Ford Mansion (Washington's Headquarters)

Washington's Revolutionary headquarters. Investigator Gordon Ward captured an EVP saying "In the kitchen" from a servant ghost.

"What is your favorite memory?" paranormal investigator Gordon Ward asked, sitting in a room across from the kitchen. The recording came back clear: "In the kitchen." He was in Ford Mansion in Morristown, trying to talk to a female spirit he suspected was a servant. The audience that heard the playback gasped.

Ford Mansion is George Washington's winter headquarters, but it's also a house where three people died young in three weeks. Colonel Jacob Ford Jr., an iron manufacturer and commander of the Eastern Battalion of the Morris County Militia, built the Georgian-style manor in 1774. He died of pneumonia inside the house on January 11, 1777, while 35 Delaware troops quartered in the parlor watched. His father died eight days later. His widow Theodosia was left with four young children. She stayed in that house until her own death in 1824 at age 83 and never remarried.

Washington arrived almost three years after Jacob Ford's death, in December 1779. The widow agreed to let the general use her house as the Continental Army's headquarters, confining herself and her children to two rooms so that Washington, Martha, five aides-de-camp including the young Alexander Hamilton, and eighteen servants could occupy the rest. The army camped four miles away at Jockey Hollow during what became known as the Hard Winter: the coldest season anyone alive could remember, more than twenty snowfalls, starvation rations. Ninety-six soldiers died. Over a thousand deserted. Some men ate their shoes. It was at Ford Mansion, during this misery, that Hamilton met Elizabeth Schuyler.

Ward documented five distinct spirits inside the house: two male voices and three female. None, he said, belonged to Washington. "I wouldn't expect him to linger," Ward told an audience during one investigation; Washington was only there six months. The voices he captured sound, in playback, like a household staff.

Park Ranger Joni Rowe has worked at Morristown National Historical Park since 1985, and she's one of the few people who spends real alone-time in the mansion. She doesn't feel alone in there. Now, when she enters the house, she says hello to whatever is listening. Other staff report footsteps on the wooden floors of empty rooms, sudden cold in the upstairs corridors, and the sense of being watched from across a room.

Some investigators think Jacob Ford himself is one of the male voices. Others wonder about the smallpox-sick Continental troops quartered in the mansion in 1777 before Washington arrived, or the servants who worked there through two wars. Morristown National Historical Park was the first national historical park established in America, in 1933. The Morris County Tourism Bureau runs "Ghostly Revelations" events in the mansion, where Ward and others share their recordings with the public, and the kitchen ghost, whoever she is, seems to enjoy the company.