BELLOWS
MANSION
Location: The Deodat
Bellows Mansion is located at 4248 Bellows Road in the village of Mill Valley
Township, Pennsylvania, located at the intersection of Highway 663 and Old
Highway 476 south of Allentown in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The house is east
of town near the north end of Gage Park.
Description of Place:
Constructed in or around the 1860s, the Bellows House is a three-story
Victorian-style red-brick structure situated five acres of land on Bellows
street north of town, just five blocks east of Main Street. Two stories high
with an attic and basement, it has four chimneys, eight bedrooms, five
bathrooms, a front hall running the length of the house and a dining room, full
kitchen, wine cellar and library. The interior was mahogany, maple and oak with
a grand staircase. Over the years, an effort has been made the preserve the
grounds and exterior including a chain-link fence around the property to deter
trespassers and vandals.
Ghostly Manifestations:
A creepy house in a lonely part of town. We’ve all seen them. Locations that
don’t sell, or no one wants to deal with…. No one is ever seen living there
or coming from it, and yet, they sit there on the end of the street, or on a
little used road, or forgotten in the woods behind the local line of stores…..
It’s not odd for a town's local
haunted house to not have any recorded hauntings, but the Bellows Mansion in the
small farming village of Mill Valley in Bucks County, Pennsylvania has had a
long history of strange stories. Tales of witchcraft, poisonings, odd
disappearances and even a strange relative locked away from public view fills
its history. Protected from destruction by the Bucks County Historical Society,
the creep mansion has a convoluted history.
The story of the Old Bellows House is
the story of Sarah Bellows, believed to be the main spirit in the structure.
According to legend, she was locked away by her family, blamed for crimes she
didn't commit, and ultimately became an enraged spirit seeking revenge on all
who invaded her home…. even her own family for what they had done to her. By
the 1950s, this woman was at the center of a teenage hazing ritual where
teenagers would break into her house, enter the ruins of her room in the cellar
and call out three times, "Sarah Bellows, tell me a story." Doing the
chant reportedly forced her to appear. According to legend, anyone who saw her
later died in bizarre accidents or mysteriously disappeared.
Empty for over seventy years, the house
has reputedly resulted in the disappearances of several local teenagers and high
school kids over the years starting with Marcia Hardy in October 1948. Hardy was
a nineteen year old high school student at Mill Valley High School on Krammell
Street where the legend of Sara Bellows raged in the form of the local hazing
ritual. Most teens went to the house to see it or just get a glimpse of it, and
while there had been rumors of kids vanishing after visiting the house, Hardy is
the first “confirmed” victim of the mansion.
On October 22, 1948, as part of a
Halloween dare, Marcia Hardy accompanied by her best friends, Lisa McAllister,
Rebecca Wood, Maggie Green and Mary Clayton, was goaded into entering the house
and signaling with her flashlight from Sarah’s basement room. Entering the
house through the library window, she stumbled around through the house for a
minute before the girls saw her signal, but then a scream tore through the
place, and Marcia came running out the front door claiming that Sara had touched
her arm. Her flashlight was left behind.
For five days afterward, Marcia
reported seeing Sarah’s ghost roaming her house or sitting on her bed late at
night. On the sixth day, Marcia didn’t wake up at all. It was reported she had
suffered a heart attack at the age of nineteen.
Following Marcia, there were a few more
instances. The following March, a new student named Eric Costello arrived from
Baltimore, Maryland. From his new classmates, he heard about the ghost of Sara
Bellows and decided to go visit the house. Two days later, he was missing… his
school books and jacket were found just a block from the house.
The legend once again reared its head
that August when Michael Chaplain, Marcia’s old boyfriend, claimed he was
seeing Marcia’s ghost visiting him at night and asking him to join her at the
Bellows House. This haunting carried on for three weeks, and on September 11,
his 1934 Stutz Bearcat was found mysteriously parked before the Bellows Mansion.
He was never found.
