High above Reading on the Mount Penn ridgeline, the William Penn Memorial Fire Tower mixes postcard views with moonlit lore. The 120-foot stone-and-concrete sentinel opened on October 28, 1939 as a Works Progress Administration project, replacing an earlier lookout near the Gravity Railroad attraction that later burned in a suspected arson. Inside, 168 steel steps spiral to a glass-walled observation room beneath a copper dome—features that made the tower both a practical fire lookout and a Depression-era jobs monument. Time, weather, and vandalism forced closure in 1988; volunteer effort and municipal stewardship revived it with limited openings by 2004. Even when the door is locked, the tower’s silhouette over Skyline Drive keeps watch—and keeps the stories alive.
The most frequently cited phenomenon along Skyline Drive is the faint swell of big-band music and the laughter of a crowd rising from the site where the mountaintop hotel once stood. No lives were lost in the hotel fire or in its dance hall, yet many believe the sounds are the joyful echoes of guests returning to a place they loved. At the William Penn Memorial Fire Tower, witnesses describe a disembodied, giggling voice and the mist-pale outline of a woman lingering on the lower flights of the tower’s broad staircase. Local lore also tells of motorists who hear something—or someone—scrape across their car roofs, often imagined as a woman’s presence gliding just out of sight.
Others report glimpsing two spectral figures standing in the center of Skyline Drive, apparitions commonly linked to the mountain’s double murder–suicides of the 1920s and 1930s. During the Depression, when Works Progress Administration crews—and nearby prisoners—built the stone wall that still traces the roadway, workers recorded encounters with the same pair of figures. Each time, the forms dissolved the moment anyone tried to draw near.
Paranormal hobbyists have brought recorders and meters to the site for years. One investigator said he captured the voice of the ghost of Mrs. Cooper, whose baby was killed in a trolley accident near the Skyline Drive area in the 1890s; although the fire tower wasn’t built until 1938, it is said that the spirit of Mrs. Cooper, who survived the crash, is on the tower’s second floor. The rocking-chair area is said to contain the ghosts of Paul and Martha Walker, caretakers in the 1940s. A witness reported seeing a “really dark gray” shadow coming up the steps and feeling a chill when walking through it, believed to be Mr. Walker. It is said that he has talked to people, offered to help women up the stairs, and pushed women up the stairs. The history of murders and suicides near the tower is said to contribute to its paranormal activity.
Berks County’s best-known chronicler of local hauntings, Charles J. Adams III, has written that he does not consider either the Pagoda or the William Penn Fire Tower truly haunted, suggesting nearby tragedies along Skyline Drive may be what people sense or reference when they attribute activity to the tower itself. His take doesn’t end the stories—but it does reframe them as part of a larger Mount Penn folklore zone rather than a single “ghost-occupied” building…