Vampires, Sex, and GHOSTS!

by Marianne Ruane
(originally posted Feb. 2013; recreated in August 2015)

When the crypt goes creak,
And the tombstones quake.
Spooks come out for a swinging wake.
Happy haunts materialize,
And begin to vocalize.
Grim grinning ghosts come out to socialize.**

Grim Philly’s ‘Vampires, Sex, and Ghosts’ tour is not strictly a ghost tour. It’s more a retelling of the seedy side of Philadelphia’s history (colonial prostitution, dead bodies in Washington Square, macabre treatments for 18^th Century diseases, etc.) with a few ghost stories sprinkled in for real/unreal, dead/undead balance. I don’t have paranormal experiences myself, but while leading the Vampire tour during the 2012 season, several customers had encounters during my tours that defied explanation.

There was the group of ladies on a 9:30 pm tour who caught a man’s transparent image in a cell phone photograph. Two of the women in the group were clearly represented, in color, to the right of a tree in Washington Square, and on the other side of the tree was an apparition of a man, all white and hazy. His head was fuzzy, but he was wearing what looked to be one of those white work shirts men wore in the 1800s, like a blouse, puffed out and tucked into the narrow waist of his pants. His pants billowed out at the top a bit and then tapered off towards his feet as if he had them tucked into boots, though his feet weren’t clear. That much is burned into my memory, though I would have liked to have had longer to really examine it. The women promised to email the photo to Grim Philly, but they never did!!!! Aaarrrgh! I’m really bummed that I let that one get away.

At the end of another tour, a customer told me he had seen a man in old-style clothes – a long coat and top hat -  standing under a lamppost near the back of the Second National Bank. He pointed the man out to his girlfriend, who couldn’t see him, and then a few minutes later the man disappeared. The customer said he’d had ghostly encounters before – once he moved into an apartment that was haunted and was woken one night by a presence choking him in bed! The ghost grabbed him so hard that the customer was left with marks on his neck. Near the same area of the Second National Bank, Robert Morris statue, and Surgeon’s Hall, another customer who claimed to be sensitive to paranormal phenomena said she experienced a suffocating feeling.

Laurie Hull, a paranormal investigator who collaborated with Grim Philly for the midnight ghost hunting tours, told us that contact with a presence can feel like extreme cold, or heat, or goose bumps, or a nauseated feeling, or the feeling of having walked through a spider web. Two customers told me that they felt flashes of cold near City Tavern, and another young man said he had felt a spider web sensation near Washington Square after the tour. I never feel anything – I’m probably too analytical and in my head to notice any ghostly advances – but it’s fun to hear about others’ stories.

The 2013 season starts up again in April. Please join us for a grimly entertaining tour and be sure to share your experiences!

** an excerpt from "Grim Grinning Ghosts (The Screaming Song)," the theme song for the Haunted Mansion attractions at Disney theme parks. Song composed by Buddy Baker with lyrics by X Atencio.  

The title comes from this excerpt of William Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis:

Look, how the world's poor people are amazed
At apparitions, signs and prodigies,
Whereon with fearful eyes they long have gazed,
Infusing them with dreadful prophecies;
So she at these sad signs draws up her breath
And sighing it again, exclaims on Death.

'Hard-favour'd tyrant, ugly, meagre, lean,
Hateful divorce of love,'--thus chides she Death,--
'Grim-grinning ghost, earth's worm, what dost thou mean
To stifle beauty and to steal his breath,
Who when he lived, his breath and beauty set
Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet?

-- Read more by Marianne Ruane