Morris–Jumel Mansion

The story

The Morris-Jumel Mansion stands in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan, and is the oldest surviving house on the island. In colonial times this was farmland in the town of Harlem. A settler named Jan Kiersen built a first house on the site around 1695-1696, and his descendants, followed by a buyer named James Carroll, farmed it until 1765.

That year Roger Morris bought the land. An English-born British officer who had arrived in America in 1746, he had served as an aide to General Edward Braddock in the French and Indian War, where he befriended the young George Washington. Morris married Mary Philipse, whose wealthy family held a manor at Yonkers, and on some 150 acres spanning the width of Manhattan he built a summer seat called Mount Morris on the island's highest ground. A loyalist, he left for England when the Revolution began and settled there for good in 1783.

The war came straight to his door. American troops were using the house by August 1776, and after the defeat on Long Island Washington made it his headquarters from mid-September to October 18, 1776, working in the octagonal room at the back. On September 16 his troops fought the nearby Battle of Harlem Heights, a modest engagement but the first time in that campaign that the Americans forced the British back. When Washington pulled out, British and Hessian officers occupied the mansion until 1783. Afterward it passed through several hands and for a time did business as Calumet Hall, a tavern on the old post road to Albany.

In 1810 the French wine merchant Stephen Jumel bought the property for $10,000. He moved in with his wife Eliza, a socially ambitious woman of poor origins, and Mary Bowen, the girl they had adopted. The couple redecorated in the Federal and Empire styles, added a new front entrance and entertained many prominent guests while chasing acceptance in New York society. Stephen died in 1832; Eliza later had a brief marriage to Aaron Burr. In old age she became famously eccentric: by the 1850s she was said to tour the house on horseback with a retinue costumed as soldiers. Relatives lived with her until 1862, when a quarrel ended with a great-nephew throwing an inkstand at her portrait. She spent her final years with a single servant and died in 1865.

The neglected house was bought by the city in 1903, saving it from demolition, and became a museum run by a Daughters of the American Revolution group (Wikipedia dates the opening to May 29, 1907; one press source says 1904). Restorations followed in the 1930s, in 1945 under decorator Nancy McClelland and again in the 1970s and 1980s.

The legend

Ghost talk here is almost as old as the Jumels' tenancy. Wikipedia reports that Mary Bowen would not stay in the house alone, convinced it was haunted by soldiers, which is understandable in a building that had sheltered Washington's staff and then British and Hessian officers. Lapham's Quarterly adds a claim, from a single source, that Eliza herself said the house was haunted when they bought it in 1810.

Eliza is now the star. Witnesses describe a woman in old-fashioned clothes, frequently violet, seen in her bedroom or out on the balcony, who tells visitors to be quiet. The best-known story dates to 1964 (some versions say 1965): a woman on the balcony scolded a group of schoolchildren on a field trip for making noise. Staff insisted the house was empty and locked, and once inside the children are said to have recognized the woman in Eliza's portrait. Her ghost is much older than that tale. The oldest report of it we found is in the Eagle River Review, a Wisconsin paper, on June 28, 1894: the room at the head of the stairs where she died was "now known as the haunted room." People who slept there said a panel slid down near the fireplace at night and her "brocade gown can be heard," and that on some nights "she steps through the panel, walks to the mirror and arranges her toilet." Others accused her of pinching anyone found in her bed.

Her reputation carries a darker rumor: that she killed Stephen. The usual telling has him tumbling off a hay wagon onto a pitchfork, after which Eliza supposedly loosened his dressings and let him bleed out; another account says he died of pneumonia. According to Lapham's Quarterly, the murder tale grew out of the battle over her estate, when heirs contesting her will spread hostile gossip. Investigator Vincent Carbone considers the killing unlikely and calls the "evil Eliza" image sexist, and part of the purpose of the museum's ghost programs is to set that record straight. The accusation remains unproven.

