By Ken Mammarella
Contributing Writer

Lincoln University resident Kevin Lagowski is an accomplished writer with a multimedia career who enjoys horror and “being generally creeped out.” 

He combines his training and interests in his 2025 book, Ghosts and Eerie Legends of Chester County, Pennsylvania, which covers three dozen places associated with paranormal activities. 

It includes research and his personal experiences, such as a visit to the ticking tomb of London Tract Church Cemetery near Landenberg. “I can’t say I heard any ticking, but there’s definitely an eeriness and stillness there,” he said in an interview. “I was by myself at night, and there was definitely kind of a creepy feeling down there because it’s a very isolated area.”

His book is heavy on historic inns, but it also includes other buildings that are open (or relatively open) to the public, plus outside areas, like graveyards and battlefields. “Any place that there’s this pain and suffering lends itself over time to an uneasiness,” he said. Each chapter includes GPS coordinates for people to plan their own road trips.

He’s thinking about sequels covering the Main Line, Delaware and Philadelphia.

Here’s a look at places in southern Chester County where something weird has been reported, by Lagowski and other content creators.

The ticking tomb

The story of the ticking tomb in London Tract Church Cemetery is a doozy. The version that Lagowski starts with involves a child named Fithian Minuit tumbling in 1764 into the camp of surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. To soothe the child, someone gave him a pocket watch to play with, which he instead swallowed.

In the most emotional version, Mason “cursed the little boy to a lifetime without peace.” Yet, according to veteran local historian Ed Okonowicz, Minuit and his wife, a woman named Martha, instead “agreed that the ticking would symbolize the love that they had for each other, and that it should go on for eternity, even after they died.” 

“He died at the gravesite of his beloved Martha, and was discovered by a group of men who were hunting,” the Chester County Press wrote in 2020. “They said that he had a blissful smile on his face, and once he was buried, the ticking continued—just as the couple had said it would because it symbolized their eternal love.”

Lagowski notes there are multiple variations. Maybe it was Mason’s watch, maybe Dixon’s. Maybe it’s a Minuit or two buried there, and maybe it’s someone who stole the watch and whose initials are “R.C.” That’s important because the flat tombstone that covers the ticking is labeled “RC.”

The story (or stories) fascinated people. Lagowski begins his book with it. The News Journal has written at least three stories about it, in 1984, 2004 and 2024. “Others claim the noise is the telltale heart of a local settler yearning for a long-lost American Indian lover,” the 2024 story mentions.

In Weird Pennsylvania, a contributor named Dupree said at first it sounded like an empty hallway. “By that I mean echoing sounds and footsteps. I listened longer, and all of a sudden, a louder sort of “tick” came from right underneath the marker.”

Laurie Hull, founder of Delaware County Paranormal Research, writes about her visit with two others in a 2008 book titled Brandywine Valley Ghosts. She heard the ticking—only to realize that it was her own watch. But she was pleased to later hear a recording they made onsite. It included an “electronic voice phenomenon” asking “Does anyone want to talk to us?”

The 1984 News Journal article said “the only scientifically accepted reason for the ticking people have claimed to hear is water dripping on an underground stone.”

The tomb is a few paces from the northeast corner of the 1729 church, now the White Clay Creek Preserve office, Lagowski writes. Take the sidewalk between a break in the stone wall, continue on the grass, turn left after the first row of headstones. “The one most commonly said to be the ticking tomb is small and gray and it is flush to the ground,” according to Okonowicz, next to a heart-shaped stone.

Emily and Joe

Reports of ghosts at the Red Rose Inn are common enough for Penn Township, which has owned the building since 2011, to acknowledge them. And then rebuke them.

“The two ghosts who appeared most frequently were that of Emily, a little girl in an old-fashioned dress, with curls and a doll, and Joe, a Native American or “Indian Joe” as he is called,” the township page on the building says. Emily was murdered, and Joe was said to be her killer and “promptly hung.” After the real killer was identified, “in an effort to conceal the murder of Indian Joe, [villagers] buried him in the basement; hence why his body and spirit continued to roam the basement bar area.”

