In Brief
The Hermitage in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey is a Gothic Revival museum where Bess Rosencrantz once ran a tea room on the house's ghost stories to pay the bills. Docents say she never left her bedroom, and the medium agrees.
The Full Story
The Hermitage in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey is a fourteen-room Gothic Revival house, now a museum, where tour groups walking through Aunt Bess' bedroom report cold spots. Ask the room for a sign, the medium Craig McManus says, and Bess has obliged by turning off the light.
She knew the part well. In May 1917, after her family lost its money, 62-year-old Bess Rosencrantz and her niece Mary Elizabeth opened a tea room in the front parlors to raise income. Within a month a local paper ran the headline "Hohokus Ghost House Becomes Tea Resort," and Bess leaned into it. While Mary Elizabeth worked the kitchen, Bess sat with paying customers from three to six each afternoon and told them the house's old lore over tea. It earned $470 its first season and ran into the early 1930s. She spent years trading on the spook stories to pay rent, and never planned to become one herself.
The house had stories to sell. It was remodeled in 1847, and the stone house before it went back to the 1760s. George Washington stayed here in 1778. Aaron Burr married Theodosia Prevost in the parlor in 1782. The Rosencrantz family held the place for four generations after that, until 1970.
That March, Mary Elizabeth died at 85; her companion of nearly thirty years, Katie Zahner, died five days later, also at 85. The two had lived their last years in just two rooms, heating with a coal stove. After they died, McManus reports, people heard a woman's voice shouting from the upstairs windows.
The original piano had already been shipped off to Ringwood Manor. When the house reopened as a museum, McManus says, docents began hearing piano music anyway, with no piano left in the house to play it. He names five spirits inside the walls. In the master bedroom he reports heavy energy and the smell of perfume; in the attic, footsteps, and EVPs of two men in garbled voices that surfaced on his recorder only after he opened a sealed room reached by a trap door.
The oldest figure here belongs to no one. A regional account describes an apparition of an African American woman holding a baby, seen emerging from the barn. No source names her or ties her to anyone in the property's long, poorly recorded plantation-era past. She is simply there, and unaccounted for.
Of all of them, the one tour groups still meet is the woman who once sat in the parlor every afternoon, telling strangers the place was haunted to keep the lights on.
