Yellow Fever, Gun Duels and the Ghosts of Old City

The booking below is the shared Friday and Saturday walk. It covers the guide and nothing else: building interiors, a weather guarantee and the guide's tip are all outside the price.

The listing describes the guide as APT-certified. APT is the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides, and its certification is a written exam on the city's history, people and places. At least 60 percent of the questions deal with the Historic District, and a pass takes 80 of 120 points.

Every stop on the listing is a pass-by, and building interiors are excluded. The stories are told outside the doors, in this order on the booking page. At 8:00 PM the buildings would be shut anyway: the National Park Service lists Carpenters' Hall as open until 4 pm and lets visitors into the secure part of Independence Square only until 4:45 pm. Washington Square, where the walk ends, is open 24 hours.

• City Tavern, where the group meets. The tour's notes say the original burned in 1834 and was razed in 1854. The Park Service says today's building is a 1975 reconstruction, a historic site that is closed to the public rather than a working tavern. Its story involves a burnt bride.
• The Merchants' Exchange, beside what was once Dock Creek, which the listing calls a cesspool of filth and disease. The operator's stop note describes Dock Street as a cobblestone lane.
• The site of Alexander Hamilton's Philadelphia house, and the affair with Maria Reynolds that followed him.
• Carpenters' Hall, which the listing says served as a makeshift hospital and a meeting place for French spies. The Carpenters' Company's own timeline for the hall calls the 1798 theft there America's first bank robbery: 162,821.61 dollars taken from the Bank of Pennsylvania, then the hall's tenant, during a yellow fever epidemic.
• The Todd House, where Dolley Todd lost her baby son and first husband in the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, which the Park Service says killed more than 4,000 Philadelphians. She later became first lady as Dolley Madison.
• The Robert Morris statue, near the site of the Walnut Street Jail, where Morris, a signer of all three founding documents, was held for debt.
• The American Philosophical Society library, with Benjamin Franklin's statue on the facade and his family quarrels in the script.
• Independence Hall, and the bodies the listing says were dumped on its steps during the French and Indian War.
• Washington Square, which the Park Service says William Penn set aside in 1706 as a potter's field for the poor. It served as a military cemetery during the Revolutionary War, took more than 1,300 yellow fever victims in 1793 and closed to burials in 1794. It is now home to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution.

Reviewers keep describing the same balance. One who went in August 2026 wrote: "This is not your typical ghost tour. It is more of a gruesome history of Philadelphia tour, with varied and detailed stories." Another, in April, put the range at "pre-colonial times to the 1930s, from bank robbery to mass murder."

The scares come from what happened on these blocks, and the ghosts are the frame for it. A September 2026 review described the ghosts here as "memories, feelings, etc. that linger years later."

Nineteen of the 21 reviews posted between March and September 2026 name the same guide, Malcolm. The listing does not say who leads a given night.