The spirits, specters and spooks of South Street

Nina Kelley-Rumpff had heard stories about "Henry" before she bought Legendary Dobbs on South Street this past winter. Henry is the cop who died in the apartment above — and now allegedly haunts the bar and music venue.

Juli Burke, Legendary Dobbs manager, becomes spooked when the lights began flickering when this image was taken on Oct. 24
Hillary Petrozziello

Nina Kelley-Rumpff had heard stories about "Henry" before she bought Legendary Dobbs on South Street this past winter. Henry is the cop who died in the apartment above — and now allegedly haunts the bar and music venue.

At first, Kelley-Rumpff didn't put much stock in the story, but then strange things started happening. Keys on an empty table inexplicably vanished, then reappeared. Cash and checks mysteriously found their way into the trash.

"Those were the sort of things you could go, 'Maybe I just didn't see it; maybe it fell,'" says Kelley-Rumpff. It was just late nights and stress beguiling her mind, not a Beetlejuice, she remembers thinking. That is, until the microwave incident.

An old, commercial microwave sat on a second-floor table, firmly in place, no parts dangling over the edge, while Kelley-Rumpff and some friends busied themselves across the room. She can't explain what happened next. "I saw a flash ... and saw the microwave on the floor, a half foot away from the table," she says. "Like it was pushed."

That incident led to the Jersey Unique Minds Paranormal Society spending a night at Dobbs, armed with "electronic voice phenomena" equipment — basically, sensitive microphones and software to strip out white noise, allowing the voices of the dead to be heard.

One ghost hunter asked the spirits to "let us know if you are there." Immediately, they heard a loud crash. On the tape, Kelley-Rumpff says you can hear a voice say, "I can do shit," just before the bang, which is exactly the sort of vulgarity one would expect from a ghost on South Street.

A few blocks away, a different set of restless souls have overstayed their welcome at the Twisted Tail, a haunt for blues and soul fiends on Headhouse Square.

The bar's owner, George Reilly, recounted his first interaction with the phantom of the blues joint. One day, before the bar opened, his wife was listening to pop music on her iPhone while cleaning upstairs. The music kept cutting out, even though everything else on the phone was working. On a lark, she covered the phone with her hands and said, "Stop playing around with my music!"

"And it kept playing," said Reilly. "But as soon as she took her hand away, the music stopped." When Reilly joined his wife upstairs, she recounted the tale, and he jokingly said, "Well, if it's a ghost [and] it doesn't like blues, we're screwed!"

"So she put blues on and it played the whole way through," said Reilly. "She put on classical and it played the whole way through. She went back to her music — a different song, but the same kind of [pop] music — and it cut out again."

Since then, cowboy hats hanging as décor upstairs have been sighted flying across the room, footsteps have echoed eerily in empty rooms, and Reilly's heard more and more stories of a pale woman in a nightgown ascending the stairs to the currently boarded-up fourth floor.

The bar needs extra storage space, so Reilly plans to tear down the barriers, hoping that stripping the physical threshold won't also pierce a spiritual one.

"I envision getting a crowbar and getting that drift of wind that goes past my ear and going, 'Uh oh,'" said Reilly. If they do "unleash a poltergeist" as Reilly fears might happen, the Twisted Tail has a plan. "It might be one of those things where we have to leave a glass of whiskey at the end of the bar, unless it gets mad. We'll toast to the ghost."

Those aren't the only supposedly spooky spots near South Street. Electricity-wasting apparitions are said to turn on lights at the Physick House in Society Hill. The dead apparently rise from the graves at St. Peter's Cemetery, but no one there was willing to talk about it on the record. Over at Powel House on South Third Street, it's said that there have been sightings of the ghost of Peggy Shippen, the sad wife of Benedict Arnold, who lived there before their damnable betrayal of America. And at Pennsylvania Hospital, numerous visitors have reported seeing the statue of William Penn walking the grounds at night. Thankfully, none of those visions of visitants have come from doctors.

Blame an oppressive level of respect for rationality or the inherent skepticism of a journalist, but I think stories about things that go bump in the night are bunk in the daylight. But if you are a habitué of haunted hollows, especially this weekend, then the hellscape of South Street should be your destination.