It took only a few months until the
reputation of the house once more reacted. In January 1950, Steven Howard and
Daniel McFarland broke into the Bellows Mansion and tried to burn it down. The
effort was unsuccessful, but the following week, their Studebaker was being
pulled out of Molasses Creek, They weren’t in it.
Between June and November 1950, two
girls named Jaclyn West and Donna Keaton ran screaming from the changing rooms
at the Jeffersons Clothing Store. They were seen running down the sidewalk,
cutting through the alley near the trainyard and from there they were never seen
again. A week after they went missing, their friends were connecting them to a
dare at the Bellows Mansion.
The last disappearance was Greg Lloyd
in March 1951. Lloyd lived with his family on the corner of Barber Street and
Bellows Street; his grandmother lived on Quakertown Road east of town and the
bicycle trip to visit her often took him past the Bellows Mansion before
reaching the bridge on the route. On March 27, he failed to make it home for
dinner, and the next day, search teams began scouring the woods on both sides of
Molasses Creek. No trace of him was ever found, but in June 1961, his backpack
stitched with his name was found by fisherman tangled in the underbrush about
1200 feet up creek from the mansion.
The Bellows Mansion was cordoned off
with a ten foot high chain link fence later that year.
By 1993, however, William Collins of
CGS had become aware of the legend of Sarah Bellows and began exhaustively
researching the mansion for a planned visit to investigate the house. Getting
copies of the original newspaper accounts, he noticed that with the exception of
Marcia and Greg, none of the original accounts even mention the Bellows Mansion
at all. He then postulated the theory that at some point these other deaths and
disappearances were just linked to the legend, and creative gossip filled in the
blanks. He lost interest in seeing the house afterward, but inhabitants of Mill
Valley and in nearby Milford Village and Spinnerstown still claim that there
were several more disappearances connected to the house well into the 1980s.
Since the 40s and 50s, motorists
traveling on Bellows Road between Mill Valley and Milford Village have testified
that some sort of haunting does seem to occur near the mansion. A few people
have seen a light coming from the basement window burning brightly or flitting
from window to window, Others have had an inexplicable feeling of dread in the
presence of the house, and for a few days in November 1979, people heard a
recurring humming noise occurring near the house that sounded like “the drone
of a motor boat stuck in third gear.”
In October 1981, businessman Alan Hill
was driving from Topton to his home in Quakertown, a route that he had taken
several times before through Mill Valley. As he was leaving the city limits on
the east side of town, he was approaching the Bellows House when he looked up
and noticed a figure in white walking down the side of the road. It was just
after 10PM, the roadway was practically empty but for a few cars every few
miles, and as he noticed the figure, he turned a bit over the centerline to give
her a wild berth, but as he passed
her, he took a close look at her. She was all in white with a large mane of
right hair, resembling a young woman in the pangs of old age. She didn’t seem
to be walking; she seemed to be swaying side to side, advancing at a slow pace
toward the house. He knew the legend of Sara Bellows, but he was not aware of
the hauntings, but he never described what he had seen until a dinner party in
Bannertown, New York when a conversation shifted to local ghost stories.
Between his encounter and 1995, there
were several other similar stories by other motorists. On October 22, 1985,
friends Bob Wright and Jim Todd had traveled to Reading to reunite with friends.
With them were their girlfriends, Tina Upton and Natalie O’Keefe, and their
long drive home to Bethlehem took them through Mill Valley. As they were nearing
the bridge, Natalie looked up and started screaming. Standing by the side of the
road was an old woman all in white standing at the roadside near the mansion.
She wasn’t doing anything, She looked like “a clip in a strip of movie blown
up to lifesize and superimposed in the open air.” Tina also started screaming
and pounding Bob to speed up past her. Jim never saw her, but when Bob looked
back at her through his windshield mirror, he saw her. The one thing he noted
was a black void where her face should have been.
