Proprietary House

The last royal governor's mansion in America, where William Franklin was arrested in 1776 and a blue-coated boy leads delivery men upstairs.

A delivery man once knocked on the front door of the Proprietary House in Perth Amboy and was greeted by a small boy in a blue coat. The boy led him up the stairs to the third floor without speaking. When the delivery man turned around, the boy was gone, and the clothes he later described didn't match any living child who had ever been in the house.

That story gets repeated every haunted history tour the museum runs, and the haunted tours are an October thing, about four or five a season. Regular Sunday tours run year-round. The Proprietary House is the last surviving royal governor's mansion in the United States. It's also, improbably, still standing in a working-class residential neighborhood in Perth Amboy, wedged between a Rite Aid and a parking lot, a three-story brick colonial that looks like somebody picked it up from Williamsburg and set it down in central Jersey.

It was built between 1762 and 1764 by the proprietors of New Jersey as an official residence for the colony's royal governor. Chief Justice Frederick Smyth moved in first, in 1766. William Franklin, royal governor of New Jersey and the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, only took up residence in 1774. Two years later the Continental Army arrested him inside this building and eventually sent him to house arrest in Connecticut. He never lived in the house again. He and his father never reconciled.

That break is the bone the house seems to keep gnawing on. Tour guides describe a man in a tricorn hat and long coat seen in upstairs windows from the street. They point to a servant in a white dress on the second floor, most often caught out of the corner of an eye in the dining room mirror. They describe a temperature drop at the landing of the third-floor stairs that holds through July, the same staircase the blue-coated boy led the delivery man up. Visitors have reported perfume in the second-floor hallway when nobody is wearing any.

Before it was a museum, the house lived hard. After the Revolution it was a private mansion, then a boarding house, then in 1808 a resort hotel called the Brighton. Perth Amboy was briefly positioning itself as a seaside escape for Philadelphians and New Yorkers. The War of 1812 ended that trade, and the Brighton never recovered. During the hotel years, a wing caught fire. A woman either died in the fire or in childbirth depending on which tour guide is talking, and a lot of what gets described on the second floor gets attributed to her. There is no documentary evidence she existed. There's also no particular reason she wouldn't have, given how many people passed through these rooms between 1808 and the late 1800s.

The house became a Presbyterian rectory, then a home for elderly women, then sat empty, then was nearly demolished in the 1960s before the Proprietary House Association formed in 1966 to save it. The rescue itself is half the ghost story. Walking the restored rooms, you can still see the seams where 1960s drop ceilings were ripped out, where plaster was rebuilt over lath, where a colonial fireplace was uncovered behind sheetrock. Old houses don't hold spirits in some metaphysical sense; they hold their own renovations, in the way that every time the building was saved it also got altered.

Haunted history tours sell out in October. Regular tours run Sundays year-round at 1, 2, and 3. The staff tells the boy-in-blue story the way the museum tells all its stories, which is carefully, with footnotes, and with the unspoken caveat that they can't account for everything visitors say they've seen in a building that has watched the country form.