• Story originally published by •Tunnel Find Linked to Young Ghost
New Hope [PA] - The surprising discovery of an old stone and wooden tunnel - a possible link to the fabled 19th-century Underground Railroad - could explain the ramblings of one of the Wedgewood Inn's most famous ghosts: a 12-year-old ex-slave girl named Sarah.[Original headline: Inn may be link to historic 'railroad'
A 30-foot tunnel was found at a New Hope site.
It may explain ghost folklore.]Carl Glassman, owner of the historic bed-and-breakfast, says the 30-foot tunnel was unearthed last fall by contractors renovating the 280-year-old inn. If it is a link to the Underground Railroad, he said, it fits in with the reported sightings of the ghost.
Three times in the last 17 years, Sarah has appeared to three 12-year-old girls who were guests at the Wedgewood Inn, Glassman said. Each of those girls reported Sarah telling of being a former Georgia slave who had stayed at the inn in the mid-19th century after she and her parents fled to the North.
"She said she was separated from her parents," Glassman said. "She was in the staircase and her parents were in the 'undergound.' "
Sarah's ghostly appearances may be the inn's folklore, but historians say the tunnel certainly lends credence to the Underground Railroad link.
Glassman's mind was very much on the future last fall when he set out to enhance the inn with business conference rooms, a handicap-access ramp and added storage space.
But a front-end loader plowing through the inn's foundations stumbled across the tunnel - a possible safety route in the network of shelters used by slaves as they made their way north in search of freedom.
"We thought we knew all the mysteries of this house after living here for 17 years," Glassman said.
He and his wife, Nadine Silnutzer, knew that the inn had a secret staircase above the kitchen that emptied behind a fake wall board near one of the bedrooms. And they knew about the hatch at the base of a gazebo in their yard, its opening not wide enough to tell where it might lead.
The newly discovered tunnel was found to connect the indoor staircase to the hatch outside, leading Glassman to believe that the inn's earlier owners erected the cavern as a hiding place for slaves waiting to catch the next mule barge heading north along the nearby Delaware Canal.
So far, his hunch has not been documented. And it is likely that it may never be, because historians say those who ran such illegal underground stations wrote very little down for fear of being caught.
"Most of them did not keep records," said Jeff Marshall, a historian at the Heritage Conservancy in Doylestown. "It would be ridiculous to keep records."
When a site like Glassman's is unearthed, he said, sometimes the only evidence is circumstantial.
Glassman's two-story inn was owned during the Civil War years by a family of Quakers, a group known for its abolitionist activism. It is a short walk from the Delaware Canal and the Delaware River - busy waterways connecting the markets of New York City to Philadelphia.
And Mount Gilead Baptist Church, considered by historians as Pennsylvania's last main stop on the Underground Railroad, was only a few miles from New Hope, on Holicong Road in Buckingham Mountain. "It's on the route, so I'm not going to rule it out," said Charles Blockson, author of The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania. "But we have to be careful."
