HGB Ep. 579 - 1890 House Museum

Moment in Oddity - Psycho Movie Door

We are fans of horror movies and one of the most iconic movies of the genre is 'Psycho'. The exterior of the Psycho house is still located on the back-lot of Universal Studios in California. However, in the early 2000's some of the sound stage movie set was dismantled. Who would have imagined that the city of Rib Lake, Wisconsin with a population of 1,000 people would somehow have a connection to this horror flick. Rib Lake, Wisconsin was home to the Dallmann-Kniewel Funeral Home until its sale in 2012 to another owner. After the partial dismantling of the Psycho movie set, the owner of the Rib Lake establishment saw that the ornate front door used for close up shots of the Bates Motel entryway was for sale. The funeral home owner was an avid fan of the iconic movie and jumped at the chance to purchase the infamous door. And what better location for installing the piece of cinema history, than as the front door of his business, the Dallmann-Kniewel Funeral Home. The Psycho door remained guarding the entryway for years until after the sale of the funeral home in 2012. The new owners desired a more energy efficient style of door and replaced it. The door was later listed on Craigslist in 2015. It was there that Dan Estep, a La Crosse resident stumbled upon it, later posting in an online forum that, "Searching for Old Doors on Craigslist can be CrAzY!". The post read, "I spend a fair amount of time searching Craigslist for antiques and old house parts, sometimes for toilets, butt that's another story. About a month ago I was looking around on Craigslist in the Antique section. While there I saw a very large Walnut Victorian door for sale. The ad title read, 'Own a piece of movie history'! As I read their ad further it said, 'The original door from the Alfred Hitchcock movie, 'Psycho'. This was the door used on the front of the Bates Motel." Dan scooped it up and headed to a Los Angeles auction house where the door fetched a nice sum of $22,500 in September of 2015. A movie prop door ending up as the entrance to a funeral home and then later on Craigslist, certainly is odd! But even odder is the fact that those new owners of the funeral home just carelessly got rid of it.

This Month in History - Lucy Hobbs Graduates Dental School

In the month of March, on the 14th, in 1833, Lucy Hobbs, the first woman to graduate from dental school, was born. Lucy was the seventh out of ten children born to Benjamin and Lucy Beaman Hobbs. With so many siblings, the young Lucy took a job as a seamstress to help contribute to the family at the age of 12. She later attended Franklin Academy in New York and graduated in 1849. Lucy was a teacher for about ten years in Michigan and during her tenure she began her study of medicine. In 1859 she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio and applied to the Eclectic College of Medicine. Her admission was denied due to being female. Lucy began studying privately under Professor Jonathan Taft who was the Dean of the Ohio College of Dental Surgery. Through this method of study, she managed to apprentice herself to a practicing graduate of the school. She practiced dentistry in Cincinnati until the spring of 1861. She went on to practice in Bellevue and McGregor, Iowa as well. By July of 1865, Lucy was awarded a membership in the Iowa State Dental Society and later was sent as a delegate to the American Dental Association convention in Chicago. By November 1865 after much determination and persistence pursuing her career of choice, Lucy Hobbs was granted admittance to the senior class of the Ohio College of Dental Surgery, later graduating in February of 1866.

1890 House Museum

Do you like having screens on your windows? How about the ability to sift flour or to strain things? You have the Wickwire family to thank for that. The Wickwire family had a big impact on Cortland, New York and the world. Their wire weaving factory would employ hundreds of people and make the family very wealthy. Chester Wickwire would build his grand mansion in Cortland that runs as a museum today. It would seem that his spirit remains in the house, as do the spirits of other family members. Join us for the history and hauntings of the 1890 House Museum.

Cortland was first settled in 1791 and was named for Pierre Van Cortlandt who was the first lieutenant governor of New York. In 1853, Cortland officially became a village and then was incorporated as a city in 1900. Cortland is surrounded by seven valleys, which led to it being nicknamed the "Crown City." There was a family that led to industry blossoming in Cortland and that was the Wickwire family. The Wickwire Brothers Company was started by Chester and Theodore Wickwire. Chester was born in 1843 and Theodore was born in 1851, both in McGraw, New York. The Wickwire family moved to Cortland when Chester was 19. Chester and his father Raymond opened a grocery store on Main Street. Raymond passed away and so Chester's brother Chauncey stepped into help, but he also died. By that time, Theodore was old enough to help Chester and so the two brothers ran the grocery store and then they changed it into a retail hardware store that they opened in 1866. They would shut this down in 1876 to follow another avenue, which was weaving wire. 

The brothers had received a carpet loom as payment for a debt and Chester experimented with changing out some parts, so that the loom would weave wire. We have no idea what made him even consider using a loom to weave wire. The experimentation worked and soon the brothers were using the machine to make fencing - particularly for chickens, screen cloths for windows, dish covers, netting, coal sieves and they became the largest manufacturer of flour sieves. The business expanded with more machines and was incredibly successful because there were very few factories doing this kind of production. The Wickwires patented everything as well. As a matter of fact, the brothers were the ones who supplied most of the machines to the factories in the United States. The brothers bought a 6 acre lot on South Main Street in 1881 and they built several buildings on that lot. The brothers finally incorporated in 1892 and a new wire mill was built in 1893. They employed immigrants from Germany, Italy, Russia, and Ireland. Working conditions were poor at first, but the brothers continued to innovate new safety protocols and implements and the factories became safer places to work. (Read article) Workers made around $1100 a month in today's money. There were a little over 200 employees and the Wickwire factory was the largest employer of women in town. (Mort: A little fun fact: products from the Wickwires were used in building the Panama Canal and the Manhattan Project. The family didn't know much about the latter since the building of the first atomic bomb was a top secret project.) The Wickwire Brothers would expand into flour mills and they built many other buildings that were known as the Grand Central Block. Chester would build the 1890 House Museum as well.

