History & local legend
Tate House at George School in Bucks County has a campus legend about a Hessian soldier buried in its cellar. In the story, Dr. James Tate and his students dissected the soldier’s body before burying it beneath the house.
Tennis coach Chéri Mellor drew on that reputation when she invited her team to her apartment in Tate House on the rainy night after Halloween in 1997. They visited the cellar, then gathered upstairs with a Ouija board to ask the soldier questions. Just as the board seemed to answer something personal, a man’s voice suddenly interrupted. One player had accidentally pressed Mellor’s answering machine with her foot.
The girls had barely recovered when the toilet flushed with nobody in the bathroom. Mellor knew the culprit: her cat had walked across the tank, slipped and hit the handle.
