to facilitate communication with those on the other side of the veil.

“The entire city was engaged in the study of the paranormal,” says Dr. Justin McDaniel, founder of the modern

Penn research group, The Penn Ghost Project. Mediums clogged Rittenhouse Square, promising reunions with long-dead lovers and messages from departed parents who had left something unfinished. Spiritualist believers flocked to their doors to hear the spirits rapping on the roof, or watch them guide mediums’ hands to write notes, or feel the brush of a chilly fingertip on their necks.

Penn, naturally, found itself at the center of the boom. When Spiritualist and philanthropist William Seybert died in 1883, he left $60,000—$1.5 million in today’s dollars—to Penn. The purpose? To fund “an impartial investigation of modern Spiritualism.”

Rephrased, the Seybert Commission—as it came to be known—dug for evidence to prove or disprove the existence of ghosts.

They visited mediums along the East Coast to discern whether they were truly gifted with second sight or whether they were charlatans, starting with one of Rittenhouse’s own: a Mrs. Patterson. She went into a trance and wrote note after note in different handwritings, signing each one with the name of someone who had passed away: Elias Hicks, Lucretia Mott, H.S., E.H.

They visited others who specialized in slate-writing—the practice of screwing together two slates and holding them under the table until writing appeared inside them, supposedly sent from the spirits. One medium, New Yorker Dr. Henry Slade, fascinated the Commission’s secretary, George Fullerton.

“[Slade’s] face would, I think, attract notice anywhere for its uncommon beauty,” wrote Fullerton in the Commission’s report on its findings. “His eyes are dark, and the circles around them very dark, but their expression is painful. I could not divest myself of the feeling that it was that of a hunted animal or of a haunted man.”

Despite the medium’s alluring dark- ness, the Commission found holes in Slade’s performance.

When one of the academics held the slates under the table with no immediate result, Slade snatched them away, deeming the academic’s energy “injurious.” It was only when Slade held the slates himself that a sloppily-written message appeared. (Yes, the Commission noticed his hand bobbing under the table).

The Commission disproved the other mediums in similar ways. The academics caught every sleight of hand, every surreptitious trading of a blank slate for one with a pre-written message, every flicker of a medium’s eyelids when he or she was supposedly in a trace.

In 1887, the academics released their report. Three years of research and eighty boxes of evidence, distilled into a nine-page-long evaluation of whether Spiritualism was real.

Their official findings, in McDaniel’s words: “The Seybert Commission concluded that we can’t prove anything about the existence of ghosts.”

These particular mediums weren’t really talking to spirits. But that didn’t rule out the possibility of spirits entirely. It just meant that this wasn’t where to look for them.

ALEKSO MILLER, C’22 ONCE WHEN ALEKSO VISITED HIS GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE AS A TODDLER, SHE FOUND HIM STARING AT A BLANK SPACE IN HER KITCHEN AND REPEATING THE NAME OF HER DECEASED MOTHER— HIS GREAT-GRANDMOTHER. HE DOESN’T REMEMBER THIS MOMENT HIMSELF, BUT HIS GRANDMOTHER IS “CERTAIN” THAT HE WAS SPEAKING TO A GHOST.

WHY? “I HAD NEVER MET MY GREAT-GRANDMA,” SAID ALEKSO. “SHE LIVED IN MACEDONIA HER WHOLE LIFE.”

AND, STRANGEST OF ALL, ALEKSO HAD NEVER HEARD HER NAME BEFORE.

Beyond the Seybert Commission, those eighty boxes of evidence continued to grow. Penn built up a sizable archive of ghost studies: notes, letters, written material supposedly sent from spirits. And it’s still there. Penn stores the boxes in the Kislak Center on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt Library. “The level of stuff they’ve preserved is truly incredible,” says Mukharji, the Penn specialist in the history and sociology of science.

Today, that collection is open to Penn’s researchers. A document in these boxes jump started one of Muecke’s projects: an investigation of Arthur Conan Doyle. When she looked through the evidence, she found a letter from the king of mystery himself, claiming that he was absolutely certain that spirits were real.

“When I saw it, I thought, ‘Arthur Conan Doyle? That’s crazy,’” says Muecke. She could barely believe that she was reading the writing of the man behind the logic-obsessed Sherlock Holmes.

But as it turned out, according to Muecke’s research, Doyle had always believed in the paranormal. She attributed the start of his interest to “all the Spiritualism going on in the 1890s.”

After the 1890s though, Spiritualism started to die down among the general public. According to Mukharji, the new technology of the turn of the century—the telephone, radio broadcasting —claimed the public’s interest instead. But not for Doyle.

The author’s interest in Spiritualism spiked during World War I. He lost four people he loved, including his son Kingsley. “He became depressed,” says Muecke. And he turned to Spiritualism for comfort.

By the end of the war, he was completely devoted.

