History & local legend
The Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site preserves a house where the writer lived in Philadelphia, at Seventh and Spring Garden streets. For visitors familiar with Poe’s stories, its rooms and basement already come with strong associations of fear and suspense.
Dan Cappello described his own uneasy visit in The Temple News on October 17, 2006. Walking through the house alone, he felt sudden chills in an upstairs room and again in the basement. While he was downstairs, the staircase creaked even though he could see nobody using it. He wondered whether another presence was nearby, but also considered that his imagination might be responding to the setting.
The ranger Cappello spoke with said he had never personally experienced anything unusual there.