The cast does not end there. Legend says a Hessian soldier met his end on the staircase, perhaps impaled on his own bayonet, and a schoolteacher claimed to have watched him step out of a painting. An unnamed Jumel maid is said to have jumped from an upper window or balcony after a failed love affair. Some visitors say Washington paces the floors; others sense Aaron Burr. Museum lore counts as many as five ghosts. Staff, including Carbone and Meg Lynch, report voices, footsteps and shadow figures; in a 2019 CBS Sunday Morning segment, moving objects, an EVP recording and EMF spikes were reported in Burr's former bedroom.

The house has a notable investigation history. In May 1964, on the 132nd anniversary of Stephen's death, ghost hunter Hans Holzer brought medium Ethel Johnson Meyers to the house for a séance, during which Stephen's "ghost" supposedly accused his wife of burying him alive; the New York Times reported it under the headline "2 Uptown 'Ghosts' Get Eviction Call," according to one later source. In 2019 The Holzer Files returned to the case in its second episode, "They Buried Me Alive." Ghost Adventures had already aired "George Washington Ghost" (season 9, episode 3) on March 1, 2014. Appearances on BuzzFeed Unsolved in 2021, on NBC's Today Show and on Haunted USA are mentioned too, though not verified.

Skeptical voices come from inside the house. In 2011 the MI:ST Society investigated and found nothing substantial, and the museum's then executive director, Ken Moss, said he had seen nothing supernatural in twelve years there. Even Carbone says he is not claiming it is definitely a ghost, and he prefers skeptics in his groups.

What remains today

The mansion survives on a lot of under an acre, all that is left of the 150-acre estate. It is a wooden house wrapped around a brick structure, with a south portico of four two-story columns. A short passage nicknamed the "hyphen" leads to a two-story octagonal wing at the rear, possibly the earliest of its kind in the United States. Rooms are arranged by era, Morris downstairs and Jumel upstairs, and the 1975 nomination highlighted Empire furniture said to have belonged to Madame Jumel and to Napoleon. A sunken garden from about 1935 and the tree-lined Sylvan Terrace, which follows the old carriage drive, complete the setting. The house is a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark inside and out. It is said to have served as a model for a house in The Spy, James Fenimore Cooper's 1821 novel, and Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote parts of Hamilton here in 2015.

Visiting

The City of New York owns the mansion, and a nonprofit operates it as a museum. As of November 2026 its website posts a temporary closure for roof replacement: the mansion is closed on weekdays and unavailable for tours, while Paranormal Historical Investigations continue. Check its website before going. For ghost seekers, the museum's own Paranormal Historical Investigations (18 and over, at most 16 people) open period rooms that are usually off-limits, after dark, on several dates each season, booked through Eventbrite. Private paranormal tours can be arranged, and candlelight ghost tours have run in some years. Outside opening hours, you can still admire the house and nearby Sylvan Terrace from the sidewalk.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #66000545 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #66000545) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Morris-Jumel Mansion — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for New York, NY 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Harlem, NJ 1891 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1891 · Public domain (USGS)
6. "Fall 2025 Paranormal Historical Investigations" — Morris-Jumel Mansion (official site) — Jumel Mansion (official site
7. Ghost Adventures 9.03 preview — Dread Central (2014) — Travel Channel
8. "Ghost Hunters Chase Spirits at Manhattan's Oldest House" — DNAinfo (Serena Solomon & Carla Zanoni, 31 Oct 2011) — DNAinfo (Serena Solomon & Carla Zanoni, 31 Oct 2011
9. "Hunting ghosts at New York City's Morris-Jumel Mansion" — CBS News Sunday Morning (31 Oct 2019) — CBS News Sunday Morning (31 Oct 2019
10. "Manhattan's oldest and spookiest house is now open for ghost tours" — NY1 Spectrum News (29 Oct 2021) — NY1 Spectrum News (29 Oct 2021
11. "New York's Most Haunted Places to Visit During NYCC" — Den of Geek (Aaron Sagers, 7 Oct 2022) — Den of Geek (Aaron Sagers, 7 Oct 2022
12. Official website
13. "The Haunting of a Heights House" — Lapham's Quarterly (Sarah Laskow, 30 Jul 2018) — Lapham's Quarterly (Sarah Laskow, 30 Jul 2018
14. "The Holzer Files 1x02: They Buried Me Alive" — TVmaze — TVmaze
15. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.