He was so devoted, in fact, that he destroyed his friendship with famed magician Harry Houdini by insisting that a medium had conjured Houdini’s late wife. He also renounced any future of continuing to write the Sherlock Holmes series. He’d tried to stop once before, in 1893, but demand from the publisher and the public forced him to take up the pen again ten years later. But this time, Doyle was steadfast. He authored only major Spiritualist texts until his death in 1930.

ANASTASIA “TASHA”

HUTNICK, C’20

TASHA’S GRANDFATHER WAS IN THE HOSPITAL IN CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA, JUST SICK ENOUGH THAT HER FATHER WAS CONTEMPLATING MAKING THE DRIVE FROM THE SUBURBS OF PHILADELPHIA. WHILE HER FATHER PACED IN THE KITCHEN OF THEIR HOME, HE HAPPENED TO GLANCE OUT THE WINDOW AND SEE A FIGURE OPPOSITE HIM, IN THE WINDOW OF HIS NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE.

IT WAS TASHA’S GRANDFATHER—HIS FATHER.

THEY MADE EYE CONTACT FOR A MOMENT, AND TASHA’S GRANDFATHER NODDED. THEN HE VANISHED. THE PHONE RANG, AND TASHA’S FATHER PICKED IT UP. IT WAS HIS SISTER.

BEFORE SHE COULD SAY ANYTHING, TASHA’S FATHER SPOKE. “DAD’S DEAD, ISN’T HE?”

“YES.”

As Muecke described her research, it struck me that Doyle didn’t view ghosts as something to fear. He viewed them as something to embrace, especially in times of sadness.

That seems to be a common thread among those who study the paranormal on Penn’s campus. McDaniel, who teaches the Religious Studies class God’s Ghosts and Monsters, grew up around graveyards. By the time he started approaching ghosts from an academic lens, he’d spent enough time exploring darkness on his own that he felt comfortable within it.

“When I was a teenager, I was in a punk rock band,” he says, laughing. “And when you were in a punk rock band, you were either a skateboarder or into goth shit.”

He wanted to date goth girls, so he chose the goth shit.

“We would hang out in cemeteries and read bad poetry and try to be deep,” he says. “And we’d tell ghost stories.”

His first job was in a lockdown unit of a psychiatric hospital, working with schizophrenic patients. “My wing was all violent. I had no training, but it was a state institution, and there was no funding. The patients would see a psychiatrist fifteen minutes per month. It was a tough, tough place to work.”

But as he spoke with the patients, he became fascinated by how they described their visions. “Yes, they’re probably all the products of trauma and brain chemistry, but you look through religious history and people saw monsters and wrote beautifully about them,” says McDaniel. “Today, would they be called crazy?”

Eventually, McDaniel moved to Southeast Asia—Thailand, then Laos. He became a Buddhist monk. And he started to see the overlap between the visions of the schizophrenic patients and the lore of the region. When religious figures told him about the monks who used to glow while meditating, he didn’t challenge them; he decided to simply believe.

When Muecke traveled to Thailand to do her own medical anthropology research, she found similar phenomena. She met healers who claimed to channel ghosts—who said they could look at a photo of someone’s wounded arm or leg and call on a spiritual pres- ence to draw out the pain.

Even Muecke personally witnessed events she couldn’t explain. “I’d seen [the mediums] walk across nails,” she says. “One made an egg jump across the floor without touching it. It didn’t crack. I couldn’t figure it out—I held the egg before, and it wasn’t rubber, and I made an excuse to look under the house to make sure that there wasn’t a trick. Nothing.”

EMMA, C’22

WHEN EMMA WAS YOUNG, HER BEST FRIEND’S DAD DIED VERY SUDDENLY. HE HAD A BRAIN TUMOR. HIS FAMILY WASN’T PREPARED, AND NEITHER WAS EMMA’S. THE TWO FAMILIES WERE CLOSE.

EMMA’S MOTHER’S WATCH STOPPED EXACTLY AT THE MOMENT OF HIS DEATH. “THAT WAS ONE SIGN,” SAID EMMA.

EVERY NIGHT AFTER THAT, EMMA’S MOTHER DREAMED OF HIM. UNTIL ONE NIGHT, HE SAID, “IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY. I’M READY TO GO NOW.” AND HE GOT INTO A CAR AND DROVE AWAY.

EMMA’S MOTHER THOUGHT THAT BECAUSE THE DEATH WAS SO SUDDEN, HE HAD TO STAY AROUND FOR A WHILE. HE WASN’T FINISHED. EMMA, A PSYCHOLOGY MAJOR, ISN’T SURE. “I DON’T KNOW. IS THIS A COPING THING, OR IS THIS AN ACTUAL THING?”

McDaniel, Muecke, and Mukharji are all members of the Penn Ghost Project. The Project formed in the early 2010s, when a group of Penn academics who all studied spirits in some capacity decided to come together. Each one approached the subject from a different angle, but the consensus was that, unlike the Seybert Commission, they weren’t trying to figure out whether ghosts were real. They were simply trying to understand the impact of people’s belief in ghosts.

