Widow McCrea House – is a bed & breakfast at 53 Kingwood Avenue with a detached cottage and five guest rooms. The Victorian house has been owned and operated by business partners Lynn Marad and Burt Patalano since 1997. In the 1930s and perhaps longer, it had been a boarding house.
The B&B is named for Frances McCrea, who owned the place in 1878, according to Marad, and may be the subject of a photo portrait that was found in the attic and is now prominently displayed downstairs. The B&B has been investigated by several psychics, mediums and others, including the Philadelphia Ghost Hunters Alliance.
Marad said the previous owner had told her about hauntings, including the sighting of the upper half of a Native American, who said, sadly and cryptically, “They need to know the truth.” Marad has named one of her units the Tuccamirgan Room on the chance that the ghost was that of Chief Tuccamirgan, friend of the Case family, whom she believes had owned the property early on.
Marad recalls that shortly after she'd opened the B&B, she was making a bed when she felt like she was being watched. She turned to see a gaunt, stern-faced woman wearing a green, high-necked Victorian-era dress with her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a tight bun. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and “I had the strong impression she was evaluating my work.” Then the woman faded away.
That same year Marad had just finished making up a room, which included following the inexplicable B&B custom of populating the bed with six to eight decorative pillows. Moments later she came back to find the pillows had been thrown all over the room. Unafraid of spirits, Marad laid down the law, “Don't make more work for me!”
Around 2004, soon after the B&B had been featured in a magazine article as one of the best haunted hotels in New Jersey, the place was a stop on a holiday house tour. Marad was showing a party of three elderly couples through her establishment. One of the women was excited by the idea of a haunted hotel and kept mentioning it, causing her husband, who wore the white uniform of a naval officer, to harrumph and mutter.
Finally, when the group was in the upstairs corridor, he said, “That's enough! I can't take it anymore! I've seen war on three continents. I've held dying men in my arms. If there were such a thing as a ghost I'd know it! And there is no such thing!”
At that, all four bedroom doors slammed shut in unison, and the visitors “just flew out of here,” said Marad.
She said that a noted psychic came to the house and identified several entities that habituate the house – two housekeepers, Abigail (she of the hollow cheeks and green dress) and Priscilla, plus a young woman who died of yellow fever there and her suitor, who comes by periodically to check on her.
The sounds of the front door opening and closing and heavy footfalls going up and down the stairs have been heard.
Circa 2000, a couple was checking out of the Tuccamirgan Room. While the wife was in the parlor chatting with Marad, the husband was finishing the packing and moving the luggage out to their car. When the wife heard the bureau drawers being closed, she hollered up the stairs, “John, I already went through all the drawers!” And then John walked in the front door.
On a couple of occasions guests in the Rittenhouse Room have reported hearing a young girl giggling when a male was undressing. The shower in that room sometimes turns on by itself.
One morning around 2002, a female guest told Marad that the previous night she'd been in the parlor reading when something caught her attention. She looked up to find that the whole room had changed to perhaps the way it looked a century earlier. An elderly woman, sitting across from her in a rocking chair, engaged her in conversation, going on and on about having lost her favorite knitting needles, the ones with the silver tips, and having to make do with lesser ones.
She indicated her preferred seat was by the parlor window, so she could look out and see the gardens. She expressed her disappointment that the gardens across the way had lost their grandeur, although in the 21st century there are no gardens across the street.
The talkative spirit said she was perfectly aware that she was dead, but liked the place and didn't want to leave it, but would like it even better of the owner would plant some yellow flowers. The woman telling Marad of her experience was a self-professed high priestess of a Wiccan coven, which makes the story more or less credible depending on how you feel about the occult.
Marad said that years later, when studying old property surveys, she learned that the vestigial East Washington Street, between her house and its neighbor, used to continue across Kingwood Avenue providing a rear entrance to the Frenchtown Cemetery. There had been large wrought-iron gates and the formal gardens that the ghost had so admired, she said.
From “Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia” (a work in progress)
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