Morris-Jumel Mansion haunting

The Morris-Jumel Mansion stands at 65 Jumel Terrace in Washington Heights. It was built in 1765 for Col. Roger Morris and Mary Philipse Morris. In the autumn of 1776, George Washington made it his headquarters. The museum calls it "Manhattan's oldest surviving house."

1810. Stephen Jumel bought it for $10,000. His wife Eliza would become its most famous resident, and its most famous haunt. On 3 July 1833 she married Aaron Burr in the parlor. The city bought the house in 1903 and opened it as a museum in 1907.

The ghosts arrived almost with the Jumels. Eliza reported hauntings when she bought the property. In a modern retelling, museum manager Madeline Mungo says Eliza used the claim to get $2,000 off the price. The Jumels' adopted daughter, Mary Bowen, refused to stay in the mansion alone. She believed it was haunted by the ghosts of soldiers.

The best-known sighting is usually dated to 1964, and one account gives 19 January. A school group waited on the lawn, and they were noisy. A woman came out onto the second-floor balcony and told them to quiet down. Some remember her as elderly, telling them to "shut up," and one version dresses her in a purple gown. "She turned and walked through a closed wooden door."

The curator arrived late and insisted the house had been empty, its door padlocked. Inside, the children pointed to a portrait. That was the woman, they said. It was Eliza Jumel, who had died more than 100 years earlier. Mungo adds that the balcony "hasn't supported human weight in a long time."

Other figures followed. A teacher ran up to the off-limits top floor and "saw a specter of a Revolutionary soldier step out of a painting." Some call him a Hessian soldier who died on his own bayonet. Washington, too, is "said to pace the floors." Rumor puts the count at up to five ghosts.

Staff logs record "disembodied voices, doors opening, lights being turned on and off." A former caretaker in the basement apartment heard heavy footsteps overhead when the house should have been empty. Two people in the gift shop heard women laughing downstairs and a table scraping the floor. They searched every room and found no one. The six-foot kitchen table had been pushed off-kilter.

In 1964 Hans Holzer held séances there with the medium Ethel Johnson Meyers, and Stephen Jumel's "spirit" allegedly accused Eliza of murdering him. In 2009 a New York Post team caught what seems to be the sound of a woman sighing when asked about Burr. In 2011 the MI:ST Society registered EMF readings near the room where Washington slept, then put them down to a natural energy source. Vincent Carbone, who runs the museum's paranormal program, saw an EMF meter go "into the red zone" near Eliza's gold settee. Ghost Adventures and The Holzer Files came to film.

Not everyone is convinced. Ken Moss, executive director in 2011, said, "I don't think it's ghosts." Carol Ward, executive director in 2014, heard strange sounds but found "nothing menacing."

Holzer's use of historical sources has been criticized, and Meyers' work at Amityville and Ringwood Manor drew challenges. The balcony story itself may first appear in Holzer's book. The historical record describes Stephen's death as an accident, though accounts differ on the details. And if the 1810 claim was a haggling tactic, the legend may have begun as a bargain.