History & local legend
Albert Joseph Edmunds spent much of his working life organizing the collections of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Born in England in 1857, he joined the Society in 1891 and worked there until 1936. He died in 1941, leaving behind papers that included diaries, notebooks, and clippings about ghosts.
Decades later, the Society’s staff were joking that their former cataloger still supervised the work. In a February 1987 report for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Project, coordinator Bill Hamill credited Edmunds’s friendly ghost while describing the cataloging of nearly 800 newspaper titles.
