Question:

What is the name of HSP’s resident ghost?

Answer:

Albert J. Edmunds

Several people have claimed to have seen spirits or heard strange noises at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. One of its most famous “resident ghosts” is Albert J. Edmunds, who worked as a cataloger at the Historical Society from 1891 to 1936. Edmunds, a native of England, claimed that he would work at the Historical Society until he died and then come back to haunt it.

Edmunds was fascinated with religion and the paranormal. He studied and wrote about religion, Christianity and Buddhism in particular, and was the author of several published works, including Buddhist and Christian Gospels (1900), Buddhist Texts in John (1906), and A Dialogue Between Two Saviors (1908). Edmunds was involved with the American Society for Psychical Research, a research organization that explores extraordinary or unexplained psychic and paranormal phenomena. In the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1912, Edmunds recounts a ghost sighting that was experienced by a librarian in England.

“As my lamp illumined this passage, I saw apparently at the further end of it a man’s face . . . I called out loudly to the intruder to show himself,” Edmunds wrote. “Then I saw a face looking round one of the bookcases . . . as the face came so closely to the edge I could see no body.  The face was pallid and hairless, and the orbits of the eyes were very deep.”

While no one at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania has ever seen Edmunds’ ghost, several staff members have claimed to have heard the ghostly sounds of a manual typewriter emanating from the vicinity of Edmunds’s old office.                                              

The society owns a sizeable collection of Edmunds’s papers (#1342) that includes include correspondence, his religious and general writings, poems, diaries, notebooks, and ephemera.   For further tidbits on spiritualism, see the the First Association of Spiritualists of Philadelphia collection (#3098), Robert Dale Owens’s “Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World” in the Ferdinand J. Dreer collection (#175), and the Furness-Bullitt family papers (#1903).

The questions of the week are created by Cary Majewicz, technical services archivist at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. To purchase a digital reproduction of an image seen here, contact Dana Lamparello at dlamparello@hsp.org.