Emily, on the other hand, had always appeared in the main dining area, around the bathrooms, on the staircase or looking out of the windows onto Baltimore Pike.

Weird stuff, Lagowski writes, has included calculators flying off the desk, doors slamming on their own, a mirror being smashed, electronics turning off on their own and sheets being pulled off beds.

Penn Township bought the inn to preserve it (it probably dates to the 1730s) and allow for work to improve the intersection of Route 796 and Baltimore Pike. Since the township has owned the inn, “there have not been any ghostly sightings or strange encounters to report,” the site says.

A drive along Devil’s Road

A section of Cossart Road, east of Kennett Pike and near Fairville, is notorious for spookiness, especially its weirdly shaped trees and vehicles chasing other vehicles out of the area.

The winding, hilly and very narrow road was famous enough to draw the attention of moviemaker M. Night Shyamalan, who in 2003 shot part of The Village nearby.

Five writers open a 2005 book called Weird Pennsylvania with their reports from the road, dubbed Devil’s Road, with several referring to a cult house that’s home to unknown rituals and several being chased by ominous vehicles (red trucks in one, and black SUVs in two). A third writer saw a car carrying people with white eyes (“like perhaps they were rolled up all the way”) and goth-style hair.

Near the cult house (or “church,” since variations are a hallmark of the supernatural), the trees reportedly lack branches on one side, a feature that becomes less prominent as the distance from the house grows. A visit this summer, however, shows few misshapen trees and no ominous vehicles.

An anonymous 2023 “as heard on air” post on WJBR.com claims that “members of the Cult House would use these trees for dumping babies who were born disabled. Over time, Skull Trees would devour their bodies fully and take the shape of the child’s skull.”

Another anonymous post on WJBR (which Google dates to 2019, but the post says it was updated in 2023) connects the hauntings to the Kiddie Gang, a group led by the Johnston family that in the 1970s was involved in multiple robberies and murders of their own members, to keep them from blabbing. “The gang members were led into an isolated field off of Cossart Road in Chadds Ford, PA, told to dig their own graves, and were killed right then and there,” the post concludes. The gang’s exploits inspired a 1986 movie called At Close Range.

In his book, Lagowski writes that “something unnatural and unholy went down in the house right along Cossart Road, and the whole area is affected by that energy.” He also writes that it lacks a unifying backstory. “Devil’s Road is all over the map, with an assortment of things thrown at it in the hopes that enough sticks to deem it adequately haunted for the purposes of legend.”

A 2020 thread on Reddit starts out by claiming that real estate agents are “hiding things so people will continue to buy land there.” Follow-up posts by believers refer to a “midget cult” and cross-shaped trim on the cult house windows. Skeptics suggest that security guards or other teenagers are the ones doing the chasing and that the trees were “obviously cut long ago to leave room for the power lines.”

The battle continues

The Brandywine Battlefield “is the site of mass death, where truth is even creepier than fiction,” horror writer John James Minster began a 2023 YouTube video. “It is one of the most haunted locations in the state.”

About 2,000 men died at the site in 1777, in the bloodiest day of the Revolutionary War. “It appears that soldiers from both sides never rest as they honor their oath to fight,” Lagowski writes.

Apparitions of soldiers and horses have repeatedly been seen without their feet, which makes sense because some areas are two feet higher than two centuries ago, according to Minster.

Re-enactors have seen “phantom soldiers in costume,” Lagowski writes, and sounds of battle – like “musket and cannon fire and the yelling and screaming of troops,” he writes – have also been reported.

There was a friendly spirit back then, who roused a Continental soldier just in time, Minister said.

The spirit of Letty

“Ask your server or bartender for a ghost story!” Letty’s Tavern invites on www.lettystavern.com. The restaurant in downtown Kennett Square doesn’t offer details, but many writers do.

