Morris-Jumel Mansion

Now a museum which offers tours and provides exhibits out of Manhattan’s oldest standing building, the Morris-Jummel Mansion was built in 1765 as a summer home for British Colonel Roger Morris. Morris and his family were forced to leave the house after the Revolution began; it was then used as temporary headquarters by General George Washington for a period of about five weeks in the autumn of 1776. Years later, in 1810, Stephen Jummel moved here with his wife, Eliza; Jummel would later die of mysterious circumstances and Eliza remarried to former Vice President Aaron Burr in 1832.

Eliza is believed to be the ghost that haunts Morris-Jummel Mansion to this day. Most famously, her spirit made an appearance in the 1960s when a group of school children came to the mansion on a field trip. Finding the children too rowdy and loud, Eliza’s spirit formed before the kids to tell them to be quiet, then floated away without another word. Her ghost has been seen by other visitors, and some report hearing a grandfather clock speaking to them while in the building. Others have seen a Hessian soldier, the subject of one of the museum’s paintings, come to life and leave the frame that holds him.