“We’re interested in ghosts as a sociological reality,” says founder McDaniel. People’s suspicions of paranormal activity impact real estate prices, the heirlooms that they donate (and don’t donate) to charity, how they think about mortality. The Penn Ghost Project wanted to know why.

The group went on a number of expeditions to investigate various paranormal phenomena in and around Penn. They visited the Penn Museum at night and spoke to the guards, many of whom had been there for decades, many of whom had stories of ghostly encounters. They traveled to the Betsy Ross Bridge on the Delaware River to investigate the rumor that tombstones from the nearby Monument Cemetery had been built into the bridge’s foundation. They did find tombstones at the foot of the bridge. The Project visited the cemetery, too. The tombstones matched.

“One October, on the night of a full moon, we went to the cemetery just off campus,” says Muecke. That cemetery, The Woodlands, offers a peaceful respite from the hustle of Penn. Students sometimes go there to jog or study with only the rustling of the trees as company. “It was late at night, and we went with ghost hunters.”

McDaniel warns that those hunters shouldn’t be dismissed by skeptics. “These are not crazy people. At all. Almost all of them have had a really traumatizing experience with a ghost.”

The hunters identified certain spiritual presences in the cemetery. “I didn’t see anything, but they pointed out a tree where they could see children— ghost children—romping around on the grass,” says Muecke. “They talked about a white glow [in other parts of the cemetery]. I did see a white glow. Maybe I felt a tap on my shoulder.”

Students on and around campus have reported similar experiences, even without ghost hunters to point them out.

Lucy Curtis, C’21, says that after her roommates fiddled around with a Ouija board, odd things started happening in her Harrison College House suite. “Lights flicker a lot. Doors and windows close and open. My roommate says she saw a figure standing over her,” says Curtis. “Apparently, it woke her up. I think it was a dream, but she says it was tall, dark, and shadowy.”

Sophie Germ, C’19, lives a few blocks off campus. She thinks that there’s a connection between the gravestone with the two blurred-out names in her backyard and the mysterious noises she hears in her basement—“almost like chickens clucking, but not.”

Allison Ricks, C’22, thinks that there’s a ghostly presence in the Kelly Writers House, where she works. The Writers House was built in the mid1800s, and it served as the university chaplain’s house and then as a fraternity house before it became the hub for writers and artists at Penn. “One night we were closing [the house], and we were in the front atrium in front of the door and we heard a knocking on the back door,” says Ricks. “But when we checked, there was nothing.”

SOPHIA DUROSE, C’21 SOPHIA AND HER SISTER WERE SITTING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, DOING HOMEWORK, WHEN SHE HEARD THE GARAGE DOOR CREAK OPEN. “I DIDN’T FIND IT STRANGE,” SOPHIA SAID. “ON FRIDAYS MY STEPFATHER WOULD DRIVE DOWN FROM GAINESVILLE TO SPEND THE WEEKEND IN ORLANDO WITH US.”

SOPHIA LOOKED UP AND SAID HELLO “AS THIS BLUR OF A PERSON ENTERED THE NEXT ROOM.”

HER MOTHER AND SISTER ASKED HER WHO SHE WAS

TALKING TO, AND SHE TOLD THEM THAT IT WAS THEIR STEPFATHER.

“THEY TOLD ME THEY HADN’T SEEN ANYONE,” SOPHIA SAID.

A CHILD HAD DIED IN THE FAMILY THAT HAD LIVED IN THE HOUSE BEFORE SOPHIA’S. THE FAMILY MOVED OUT. THE SAME THING HAPPENED TO THE FAMILY THAT LIVED THERE BEFORE THEM. BY THE TIME THAT THE HOUSE BELONGED TO SOPHIA’S FAMILY, SHE “SWEARS” THAT THERE WERE TWO GHOSTS WHO REMAINED IN THE HOME.

IT WASN’T HER STEPFATHER WHO HAD ENTERED. “YET THE GARAGE DOOR WAS STANDING OPEN,” SAID SOPHIA. “I GOT UP OUT OF MY CHAIR AND SEARCHED THE ENTIRE HOUSE.” NO ONE WAS THERE.

There’s a graveyard underneath Locust Walk. But the ghosts aren’t just beneath our footfalls.

Any old building has stories stuck in its mortar; any old field has memories strewn among the blades of grass; any old pathway has ghosts lingering between cobblestones. This campus is enveloped by the history of everyone who has ever inhabited it, both over and under Locust.

But that’s not something to fear. Almost everyone who told me a ghost story felt that the ghost provided comfort in a time when someone needed it. Usually, the ghosts were loved ones, or had some significance as bearers of peace. These ghosts weren’t invaders. They were protectors.

Maybe this campus doesn’t lie in the shadow of ghosts. Maybe ghosts watch over this campus.