A few months later, on January 9, 1986,
Russell Doyle was making a late delivery of parts to the Mill Valley Garage from
his garage in Cooperstown. It had been a wintry season, and there was snow on
the ground. The roads were wet, but the way was clear, and the sky was clear. He
had promised to deliver the parts earlier that day, but he was short one
employee and the day had been busy. Traveling westbound on Bellows Road (local
Highway 663), he had just come up the hill to the bridge and was approaching the
house when he swerved to miss a figure in white in the street. He turned his
steering wheel tightly to the right, his car throwing up dirt as he passed.
Correcting himself, he looked back casually, but there was nothing there, and he
kept on driving.
As was approaching the city limits, he
suddenly started having a strange feeling he was being watched. An odd feeling
was directing him to the back seat, and as his gaze looked up to his rear view
mirror, his eyes met a ghastly sight. Sitting in his back seat was a decrepit
old corpse, a skeleton with white hair in a long white dress. Screaming, he
accidentally drove off the road and down a twelve foot incline, colliding with a
tree in his path. He survived to tell his story, but he has never forgotten the
incident.
For a few years, there were no
sightings of Sarah’s ghost or if there were, no one was sharing their
experiences. But then, on November 13, 1991, Sarah once again appeared near her
house. Appearing to Louise English, a local single mother, this appearance
wasn’t as spooky as the others, but it does give a different look at Sarah’s
forlorn spirit. As Louise’s daughter, Dawn, explains:
“I was eight years old, and my
sister, Lisa was five. Our grandmother lived in Bellows Road near Quakertown,
but there, it was known as Freed Street. We lived on Pardue Road off Main Street
north of town. At that time, mom worked as a nurse at Quakertown Medical Center
and dropped us off at grandma’s house to catch the bus to school on her way to
work.
“One night, mom came to pick us up
after work and had stayed for dinner before heading home, so it was pretty late
by the time we returned to Mill Valley. I was riding in the back seat, and I
guess I wasn’t sleepy because when my mom tells this story I was apparently
climbing over the seat to the front of the car and back again. Anyway, I guess
we had come over the bridge east of town and we were going past the Bellows
House set back off the road. You can’t see it very well with the foliage
covering the fence, but you can see it coming from a distance because of that
roof.
“Anyway, we were going past it when I
saw a tall woman in white standing by the street. She was kind of bathed in
light…. Kind of glowing from this light clinging to her, but otherwise she
looked normal. She was looking straight at us, and as I noticed her, our eyes
just locked. I could see her face…. To this day, I still recall how careworn,
placid and tired she seemed to be, but we just passed by her
and that was it. I never saw her again….
“For years, I thought I was the only
one who saw her that night, but one night, my mom and relatives were reminiscing
about lost relatives, some nostalgia and old family events. The conversation
then turned to whether we lived on after death, and my mom told the same story I
just told….”
History: Founded in
the 1790s, Mill Valley was originally settled by Quakers fleeing religious
persecution in England. They settled in the area because of the easy access to
water to build farms, later being joined by Dutch Protestants and Presbyterians
. The settlement was not officially known as Mill Valley until its first post
office opened in 1803. Among the settlers was Josef Bellows, a German store
merchant, and his wife, Gertrude Bellows, and two sons, Deodat and Eustace. He
opened a small store on Main Street and later became the town mortician,
building a boarding house on Providence Road and later becoming a prominent
businessman and town leader in town. With his fortune, he built a paper mill
north of town on Molasses Creek near Commerce Street, becoming incredibly
wealthy as a result. He built the Bellows Mansion on Paupers Lane (later Bellows
Street) in 1859 Street taking property across from what was once an Old Pioneer
Burying Ground. The house was built to be as opulent as possible… Windows
crafted in England, wood furnishings from Germany, fixtures, sinks and lights
from France and marble tiles from Italy. Construction cost almost 1.5 million
dollars (35 million dollars worth in 2020).
Living outside of town, Deodat Bellows
inherited a life of excess and incredible opulence. He met his wife, Delanie,
near Helmstadt, Germany, and brought her to the United States. They had five
children, Ephraim, Gertrude, Sarah and Harold Bellows..
