The Columns Museum Ghost Hunt, Milford, PA

1904 Columns Museum Ghost Hunt, Milford, PA

The Lincoln Flag. The Mysterious Madame Peirce. A Mansion Where the Dead Stay With Their Things.

Some buildings are haunted by the people who lived in them. The Columns Museum is haunted by what they left behind.

Built in 1904 as the private residence of businessman Dennis McLaughlin, this 22-room neoclassical mansion in the small town of Milford, Pennsylvania has become something stranger than a historical society headquarters. It is a vault for objects that should not exist in a small-town museum at all. A 36-star American flag stained with the blood of a murdered president. The stage costumes worn the night he died.

The personal effects of a woman whose own history reads like a piece of dark fiction. Spend an evening here and you begin to understand why some of the spirits seem reluctant to leave.

The Lincoln Flag

On the evening of April 14th, 1865, red, white and blue bunting hung from the balustrade of the Presidential Box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. When John Wilkes Booth fired into the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head, the President slumped forward. In the chaos that followed, the theatre’s stage manager, Thomas Gourlay, climbed into the box, tore down a length of the bunting, and pushed it beneath the dying President’s head to cradle the wound. Lincoln did not regain consciousness. He was carried across the road to the Petersen House and died the following morning.

Gourlay kept the blood-stained flag. He gave it to his daughter Jeannie, an actress who had been performing in Our American Cousin on stage that very night. Jeannie carried it with her when she moved to Milford in 1888. In 1954, her son donated it to the Columns Museum, where it has remained ever since, displayed just inside the entrance. The dark stain is still visible across the fabric.

It is one of the most extraordinary artefacts in private museum hands anywhere in the United States. And you will be investigating in the same building that holds it after the lights go out.

Madame Juliette Peirce

The museum’s most active spirit was, in life, one of the most mysterious women in nineteenth-century America.

Almost nothing about Juliette Peirce can be confirmed. Her surname is recorded variously as Froissy and as Pourtalai. She spoke French. She arrived in New York in the 1870s with her own money, her own tarot deck (a deck she claimed had predicted the downfall of Napoleon), and a habit of telling people she was a Habsburg princess. Some historians have speculated she was of Spanish Romani origin, raised on the pilgrimage routes through Andalusia. Nobody knows for certain. She married the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, the man often called the father of American pragmatism, and together they moved to a sprawling, half-finished house outside Milford that Charles named Arisbe.

Their life there was a slow ruin. Charles, dismissed from Johns Hopkins because of the scandal of their relationship, never held another permanent post. They lived beyond their means, lost heating in winter, and survived on bread donated by the local baker. When Charles died destitute in 1914, Juliette kept his ashes in an urn on the mantelpiece at Arisbe. She lived another twenty years, frail and increasingly alone, dying of tuberculosis in 1934. When she was finally buried in Milford Cemetery, his urn of ashes was placed in her casket and interred with her.

Her possessions, the things she kept around her in those last poor decades, found their way to the Columns Museum. And she appears to have come with them.

The Second Floor and the Woman Who Watches the Stairs

Juliette is seen most often on the second floor. Visitors report a woman in dark dress standing at the top of the staircase, or pacing the landing, or watching from the doorways of the rooms where her belongings are displayed. People who get too close to her things, who lean in over the cases or reach toward them, have described a sudden, unmistakable feeling of being told to step back. More than one has left the floor in a hurry.

She is not the only presence here. A small woman has been reported in the basement, glimpsed at the edge of the shadows and then gone. Disembodied voices have been heard in empty rooms. Whispers without speakers. Words called from corridors no one is walking. Footsteps and the click of heels move between exhibits after closing, on floorboards that show no one there.

The Attic Stairs

Then there is the attic. Visitors with no prior knowledge of the building’s history have described, unprompted, the same vision: a woman falling down the attic stairs while a man stands at the top, watching her go. Whoever she was, whatever happened to her, that scene appears to be replaying itself for those sensitive enough to receive it.

You will spend the evening here. You decide what you make of it.

What’s Included

– Exclusive after-hours access to the most haunted areas of the Columns Museum, including the second floor, basement, and attic.
– Structured investigation sessions led by experienced Haunted Rooms America investigators
– Use of professional paranormal equipment
– Free Time to explore both locations and conduct your own investigations.
– Snacks & Refreshments to keep you energized throughout the night.

Do you have the courage to spend the night in a museum where history refuses to rest?

Uncover the mysteries that haunt the Columns Museum and see if you can connect with the spirits that remain tethered to their earthly possessions.

TICKETS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED

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