Phelps Mansion

Every member of the Phelps family died within twelve years of moving into this 1870 Second Empire mansion in Binghamton, with rumors blaming arsenic in the wallpaper. Sherman Phelps, who arrived in town with $100,000 and won the mayoral race by one vote, reportedly still haunts the house, with a trained medium describing him as a "hoverer" who doesn't realize he's dead.

Every member of the Phelps family died within twelve years of moving in. Sherman David Phelps built this three-story Second Empire mansion at 191 Court Street in Binghamton in 1870, hiring Isaac G. Perry (who would go on to design the New York State Capitol building in Albany) to create the finest home in the city. By 1882, the house was empty.

Phelps had arrived in Binghamton in 1854 with $100,000 in cash. He opened a bank, started the gas company, invested in the city's cigar manufacturers, and won the mayoral election by a single vote. The mansion was his showcase, with black walnut in the front hall and central staircase, rosewood and maple in the parlor, golden oak in the dining room, and fireplaces carved with laurel leaves in steel and brass, fruits and fish in stone.

He died in 1878 at 64, just six years after moving in. His younger son Arthur died at 21. Arthur's death fell on Halloween. His older son Robert died the following year. Robert's wife Harriett followed in 1882. Rumors circled through Binghamton that the wallpaper might have contained arsenic, which was common in Victorian-era green pigments. But the servants stayed healthy. Nobody could explain why the family dropped one by one while the staff survived.

Robert Keller, a trained medium who works as a docent at what's now the Phelps Mansion Museum, has a theory about why Sherman never left. "Sherman Phelps has not gone over," Keller says. "He is what we call a hoverer. It seems to him that no time has passed since he died." The pride Sherman took in his home kept him tethered to it.

The evidence for Sherman's continued presence is oddly specific. Objects weighing three to four pounds get ejected from the fireplaces. Candlesticks lift out of their holders and reposition themselves horizontally on surfaces that aren't level (they shouldn't be able to stay put, but they do). A clock that nobody winds chimes at random hours throughout the day.

The mansion's modern elevator is the strangest case. It was installed to make the museum wheelchair accessible, and it requires specific safety features to be engaged before it operates. The caretaker has watched it travel between floors on its own, with all the safety mechanisms somehow activated. A psychic who visited the museum theorized that ghosts are drawn to objects they didn't have in life, which would explain a 19th-century banker's fascination with an elevator.

The Monday Afternoon Club, a women's civic organization, purchased the mansion in 1905 and added a large ballroom to the rear. They ran it until 2006, when ownership transferred to the Phelps Mansion Foundation. It was chartered as a museum by the New York State Board of Regents in 2005 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

Visitors on guided tours report seeing figures in period clothing watching them from doorways. Doors open and close without drafts. Footsteps echo through rooms where nobody's walking. Empirical Paranormal, a local investigation group, partners with the museum for public ghost hunting events, bringing equipment into the rooms where Sherman's family lived and died in such quick succession.

The arsenic wallpaper theory was never proven, but it was never disproven either. Whatever killed the Phelps family, the house outlasted all of them by more than a century. Sherman, if Keller is right, doesn't seem to mind.