“Letty’s Tavern is named after the resident ghost, a precocious child named in honor of William Penn’s daughter. There have been sightings of her roaming her former home from time to time,” the Chester County Press wrote in 2021, when 4AM Hospitality marked its transformation to “modern interpretations of elevated pub-fare, blending fresh West Coast flavors with house-made and locally sourced ingredients.”

Jacob Short told The News Journal at the time that he didn’t believe in ghosts until one night when he, his wife and business partners Dan Daley and Matt Killion were working onsite after midnight. 

“Short said they heard what sounded like footsteps running around the second floor. Then, they heard it again. They checked all around, but no one else was in the building.

“ ‘We all looked at each other and said “Is that Letitia? Is that Letitia?” ’ Short said. ‘After we heard it several more times, we were convinced Letty was here.’ ”

The ghost is reportedly someone named after Letitia Penn. For a glimpse of the ghost, Short suggested standing on State Street and looking up at the second window from the left.

Lagowski offered a long list of specific events, including things falling off the shelves and spinning unnaturally; a former owner feeling “a cold darkness” while trying to sleep; a phone call made to local police from the payphone inside, when the building was empty; a teen girl in Colonial dress appearing and disappearing in the dining room; bottles that fell off the shelves at the bar; and a baby’s cry.

Katie and Simon

An inn now known as Brandywine Prime Prime Seafood & Chops @ Chadds Ford Inn has been said to be haunted by two ghosts named Katie and Simon. Search engines are no help in finding out more. Dan Butler and Mike Majewski took over the Baltimore Pike place in 2007, and Majewski told The News Journal that “I haven’t seen anything.”

Haunted in dreams

“Multiple employees” at Chaddsford Winery have had dreams about “a little girl playing in the yard of the winery,” Paranormal in Pennsylvania posted on Instagram in July. The Baltimore Pike winery did not respond to a request for comment.

The ghost of Morris Stroud

Mike Rowe, perhaps best known for creating Dirty Jobs and hosting 10 seasons of it, was a struggling QVC personality when he had two days to find a place to live. He found one with a ghost.

Georgia Farm, a 332-acre tract on the east branch of the Brandywine, is where he lived in the 1990s, starting on Halloween. It’s now the heart of the Stroud Water Research Center’s Stroud Preserve.

Rowe learned about Georgia Farm when he saw a newspaper classified ad seeking a “discreet caretaker” to live free in the mansion. In a meeting at the Marshalton Inn, Marion “Kippy” Boulton Stroud explained that she had recently inherited the place from her father, Morris, who died in 1990.

“I’d like to move in, but my father’s still here. We never got along,” she told him in The Way I Heard It. “He walks the grounds at night. In the evenings he sits in the great room by the fire.” 

Stroud told Rowe that her father had a “problematic” will that called for her moving in within a year of his death; otherwise, the property would go to a preservation group called Natural Lands. But she was scared of moving in and needed a cover story. If people asked, as they surely will, she said to tell them that he was her lover and she was traveling. “Handle the ghost of my father as you see fit.”

“Kippy turned out to be right. Georgia Farm really was haunted,” he writes. “Let’s just say it was a friendly ghost,” he told Fox News to promote the 2019 book.

On his first night, he was in the great room – fire lit, severed heads of animals above, scotch in hand – reading a mystery when a player piano started to roll with “Georgy Girl.” He dropped his glass.

“Life at Georgia Farm was shot through with a strange feeling that shadowed my every move. … It was a lonely time, unsettled and unsettling,” he writes, referring to life in the mansion and work on the overnight shift at QVC. “I never did see the ghost of Morris Stroud. The player piano turned out not to have a mind of its own – only a timer that sometimes malfunctioned. Creaks and rattles I’d heard in the night all turned out to be just creaks and rattles.”

Stroud representatives did not respond to requests for comment.