In Brief
The Houghton Mansion in North Adams, Massachusetts is haunted by the family that built it — a textile magnate, his daughter, and the chauffeur who blamed himself for the crash that killed them, then shot himself in the barn cellar.
The Full Story
The Houghton Mansion in North Adams, Massachusetts has kept three of its dead. The Masons who owned it for nearly a century said the man who built it never left his bedroom, his daughter lingers in her own room under a weight of sorrow, and the chauffeur walks the servant stairs to the chambers where he used to sleep.
The house went up in 1897 for Albert Charles Houghton — a textile magnate, owner of Arnold Print Works, and North Adams's first mayor. It was the grandest of his three homes in the city. He moved in around 1900 with his wife and his youngest daughter, Mary, who by 1905 had given up the idea of marriage to nurse her failing father.
On the morning of August 1, 1914, they took a brand-new seven-passenger Pierce-Arrow out toward Bennington. The chauffeur, John Widders, had served the family roughly 42 years as their coachman and been sent to learn to drive the thing. On a soft road shoulder near Pownal, Vermont, the shoulder gave way and the car rolled three times down an embankment. A family friend, Sybil Hutton, was crushed and killed almost instantly. Mary, who had been loved in North Adams for her kindness, died of her injuries that afternoon at the hospital. Houghton walked away with minor cuts and died ten days later, on August 11, by every account of grief.
Widders had been exonerated. The investigator blamed the road, not the man. The gardener sat up with him through the night out of concern for his state of mind, and the morning after the tragedy Widders shot himself with a horse pistol in the cellar of the Houghton barn. He turned out not to be John Widders at all. His real name was John Winters; he'd told people he ran away as a boy to join the circus, and the truth surfaced only when his estranged mother came forward to claim his estate. He was buried in the Houghton family plot anyway.
The Masons who bought the place in 1926 reported all three of them for decades after. One winter night, with two feet of snow down, two of them heard the side door open, heard boots stomping off snow, heard heavy footsteps come down the hall. No one was there. There were no prints in the snow, no tire marks in the drive. A skeptic among them became a believer that night. Another Mason and his wife once heard papers rustling in the second-floor records room, the sound climbing louder and louder until they fled the building.
Ghost hunters say they once caught a voice on tape in one of the upstairs rooms. Two words. "Get out."
