|
 |
|
|
Chippewa Square
The last great fire in 1889 spared Chippewa Square. The wind held
the fire off the square, blowing the flames east and destroying over half the city
in 48 hours. Three sides of Chippewa Square are pre-Civil War or antebellum.
Most of the buildings date from the 1820s and 1830s, and a few of these are of wood
construction.
One of the wooden structures at the corner of Bull and Perry Streets is a beautiful
Carpenter style house, and there are numerous stories about this house, all revolving
around a young woman heard to screem, "Oh! So much blood!"
A gentleman and his family moved into the house in the 1870s, and everything that
happened to them is recorded in the newspapers of that day. He came from Philadelphia
to take a job with a local insurance company. They traveled by steamboat to the
wharves on River Street and had a local moving company bring their furniture and
belongings up the bluff and into the house.
It was late so the last of the crates and furniture were unloaded into the basement
and parlor level. The movers were told to bome back the next day to move their
belongings upstairs. The movers left for the night and the family sat with
a picnec on the parlor floor. They were eating when footsteps could be heard
running from room to room upstairs, then they heard a woman's voice screaming "Oh!
So much blood! Oh! So much blood!" The family ran upstairs and searched the
entire upper floor and found no one there. Then they heard the voice coming
from below on the parlor level where they had been eating, so they ran downstairs
to investigate. There was no one in sight. Thinking whoever it was could
have gone out into the garden, the family ran outside to search the grounds, only
to hear the woman screaming from inside. They spent the night at the Pulaski
House Hotel and had the movers remove all their belongings the next morning.
One of the last owners died in her mid-nineties. She would talk about the
'shades' in the house. She wasn't talking about window shades, she was talking
about ghosts. She would say, "Oh, those shades, they kept me up all night,
running from room to room, and that poor woman, I wish she would just move on!"
|
|
|
|
|
|