A small crowd will gather outside the Chestnut Hill Library at 8711 Germantown Avenue, lift lanterns, and set off down the avenue into the dark. They will not be walking alone. At stops along the route, costumed storytellers will be waiting to tell them scary stories, each one performed live. The walk ends at Hilltop Books at 84 Bethlehem Pike.
The event is the Chestnut Hill Ghost Walk, a fundraiser for the Friends of the Chestnut Hill Library. Tickets are $10 per person or $25 for a family, and they can be bought online or in person at Hilltop Books.
The walk is a collaboration with Patchwork: A Storytelling Guild, a Philadelphia organization with a long history of its own. Patchwork was founded in 1982, when a group of professional storytellers and librarians got together to push back against what they saw as the decline of storytelling, driven in part by the rise of multimedia and technology. They wanted to keep the art form alive by offering training, performance and education, and an open forum for tellers and audiences alike. The guild incorporated as a nonprofit in 1984 and has been producing storytelling performances around the Greater Philadelphia area ever since, from workshops and retreats to public performances and a calendar of events. Its members pass on oral history from one generation to the next, gather and share stories that reflect cultural identities, and treat storytelling as both a contemporary art form and a tool for personal growth. A lantern-lit walk with live tellers is, in other words, exactly the kind of thing Patchwork exists to do.
The setting suits the material. Chestnut Hill is one of Philadelphia's oldest and most atmospheric neighborhoods, a historic district of Victorian houses, stone twins and Colonial estates. Germantown Avenue serves as its main commercial corridor, lined with boutiques, restaurants and local businesses.
The starting point has its own story. Chestnut Hill has had a library since 1870, when the philanthropist Henry Williams retired to the neighborhood from Boston. To serve the schools and the community, Williams built the Christian Hall Library in 1872 at 8711 Germantown Avenue, the same address the walk departs from today. He named it Christian Hall because he did not want anything inconsistent with the word Christian to go on in the building, though singing, elocution classes, magic lantern shows, art lectures, church fairs and temperance meetings were all permitted. At first it was only a reading room, and books were issued solely to subscribers; the upstairs was used by the YMCA and area churches, and a frame building behind the library served as headquarters for the Workingman's Club, equipped as a reading room and billiard hall. After 1876, Williams was persuaded to let anyone take books without charge. In 1897 the trustees decided the library would better serve the community as a branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, and granted the grounds to the city. Today the branch is housed in a Carnegie library designed by Cope and Stewardson in a Georgian Revival style, with a stone portico, Doric columns and large arched windows flanking the entrance.
The ending point has a more recent origin. Hilltop Books is the bookstore of the Friends of the Chestnut Hill Library, operated independently of the Free Library system but with proceeds benefiting the Chestnut Hill branch. Its roots go back to the weekly used book sales held in the library's Community Room, where, since the 1970s, volunteers sold books for a dollar, fifty cents and a quarter every Monday afternoon, week in and week out, filling tables and repacking them for the next sale. Those sales helped maintain the library property, augment its programs and plug the most yawning gaps in the city's library budget. Hilltop opened its storefront at 84 Bethlehem Pike in April 2021, and when it did, Chestnut Hill had been without a bookstore for more than a decade, since Borders closed in 2010. The shop is staffed by volunteers, sells most books at a third of retail price, and keeps a full room of kids' books alongside fiction, history, biography and more.
That is where the money from the Ghost Walk goes. The Friends of the Chestnut Hill Library support the branch and maintain its garden, and the walk is one of the ways they raise the funds to do it.
For anyone who has heard about the walk and wants to go, the practical details are simple. It starts at the Chestnut Hill Library, 8711 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19118. It ends at Hilltop Books, 84 Bethlehem Pike, Philadelphia, PA 19118. Expect live scary stories told by costumed storytellers, and a short walk through one of the city's most historic neighborhoods after dark. Tickets are $10 per person or $25 for a family.