History & local legend
Baleroy Mansion is a stone house built in 1911 on West Mermaid Lane in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood. Its longtime resident, George Gordon Meade Easby, filled it with antiques and became the principal storyteller behind its haunted reputation. He lived there for most of his life, until his death in 2005.
In a 2011 review of material held by the Chestnut Hill Historical Society, reporter Kaitlyn Foti traced accounts of séances, electrical disturbances, and Easby’s own experiences. One story he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999 concerned waking to the sensation of someone gripping his arm, then finding nobody beside him when he switched on the light.
The most disturbing tradition concerns a blue chair in the mansion’s Blue Room. Easby associated it with the deaths of a housekeeper, a cousin, and his friend Paul Kimmens after they had sat in it. These alleged connections made the chair central to Baleroy’s reputation. Easby also said in a 1984 interview that he would return after death if the house was not properly cared for, adding his own promised haunting to the stories he had spent years telling.
