“I first woke up when I felt the bed vibrate due to a shock, which may have been under it, or it may have come from someone striking the surface of the bed,” she said. “There at the foot sat an elderly woman in a white dress, looking very calm. Her clenched fist rested on the footboard, and I had the feeling that she had just hit the bed. She sat there bathed in light, a light so bright that it illuminated the room. I tried to wake you, and when you first spoke, the figure began to dissolve into the luminous cloud. First the head went, then the body, and a moment later the cloud drifted up to the ceiling and disappeared.” The last part of her story was exactly what I had seen myself.
On the next occasion the figure of the woman stood by my side as I slept. My wife roused me, and as I woke up, it vanished with a flash of light as bright as the flare of a match.
After my wife and I left Loudoun, for our services were no longer needed, we came back a few years later and stopped to talk with the caretaker. He had seen lights on several occasions but never anything as distinct or as close to him as Elizabeth and I had experienced.
Mrs. John W. Farr, who was head of the Friends of Loudoun, relates, “Some of the neighbors say that Miss Logan is guarding the property. Children tell of seeing someone sitting on the sun porch, most often a little old lady. And, I must say, a number of things have happened for which there are no explanations.”
On one occasion Mrs. Farr’s committee members arranged some heirloom plates in a china closet in Loudoun House. Returning several days later to continue their work, they found that there were no plates in the china closet. The plates eventually turned up on such a high shelf that it took a ladder to reach them. Both the china closet in which the plates had been arranged and the house itself had been securely locked.
When she was ready to leave the house one day, Mrs. Farr discovered that the large pocketbook she had left in the drawing room was missing. A search through the house proved fruitless. Two days later, though, there was the bag, in plain view in another room. Nothing was missing from it.
The late Dick Nicolai, author and former promotion director of Fairmount Park, heard a story that could account for the missing bag. A playful ghost called Willie, a member of the Armat family who died quite young, is said to return and move small objects about.
The live-in caretaker had never had a problem with break-ins, and neither did the caretaker before him, who was on the premises for twenty-seven years. That record is unusual. But it is possible that fewer people try to break into houses said to be haunted.
Might more than one spirit live on Neglee’s Hill? During the Battle of Germantown in November 1777 wounded American soldiers were carried to the top of the hill on which Loudoun now stands. Many were dead or dying. Some were removed in wagons to Philadelphia, but some—not even dead, just comatose—were buried there while they were yet alive. Is it possible that, when winter winds make dried leaves rustle, the restless spirits of those unfortunate young men rise and walk again?
Loudoun was built by Thomas Armat in 1801. He named it after the county in Virginia from which he had come. The house is reminiscent of those of Virginia, and he must have had many pleasant memories of his early years in the South. Armat, a distinguished philanthropist and a man of strong faith and inventive mind, was one of the founders of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. The house museum, containing much of the home’s original furniture, is open to visitors on Sunday afternoons. It is located at the northwest corner of Germantown Avenue and Apsley Street, in the historic Germantown section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The mansion underwent restoration following a fire caused by lightning in 1993. Further information may be obtained by contacting Philadelphia Parks and Recreation at (215) 683-3600.
THE HERMITAGE
NEAR MYRTLE BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA
The Hermitage at Murrell’s Inlet, near Myrtle Beach, is haunted by one of the state’s most famous ghosts.
There are few people alive or dead who are more famous in South Carolina than lovely young Alice Flagg. She once lived at a house called The Hermitage in Murrell’s Inlet. The number of visitors to her grave is amazing, since it was more than a century ago that the sixteen-year-old Alice went to school in Charleston, studied, danced, fell passionately in love, and died a tragic death.
Generations of young people have visited Alice’s grave under the moss-draped oaks at All Saints Waccamaw Church. To this day, people say that the ghost of Alice still appears at the cemetery and roams the marshes of Murrell’s Inlet.
Dr. Allard Belin Flagg built the house in 1848, choosing a point of land surrounded on three sides by tidal marshes. He placed it within a grove of live oaks that at that time were at least one hundred years old. They are still in the spot where The Hermitage once stood. A new development is being built here currently. Although it was never a Gone With the Wind–style antebellum home, the first impression of The Hermitage was of a house with character and serenity on a green lawn and surrounded by huge oaks. Across the front porch were immense white columns, each carved from a single tree.
Reilly Burns, a serious young engineer who visited the house from out of state, related his own experience.
Often after my arrival in Myrtle Beach, the story of
