Philadelphia Weirdness

The Man Who Died Twice!

1793 was a grim year for Philly and its residents. Yellow fever gripped the city and death nipped in on a black wave and stole the souls of hundreds of people. So severe was the epidemic that the United States bureaucracy was urgently shifted to Germantown as bodies dropped like flies.

Of course, with so much death under the spell of the yellow fever, tales of wandering spirits and their tormented cries were in abundance. But one such victim has a very tragic yarn attached.

H.P. Lovecraft once wrote a story named "The Shunned House," and one particular place on 11th Street, between Spruce and Walnut, would most certainly have fit that title. It was here that a man succumbed to the grasp of the fever. His neighbors escaped the disease, but before fleeing they boarded up his house thinking that the frail man had perished. However, legend has it that despite his ravaged state, this wraith-like victim regained his health and miraculously survived the fever, but only to find that he'd been imprisoned within his own home by his neighbors in their state of panic.

The man did not die of starvation, but more tragically, he pushed too hard trying to break out of a boarded-up second floor window and plunged to his death, his broken body crumpling on the sidewalk like a rag doll.

As the years passed and Philly flourished again, many ghost stories were connected with that eerie house and many people often reported hearing cries of angst from within and that hideous face yawning at the window, a spectre—imprisoned, neglected—of a man who had seemingly died twice.

Image Credit: Flickr user Brooklyn Bridge Baby