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It is not clear when she began haunting the mansion, but about 100 years after her death, a female ghost made herself known to schoolchildren on a class trip to the Morris-Jumel Mansion Museum in Washington Heights, New York City. The house was the stage for several romantic tales of the early American Republic.
On January 19, 1964, the visiting class arrived in advance of the museum’s curator. Kept waiting outside, the children became restive and unruly. A blonde woman dressed in a purple gown came out onto the second floor balcony and chastised them, telling them firmly to “Shush!” She then turned and walked through a solid wood door; that is, through the wood of the closed door.
When the curator arrived, the students complained about the woman having let them stand outdoors in the cold instead of letting them into the mansion to wait. The curator explained that there was no woman in the house, but began to believe the house was haunted.
On another occasion an enthusiastic teacher leading a class trip ran upstairs to the top floor, which was generally closed to the public. She fainted in fright when she saw the ghost of a Revolutionary soldier step out of a painting. A second teacher on another visit suffered a fatal heart attack having been confronted by a ghost in the mansion. A maid is said to have thrown herself out a window over an unhappy love affair with a member of the Jumel family and she, too, has been seen haunting the third floor servant quarters.
Visitors to the mansion also report meeting the ghost of Aaron Burr, the second husband of the woman who owned the mansion. But the first husband has caused the most commotion. Stephen Jumel seems to have been a very, very angry ghost. He communicated to Hans Holzer and Ethel Myers during two rescue séances, the information that he had been murdered by his wife, Eliza. The ghostly Jumel claimed that he had been injured in an accident with a pitchfork after which Eliza ripped off his bandages and watched him bleed to death.
Contemporary reports of Jumel’s death all attribute it to a fall from a carriage; perhaps he did fall on a pitchfork.
British Colonel Roger Morris built the house in 1765. Morris’s wife, Mary Philipse, had been romantically involved with George Washington before her marriage. Morris had returned to England and his wife and children to her parents in Westchester County, when Washington used the house as his headquarters in 1776 during the Battle of Brooklyn. It was later used by the British and confiscated and sold as a tavern once the war was over. The Calumet Inn was a fashionable stopping place on the post road to Albany when New York was the nation’s capital and all the leading figures of the day stayed there.
The ghostly woman who stands on a balcony that once overlooked a Manhattan Island of hills, creeks, rivers, and woods, and cautions visiting school children to be quiet is Madam Stephen Jumel, otherwise Eliza Brown Bowen Jumel Burr, a woman of parts and a past. A prostitute in Providence, Rhode Island in her youth, Eliza Brown or Betsy Bowen, as a young woman in the early Republican city of New York, was a stage actress and courtesan. She was described in her day as “a beautiful blonde with a superb figure and graceful carriage.” She frolicked with the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, and Alexander Hamilton. One of the many rumors circulated to be the cause of the later duel between Hamilton and Burr was a lingering competition over the favors of Eliza Jumel. She was also said to have covertly carried political intelligence from the Federalist Hamilton to the Republican Burr.
She became the mistress of a wealthy French wine merchant named Stephen Jumel and lived with him for several years in his mansion at Whitehall and Pearl Streets. After they were married, the Jumels lived in France, where they were a social smash at the Imperial Court of Napoleon I. The Jumels later offered Napoleon an escape from exile and protection in America after Waterloo, but the Emperor declined the favor. In 1810, Jumel bought the Morris mansion in Harlem Heights as a gift for his wife. She restored and refurbished it with fine furnishings in the latest Parisian styles.
In 1826, Eliza returned alone to America and with power of attorney over her husband’s fortune, after which she divided her time between Paris and New York. He died in 1836, following a fall from a carriage, and between his wealth and her wise investment of it Eliza became the wealthiest woman in America in her day. There seems to be no question of Eliza having pushed her husband out of the carriage, but there is a persistent charge that she watched him die unassisted.
After a year as a widow, Eliza married the disgraced former Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr in the octagonal parlor of the mansion. Diarist Philip Hone wrote on July 3, 1833, “The celebrated Colonel Burr was married on Monday evening to the equally celebrated Mrs. Jumel, widow of Stephen Jumel. It is benevolent of her to keep the old man in his later days. One good turn deserves another.”
She filed divorce proceedings against Burr in 1834, saying he had squandered her money on Texas land settlement deals and committed adultery “at divers times with divers females.” Burr at the time was 78 years old; Eliza was 58. The divorce became final on the day of his death, September 14, 1836. Eliza’s divorce had stipulated that she could remarry at any time; however, Burr could not marry before her death. Ironically, her lawyer, named Alexander Hamilton, Jr. was the son of her former lover, the man killed in the famous duel by Eliza’s second husband, Aaron Burr.
Madam Jumel lived in her sumptuous showplace of a house on Harlem Heights until 1865 when she died there.
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