Was there a murder at Bucks County Tavern?
In the basement of the Continental Tavern in Yardley, thousands of empty bottles have been found. Gordon’s Gin bottles, bottles marked “Moxie’s Nerve Juice” and “Sarcoptic Mange Medicine.” There are milk bottles and medicine bottles and mysterious cobalt bottles with no labels.
“This one’s poison. You can tell because they had bumps or ridges on the sides,” said Paul Beck, a retired chemist who comes in once a week to clean, sort and catalogue each piece in a third-floor room nicknamed “the labora-tory.”
Other items: A metal lunch box with sandwich wrapping paper and walnut shells intact. A candy bar rack. Tools. Soup cans, beer cans and a New Deal Era shot glass emblazoned “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
“There’s stuff down in that pit that would get you arrested today. It’s a Bucks County time capsule,” said Frank Lyons, a retired airline pilot who purchased the tavern in 2007.
He gutted the place, aiming to restore it as it appeared in 1875, prior to a fire. The small treasures recovered from the basement were uncovered as workmen removed tons of soil, as Lyons intends to return it as it likely appeared when it was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Which is when workmen uncovered the most intriguing finds of the excavation. Behind some loose rocks in the wall was found a rusty .32 caliber Smith & Wesson pistol manufactured in 1882, and a silver sterling frame of a woman’s purse. Then something truly bizarre.
“In a crevice, in one of the ceiling joists, was hidden a bloody corset,” Beck said.
He made no connection between the items and, in the course of hectic renovations (“We gutted everything,” he said), the corset was accidently tossed out, but not before he photographed it, the gun and the ornate purse frame.
“I just thought they were strange things to find down there,” he said. But then odd things began to happen. His daughter, Colleen, just a child at the time, said there was a
cranky old woman on the second floor, and a young boy named Thomas in ragged clothing.
He didn’t believe she was making it up so, out of concern, he brought in paranormal investigators to see if there was anything to it. The investigators confirmed that there were ghostly presences in the place, not surprising for an old Bucks County tavern.
“It is truly one of the most historic and most haunted buildings in Bucks County,” Lyons said. “The paranormals told us there is
a lot of activity here. As a matter of fact, they told us there’s a lot of people who checked into the Continental Tavern and never checked out.”
The building pre-dates the Revolution, and was originally an out-building on the Thomas Yardley estate. Over the centuries it has been reincarnated as a barber shop, a dry goods store, grocery store, mechanic shop, and boarding house. Its basement became a convenient disposal area in an era where trash collection wasn’t the norm, if it existed at all.
At some point, the second and third floors contained 18 rooms for rent. “I was told by the Yardley Historical Society that John Wilkes Booth once stayed here,” Lyons said.
Investigators checked the upper floors, or spent the night with hightech gadgetry they said is designed to detect paranormal activity. Lyons never let any of them know what the others had found. It was like he was conducting a double-blind test for ghosts.
Some investigators claimed to have communicated psychically with the strongest presence in the place. “The stories they told us were remarkably consistent,” he said.
“Different paranormals began telling us about this beautiful young woman that lived in that room and she had visitors from all over eastern Pennsylvania,” Lyons said. “It became obvious that she was a lady of the night.”
Her name was either “Rose” or “Rosa,” the investigators told him.
The investigators said there was a secret staircase that led from the basement to her room on the second floor. It was remarkable. During renovations, they found the framing of a long-gone staircase, which extended to the third floor. Anyone could enter or leave the building discreetly.
“So there was, in fact, a secret back staircase,” Lyons said.
The psychic investigators who said they made contact with the woman said she told them she’d been murdered, and that the gun was still in the building, as well as her purse.
Lyons was astonished.
“(The shooting) was unexpected, and it was an unrequited lover who wanted her to leave with him and she wouldn’t go,” he said. Lyons’ research into murder at the Continental has turned up nothing. No criminal reports, no newspaper accounts. “I believe this murder went undiscovered,” he said. “The weapon was manufactured in 1882, so I know it was not before 1882.
Staff and customers regularly report odd experiences — shadowy figures, objects that move by themselves, late night crashes on the upper floors but, when checked, nothing’s out of place.
Since 2007, the Continental has become a favorite haunt of psychics and ghost hunters, who Lyons believes are sincere.
“I guess the thing that’s always in the back of my mind is what one paranormal told me about the woman’s murder — it’s that there’s other evidence still here that hasn’t been discovered,” he said.
In the basement, workmen haven’t found anything incriminating, although one ironic discovery was recently unearthed.
“A skeleton key,” Lyons said.