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Reported phenomena, as catalogued
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Georgian country house built 1763-1767 for Pennsylvania Chief Justice Benjamin Chew; British stronghold during the bloody 1777 Battle of Germantown and now a National Trust house museum with a long-running headless-woman legend.
6401 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19144
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Standard admission for house tours; check cliveden.org for current pricing and special events.
Access
Limited Access
Historic 18th-century mansion with stone steps and uneven floors; the grounds are partially accessible but the house interior has stairs and is not fully ADA accessible.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1767 · Site of the 1777 Battle of Germantown · National Historic Landmark · Home of Pennsylvania Chief Justice Benjamin Chew · Outstanding Philadelphia Georgian architecture · Operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation
Cliveden was built between 1763 and 1767 as the country house of Benjamin Chew (1722-1810), one of the most prominent legal figures of colonial Pennsylvania and Chief Justice of the Province of Pennsylvania at the time of the American Revolution. The mansion is an outstanding example of mid-18th-century Philadelphia Georgian architecture, a two-and-a-half-story stone building set well back from Germantown Avenue on a large landscaped property.
The house became the central feature of the Battle of Germantown on October 4, 1777, one of the bloodiest engagements of the Philadelphia Campaign of the American Revolutionary War. British troops under Colonel Thomas Musgrave fortified inside Cliveden's thick stone walls; the artillery and musket fire that General George Washington's column was forced to direct at the mansion stalled the American advance and contributed to the broader Continental defeat. More than 150 men died on the Cliveden grounds, with approximately 70 American soldiers killed in the immediate assault on the house itself. The interior floors and walls retain musket scars and battle damage that are still visible to visitors.
Benjamin Chew himself was not in Pennsylvania during the battle. A supporter of the proprietary Penn family, Chew was held in suspicion by patriot authorities but was never declared a Tory loyalist; he was briefly detained in New Jersey during the war. After the war Chew repurchased and restored the badly damaged house, and the property remained in the Chew family for seven generations until 1972.
The Chew family were enslavers, and Cliveden's modern interpretation explicitly addresses the lives of the enslaved African Americans who worked and lived on the property and across the Chew family's holdings — an interpretive shift led by current staff and presented as central to understanding the site rather than as a peripheral footnote.
Cliveden was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has operated the property as a public house museum since the 1970s. The site hosts an annual reenactment of the Battle of Germantown each October, and the surrounding Germantown neighborhood retains a dense concentration of Revolutionary-era buildings.
Sources
Cliveden's paranormal lore stems primarily from the violence of the 1777 Battle of Germantown. According to PA Haunted Houses, Haunted Places, and Visit Philadelphia coverage, soldier apparitions are the most frequently reported phenomenon — full-body figures in Revolutionary-era uniform seen near the front of the house, particularly on the side where American troops attempted to storm the building, with approximately 70 American dead documented on the grounds.
The most-documented single specter at Cliveden, according to PA Haunted Houses and Haunted Places, is the spirit of an elderly headless woman. The standard version of the story describes her stumbling from the mansion into the surrounding brush in search of her head, with the headless detail attributed in local folklore to her decapitation during the chaos of the battle. The story has circulated in Philadelphia paranormal compilations for decades and remains the property's signature ghost story.
A distinct narrative strand involves 20th-century seances reportedly held at the mansion that sought to contact Samuel Chew Jr., one of Benjamin Chew's descendants. According to PA Haunted Houses, these seance accounts circulate in local paranormal literature, though independently documented contemporary records of the sessions themselves are thin.
WHYY's coverage of haunted Germantown locations places Cliveden alongside the nearby Loudoun Mansion and Grumblethorpe as the heart of Northwest Philadelphia's Revolutionary-War-grounded paranormal cluster, and Visit Philadelphia's annual roundups consistently include Cliveden among the city's most-cited haunted historic sites. None of these accounts originate from the National Trust or from Cliveden's official interpretive programming — the museum focuses on the historical, architectural, and social-justice significance of the property rather than promoting paranormal claims.
Notable Entities
Docent-led tour of the Georgian mansion and grounds, including the rooms scarred by musket fire and artillery during the Battle of Germantown, the surviving battlefield landscape, and the Chew family interpretive programming covering seven generations of ownership including the Chew family's enslavement of African Americans.
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