Baleroy Mansion

A stone house on Mermaid Lane in Chestnut Hill whose owner, George Gordon Meade Easby, said it was haunted, and which holds a blue chair said to kill whoever sits in it.

Baleroy's address is 111 W. Mermaid Lane, Chestnut Hill. The Philadelphia Inquirer's 2005 obituary of its owner, George Gordon Meade Easby, who died at 87, says the stone house went up in 1911 to show off treasures. Easby thought the ghosts arrived along with his personal collection of over 100,000 pieces. He told the Inquirer in 1976 that the spirits started showing up often after his mother's death in 1961.

The best-known story concerns a blue chair. A 1990 Inquirer feature by Ginny Wiegand reported the claim that sitting in it could bring sudden death, and listed a housekeeper, a cousin and two other people as having died that way, while calling the pattern coincidence. Wikipedia says the chair is 200 years old, calls it the "chair of death", and says Easby stopped anyone from sitting in it after about four people were said to have died.

Wikipedia also repeats other claims about the chair: that Napoleon owned it, that a warlock made it, and that a red mist called Amanda haunts it. The Chestnut Hill Patch described the house in 2011 as full of antiques, historical objects and ghost stories.