The Bolton Mansion Ghosts In November of 1971, as a student at Bucks County Community College, I had the unique opportunity to organize a group of paranormal researchers and students to investigate a rumored "haunted house". Bolton Mansion was built in 1687 by Phineas Pemberton, an associate of William Penn, in what is now the town of Levittown, PA. By 1971 the Mansion had been vacant for years and in a state of disrepair with a reputation for psychic activity. Initially, my research was to test the effects of stress on individuals while spending a night in a reportedly haunted house. However, I had opportunity to have the interior of the Mansion photographed with military photoreconisance infrared film under the auspices of the Princeton University Physics Department. Of the 120 slides taken, three showed usual activity. "The Lady and her Gentleman" is the most usual of these photographs. This photo was taken of the staircase in the main hall of the house in total darkness and seems to show an image of a woman on the top of the stairs and a man standing on the staircase with his back to the photo. The woman appears to be in typical Civil War era dress and the man appears to have an insignia on his sleeve, stripes on his trousers and gloves. The photo is bathed in a bluish cast which indictes electromagnetic energy. The bluish cast seems to radiate from a white shape in the right corner, where it seems a very high energy source has burned the emulsion from the film. The photo lacks the color red which would have indicated any living being or heat source. This slide and the other two usual slides which showed a white elipse and a strange gargoyle-type face, were examined by the U.S. Reconnasissance Lab at N.A.S. Memphis as well as various parapsychologists and paranormal organizations and was called the the most well documented photo of an apparent apparition or "ghost" ever taken, by the British Society of Psychical Research. As a side note, initially researchers were puzzled that the "Gentleman" in the slide seemed to be wearing a Confederate uniform in a home once used as a hideout on the route of the Underground Railroad. The slide was shown to a member of the Bolton Mansion Historical Society and she explained an interesting legend surrounding the staircase. A son of James Pemberton Morris, the founder of the Pennsylvannia Abolition Society, was disowned for joining the Confederate Army. After the War, the son returned home begging forgiveness. Morris refused to take his son back and his grieving son hanged himself from the second-floor stairwell. A servant girl who had been the son's childhood sweetheart was so devastated when she found the body that she shot herself beside him on the stairwell. Possibly these two are the "ghosts" that are shown in the photograph above.
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