Identity of Ghosts:
To the populace of Mill Valley, Sarah is just a myth, but she is a myth based on
a real person who lived in the Late 19th century. In life, Sarah Bellows was the
third child born to Deodat and Delanie Bellows, and the younger sister to
Ephraim, Gertrude and Harold Bellows, and the granddaughter of Gertrude Bellows.
Born with albinism, she was ostracized by the family. They kept her locked in
the basement away from the family who enjoyed the benefits and luxuries of their
wealth. She spent her days writing and talking to the few local children that
came to visit and look for her in the tiny exterior window to her room. Among
the children that came to see her was Louise “Lou Lou” Baptiste, the
daughter of the Bellows' maid. Sylvie Baptiste. However, at some point,
Sarah’s siblings got tired of her popularity with the neighborhood children,
and chased them off, leaving Sarah lonely and depressed. When the children began
dying, it was claimed that Sylvie had taught Sarah witchcraft which she used to
kill the children that shunned her.
The real story is much more tragic than
people who know the legend would believe. In reality, the mercury runoff from
the family's paper mill had polluted the town’s watershed and the children
ended up poisoned from the deliberate negligence. Sarah was aware of this, and
when she tried to tell the truth, her family decided to silence her. They had
her forcefully committed at Pennhurst Asylum, thirty miles away in Spring City,
Pennsylvania under the care of her own brother, Dr. Ephraim Bellows. The
diagnosis of “non-stop delusions” and "homicidal tendencies" was
just a cover up to silence and discredit her. It is believed Sarah was tortured
by Ephraim using electroshock therapy and isolation therapy, all in an effort to
get her to "confess" to murdering the children in order to cover up
the true cause of death and prevent the paper mill from being closed down. The
Bellows family would certainly have been liable, but they couldn’t allow the
truth to get out. Despite the cruelty and conspiracy against her, Sarah
continued to maintain that it was the water that had poisoned the children, not
her.
On November 11, 1898, however, this
false narrative led to an angry mob of the families of the dead children. They
invaded Pennhurst and sought her out to hang her as a witch, but Sarah managed
to just sate their anger, and she hung herself by her long hair at Pennhurst.
Following her death, Sylvie Baptiste was fired as the family’s maid, and in
one year, all of the Bellows family members soon vanished or died strange
mysterious deaths. First, Ephraim traveled to the Blunt Meat Shop for some liver
and failed to return. A month later, mother Delanie passed away in her chair
before the fireplace in her bedroom. Brother Harold who was away hunting at the
time with locals Thomas and Andrew Ritter and failed to return. No one ever
found a trace of him. Sister Gertrude later purchased a dress for the funeral
that had formaldehyde in it and died from the poison. That fall, Deodat Bellows,
Sarah’s father, went hunting in the woods west of town, and like Ephraim, he
never returned either. Over two hundred volunteers searched the area, but he was
never found.
Less than a year after he vanished, the
mill was left loping along, finally closing down on August 12, 1899 without
being sold or being turned over. The town struggled afterward without the
Bellows fortune until the 1920s when the mill was demolished to manufacture
steel for World War Two, lifting the town out of its recession, but it was soon
struggling after World War Two, getting converted into a grain mill..
Source/Comments:
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2009) - Architecture based on the Fairbanks
Mansion (“Sunnyside House”) in Petrolia, Canada. Activity based on the film.
Extended activity based on Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, Illinois, Centenary
Avenue in Cleveland, Tennessee and Black Woods Road in Cherryfield, Maine.
“Paper Mill Closing” by Henry
Ketchum, Mill Valley Enterprise, August 22, 1899
“Was it Black Magic? - Voodoo
Suspected in Tragic Hanging of Bellows Girl” by Lee Kedward, Mill Valley
Enterprise, November 12, 1898
“Last Bellows Leaves Town - Fate of
Town’s Industry Left in Question” by Samuel Borden. Mill Valley Enterprise,
August 22, 1899
“The Truth Behind Our Scary Story” by Stella
Nichols, Mill Valley Gazette, October 1, 1968