Smithville Mansion

Hezekiah Smith was buried in an iron casket inside an iron cage inside cement to keep his first wife from moving him. Smithville reports him anyway.

Hezekiah Smith was so afraid his first wife would dig up his body that he had himself buried in an iron casket, inside an iron cage, inside a cement-filled tomb bolted with heavy iron bars. That was in 1887. At Smithville Mansion, the 1840 Greek Revival house he bought in 1865 for $20,000 and renamed after himself, staff and visitors still report him turning up anyway.

Smith was a 19th-century eccentric so over the top you stop believing in him until you read the paperwork. He trained moose to pull his carriage. He kept a private marching band that traveled with him after he won a state congress seat. He ran a bicycle factory, an opera house, and a casino out of what had been a collapsed calico-printing town called Shreveville. He also had a wife and children back in Vermont he'd walked out on without warning, which is how his second-term run for Congress collapsed once the papers got hold of the story.

The second wife, Agnes Gilkerson, was the one everyone in town actually loved. Smith paid for her medical education, and she came back as a respected doctor and the cultural center of Smithville. She died of cancer at 41. Smith built a shrine to her. One of his adult sons later smashed it.

The docents point to a few people when visitors ask who's here. Jim Denworth, president of the Friends of the Mansion at Smithville (FOMAS) and a blood relative of Hezekiah, has run the mansion's ghost programs for years. Bill Stepler, the group's treasurer, has described the temperature dropping to "absolutely freezing" upstairs whenever volunteer Larry plays the pipe organ. South Jersey Ghost Research, led by Dave Juliano with assistant directors Rosalyn Bown and Marti Haines, has investigated the mansion more than once and keeps its case files under Eastampton, NJ.

Inside, the house does the work on its own. There's a portrait on the wall woven from human hair. There's a taxidermy moose head, probably a nod to Smith's carriage animals. There are Victorian dolls displayed in the rooms where visitors report the most activity. On guided "Spirits and Spirits" nights the mansion runs in the fall, the tour starts with wine downstairs and ends with ghost-hunting equipment upstairs around 10 p.m.

The specific complaint isn't dramatic. It's cold air where there shouldn't be any, footsteps in rooms nobody is using, the pipe organ sounding off-kilter in a way that makes the room drop in temperature. Paranormal groups also talk about activity near the spot where Agnes's shrine once stood before Smith's son tore it down.

What's interesting about Smithville isn't whether the ghosts are real. It's that the house still feels like a stage Hezekiah set for himself and then refused to leave. He bought a dying factory town and put his name on it. He buried himself in iron because he couldn't imagine letting go of the body. His second wife was the warm center of the place and he outlived her by four years. If you wanted to design a mansion a person would stay tethered to, you couldn't do much better than this one.

The iron tomb at Saint Andrews Cemetery is still there. So is the mansion, owned by Burlington County since 1975, listed on the National Register, and open for weddings and ghost tours on alternating weekends. The docents usually save the story about the moose for last.