Municipal parking garage at the corner of Duke and Chestnut Streets in downtown Lancaster, built atop the original 1763 burial ground of the Conestoga people massacred by the Paxton Boys.
50 N Duke St, Lancaster, PA 17602
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Standard Lancaster Parking Authority hourly and daily rates; the garage operates as ordinary municipal parking.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Multi-level concrete parking garage with stair and elevator access; ADA spaces available.
Equipment
Photos OK
The Paxton Boys massacre of the Conestoga is one of the most thoroughly documented acts of racial violence in colonial Pennsylvania history. After an initial attack on the Conestoga settlement at Indian Town on December 14, 1763, the twenty surviving Conestoga were placed in protective custody at the Lancaster County workhouse. On December 27, 1763, between roughly fifty and one hundred Paxton Boys broke past Sheriff John Hay and Coroner Slough at the workhouse and killed all fourteen Conestoga sheltering inside in an attack that lasted approximately twelve minutes. The murdered Conestoga included men, women, and children.
The victims were buried just outside a nearby Mennonite cemetery near the present-day intersection of Chestnut and Duke Streets in downtown Lancaster, the site now occupied by the Duke Street Parking Garage operated by the Lancaster Parking Authority. According to historical documentation summarized by Uncharted Lancaster, the remains were exhumed and moved in 1833 to clear the ground for railroad construction; precise reburial records from that 1833 relocation are not fully recoverable.
The Conestoga were one of the last identifiable groups of Susquehannock-descended Indigenous people in the Lancaster region, and the December 1763 attacks effectively ended their continuous presence in the area as a community. Contemporary commentary on the massacre was published by Benjamin Franklin, who condemned the Paxton Boys' actions; subsequent Pennsylvania historiography has continued to treat the event as a foundational moment of settler-versus-Indigenous violence in the region.
Today the Duke Street Garage functions as ordinary downtown municipal parking. The Fulton Theatre and the Duke Street Garage are increasingly recognized in Lancaster civic conversations as the paired physical sites of the massacre and burial, and local Indigenous-history scholarship continues to call for more visible commemoration of the Conestoga at both locations.
Sources
Reports of unexplained phenomena at the Duke Street Garage are summarized in Uncharted Lancaster's 'Massacre of the Conestoga' essay and on the Haunted Rooms America Lancaster page. The most commonly retold reports describe shadowy figures glimpsed darting between the various levels of the multi-level garage, often by drivers retrieving vehicles late at night.
A second category of reports involves audible phenomena: piercing screams or wailing sometimes attributed to the murdered Conestoga. These auditory reports are more often associated with the former workhouse site one block away (today's Fulton Theatre block) than with the garage itself, and the two sites are paired in the broader Conestoga-massacre folklore as the place where the killings happened and the place where the dead were laid.
These accounts are presented in local-history and ghost-tour writing as anecdotal rather than investigative; no formal paranormal study of the garage has been published, and the building itself is an ordinary functioning municipal facility. Visitors interested in the site should approach it as a place of mourning for the Conestoga rather than as an entertainment destination.
Notable Entities
Visit the corner of Duke and Chestnut Streets in downtown Lancaster, identified in local historical scholarship as the original 1763 burial ground of the murdered Conestoga people. The site is best approached respectfully on foot as part of a broader Conestoga memorial walk that also includes the Fulton Theatre block (the former workhouse site).
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