In Brief
The Morris-Jumel Mansion is the oldest house in Manhattan, and the woman the staff keep seeing died inside it in 1865. In 1964 she stepped onto the balcony and shouted at a class of children to be quiet. They knew her face from a portrait hanging inside.
The Full Story
In 1964, a class of children on a field trip to the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights were playing on the front lawn when a woman walked onto the second-floor balcony and shouted at them to be quiet. Her husband, she said, was very ill. When the curator arrived minutes later to unlock the house, she told them the building had been empty all morning. As the children filed past the portraits inside, they stopped at one and pointed: that was her, the woman on the balcony. The portrait was of Eliza Jumel, who had died in the house in 1865, ninety-nine years before.
It is still the mansion's most famous sighting, and Eliza is still the figure people report most. She has a face worth knowing. Born in Providence to deep poverty, she spent part of her childhood in a workhouse and rose to become one of the richest women in America. In 1810 she and her husband Stephen bought the house, built in 1765 by a British officer and already old by then, the place George Washington had run a war out of for a month in 1776.
Stephen died in 1832, the manner of it never settled. The most-told version has him falling onto his own pitchfork. Within a year Eliza married former Vice President Aaron Burr in the mansion's parlor. He went through her fortune fast. She filed to stop him, and the divorce was made final on September 14, 1836, the same day Burr died.
Eliza outlived them all, dying in the house at 90 as dementia took her memory. She is buried at Trinity Church Cemetery nearby. In the 1960s the parapsychologist Hans Holzer held séances in the house hoping to reach her. The story goes that he reached Stephen instead, whose spirit claimed his wife had pulled the bandages from his pitchfork wounds and watched him bleed to death.
The room people report most now is Burr's old bedroom, footsteps and voices behind the closed door after hours. It is also where a paranormal investigator named Vincent Carbone, who runs public investigations in the house, captured a recorded voice in Burr's room that no one heard in the moment, read by some as "He doesn't love you." On Eliza's own French chairs in that same room, electromagnetic meters lit up with no electronics anywhere near them. Carbone put it plainly: "If there are such a thing as ghosts, they are here."
The mansion is a National Historic Landmark and has been a museum since 1907. Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote songs for *Hamilton* in Burr's bedroom. The house has carried two centuries of names, and the woman the children pointed at still hasn't left the one room a visitor would least expect to find a ghost.
