Eliza Jumel's ghost on the balcony of the Morris-Jumel Mansion

The Morris-Jumel Mansion stands at 65 Jumel Terrace, in Roger Morris Park, Washington Heights. Roger Morris built it in 1765, and George Washington used it as his headquarters in late 1776. In 1810 Stephen and Eliza Jumel bought it, and Eliza married Aaron Burr there in 1833. She died in the house in 1865. The city acquired it in 1903, and it opened as a museum on 29 May 1907.

Its reputation came early. Eliza herself claimed the house was haunted in 1810, which knocked $2,000 off the price. Mary Bowen refused to stay alone there because of soldier ghosts.

The 1960s. Most tellings say 1964. A school group on a field trip, about half a dozen children in some versions, arrived before the museum opened. They waited on the front lawn. They were noisy.

A woman came out onto the second-floor balcony above the front portico. In the words of Madeline Mungo, the museum's Public Programs and Visitor Services Manager, she "came out onto the balcony and yelled at the children to be quiet." Then the curator arrived to unlock the house. She said nobody was inside. The door was padlocked.

Inside, the children pointed at a portrait. That was the woman. The curator's reply, as Mungo tells it: "That's impossible. That's Eliza Jumel, she died over 100-years ago."

The details shift with each retelling. Philip Ernest Schoenberg of Shadow Tours USA describes "a violet dress" and a curt "shut up!", and says the children recognised her from Alcide Ercole's life-size portrait of her and grandchildren. Other versions give a purple gown, a woman with red hair, or a warning that her husband was very ill. One telling says she "turned and walked through a closed wooden door."

Another notes that the balcony has not supported human weight for a long time. In one version the children picked out a mannequin in Eliza's bedchamber. NY1 says the children only heard a woman yelling from inside, and that the incident "was reported in the newspaper."

The same year brought a more famous visit. In May 1964 the New York Times covered a séance held by Hans Holzer with the medium Ethel Johnson Meyers, under the headline "2 Uptown 'Ghosts' Get Eviction Call." Stephen Jumel supposedly accused Eliza of burying him alive. Shadow Tours dates Holzer's séances to 1965 and says he "heard nothing from Eliza." One retelling traces the balcony story to Holzer's book Ghosts: True Encounters with the World Beyond.

No contemporaneous account has surfaced. No teacher, school, curator or child is named in any version, and every retelling found dates from 2014 or later. The year matches the well publicised 1964 séance, which raises the question of whether the two stories merged over time. No hoax finding exists, and no source offers an ordinary explanation.

The house still collects stories of Hessian soldiers, a servant girl on the third floor, footsteps and lights that switch themselves on. Vincent Carbone took EMF readings there for CBS News: "If the men leave the room, the EMFs start to go off." Staff keep a "book of haunts," and coordinator Meg Lynch told NY1 that "some staff have heard disembodied voices, some have seen shadow figures." The mansion has appeared on Ghost Adventures and The Holzer Files. It still runs ghost tours.