Conference House

The oldest stone house on Staten Island hosted a failed 1776 peace conference between Benjamin Franklin and the British. A persistent legend claims a Loyalist colonel murdered a servant girl on the stairs, and neighbors still report hearing the sounds of shouting and a body falling after dark.

Neighbors still hear it on quiet nights: a man shouting, then a woman screaming, then the unmistakable sound of a body tumbling down stairs. The Conference House sits at the very bottom tip of Staten Island, the southernmost point in all of New York State, and the ghost story attached to it is one of the oldest in the city.

The legend goes like this. During the Revolution, Colonel Christopher Billopp, a British Loyalist, caught a teenage servant girl placing a lantern on a second-floor windowsill. He believed she was signaling to colonial spies at a nearby church. In a rage, he grabbed her and threw her down the staircase, breaking her neck. He buried her in an unmarked grave on the property and fled.

The murder almost certainly never happened. Historians have found no evidence of a servant girl killed at the house, and the multiple versions of the story (some say a broken engagement, others say she died of heartbreak) have the fingerprints of folklore all over them. What is documented: Billopp was captured in 1779, branded a felon, had his lands confiscated, and eventually relocated to New Brunswick, Canada, where he served in the provincial assembly until his death in 1827. Not exactly the profile of a fugitive murderer.

But the house earned its fame long before any ghost story. On September 11, 1776, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge rowed across from Perth Amboy to sit across from Lord Howe in Billopp's parlor. The British wanted the colonists to withdraw the Declaration of Independence. The Americans said no. The meeting lasted three hours and accomplished nothing, which is exactly what makes it fascinating. The Revolution could have ended in that room. It didn't.

The house was built before 1680 by Captain Christopher Billopp, the colonel's great-great-grandfather, who supposedly won Staten Island for New York by sailing around the entire island in a single day. The stone building sat abandoned and crumbling until the Conference House Association restored it between 1929 and 1933, and it became Staten Island's first house museum.

As for the ghosts, visitors report seeing a candle flickering in a second-floor window after dark, even though the museum is closed and empty. Others have reported the figures of British soldiers walking the grounds of the surrounding park. The most persistent claim is the audio replay: a man yelling, a woman screaming, a fall. Whether any of it is real or just the legend reinforcing itself, the Conference House has 350 years of history soaked into its stone walls, including one failed peace conference that shaped the future of the country.

The servant girl's grave has never been found. Neither has any record she existed.