The 1890 House Museum is sometimes called the Cortland Castle because it kinda resembles a castle and it symbolized the grandeur of the Victorian and Gilded ages. This was constructed from limestone in the Chateauesque architectural style and designed by Samuel B. Reed. The mansion is a mirror image of circus manager James Bailey's house in Harlem, New York and indeed, based on pictures we've seen, if you put the houses facing each other, they match. The mansion has thirty rooms. The interior of the mansion features parquet flooring, oak and cherry wood that has been hand-carved and decorative stenciling. The real wow factor of the house though, are its windows. J.B. Tiffany & Co. designed the stenciling and much of the decor, but the stain-glass windows are definitely not Tiffany produced. The Belcher Glass Co. made these are they are truly unique. Henry Belcher headed the company and he was a stained glass artist that had patented a unique process he dubbed "mosaic." And they do indeed look like a bunch of mosaic tiles, only they are glass. Rather than using the traditional grout, he used a mold within which he assembled small pieces of glass and then sandwiched it between two pieces of asbestos before pouring liquid lead into the mold. These windows are incredibly complex and like nothing we have ever seen. It's like, Tiffany who? Guests were greeted at the east entrance door with these magnificent windows on the doors to prepare them for just how gorgeous the interior would be. You don't see much about Belcher or his windows because they fell out of favor because they were impossible to repair. 

The first floor of the house featured two parlors, the dining room, breakfast room, library and living room. One of the parlors was dubbed the Gold Parlor and features French Revival styling with silk wall coverings. The family bedrooms were on the second floor and the servant's quarters were on the third floor. There was also a recreation room on the third floor on the front part of the house with a billiards table and dance floor. A small playroom was just off this room. There is also a cupola at the top of the mansion that gave a great view of the Wickwire factory. One of the first things to greet visitors is the inglenook, which is a fireplace that has an archway in front of it with bench seats. It looks very cozy. Some of the woodwork features carvings that are supposed to look like wire mesh. The dining room furnishings were all hand carved and the original set in still in the house. Chester would fill the house with his family. He married Ardell Rouse on October 2nd, 1866 and they had three sons: Raymond, Charles and Frederic. Raymond would die when he was six-years-old from scarlet fever. This happened in 1878, so the family wasn't in the mansion yet.

The most well known servant at the 1890 mansion was Margaret Stack who was an Irish immigrant that cooked for the family. She came over in 1902 to join her aunt in Cortland and it is believed that her aunt had arranged for her employment at the Wickwire mansion. Maragret would have had Thursday afternoons off and every other Sunday off. During those times, she socialized with the large Irish population in Cortland, attending dances and actually performing as part of a four-person Irish reel doing traditional Irish step dancing. Riverdance! She wrote a recipe book as well. During a social event, she met John Lane and they became engaged. In 1910, Margaret was given the summer off with pay and she went back to Ireland and explored the British Isles with John. The couple married in her home town of Athea. They returned to Cortland in the autumn and continued to work for the Wickwires for another year. Then they returned to Ireland and ran a grocery store. There are rumors that Margaret left for a reason. That something bad had happened, possibly attempted rape or rape, but there is no evidence for anything. This was something that has come out of paranormal investigations and there are claims that her spirit haunts the house. We'll discuss that later.   

Ardell was active in social causes around Cortland. She would host teas at the mansion once a week for the women in town who worked on charitable causes. Ardell herself served on the Finance and Entertainment Committees for the Cortland Library Association and she was a member of the Social Committee and Women’s Auxiliary of the YMCA. She championed the building of a new hospital that eventually became the Guthrie Cortland Medical Center and the family donated $95,000 toward the hospital’s construction and expansion. Chester gave back to Cortland in many ways and supported his workers as much as he could. Charles and Frederic joined their father in the wire weaving business when they became adults.

Charles had been a gifted child, playing multiple instruments, and he was fluent in French. He earned a degree at Yale University and he married his childhood sweetheart, Mabel Fitzgerald, who was literally the "girl next door." The couple would build their red brick mansion that is today the Lynne Park's '68 SUNY Cortland Alumni House, right next to the family mansion. The State University of New York at Cortland or SUNY Cortland was founded in 1868 as the Cortland Normal School. It became a four-year college in 1941 and was renamed State University of New York College at Cortland in 1961. Its current name came in 2023. The campus covers 191 acres today. The original school almost completely burned to the ground in 1919. Old Main was finished in 1923 and the campus reopened. The four years it took to rebuild, classes were held in various buildings in town. The house was built in 1912 and covers 15,000 square feet and has beautiful gardens. It is rented as a wedding venue and for other events as well. Jean Miller Biddle was the granddaughter of Charles and she inherited the house. She  sold it to Charles A. Gibson in 1992. He lived in it as a private residence for 12 years and then he sold it in 2004 to the SUNY Cortland Alumni Association.

Charles became the Vice President of the Wickwire Brothers factory. When his father died in 1910, he became the President and the factory would have its peak production under his management from the 1920s to 1940s. Frederic Wickwire followed in his brothers footsteps with learning to play the banjo and excelling at school. He too graduated from Yale University. Frederic loved animals and had a menagerie of pets that included a Pionus parrot he named Jac, who had free reign in the house. He joined the factory as General Superintendent. He married Marian Goodrich in 1912 and they had four children. Ardell Wickwire passed away in 1915 and the mansion was left vacant until 1923 when Frederic moved into it with his family.

Frederic set about renovating the family home. He remodeled a new breakfast room in the Art Deco style that was so popular in the 1920s. Lincrusta wallpaper was added to the second and third floors. That term doesn't do it justice. This is more of a molded wallcovering and has these gorgeous textures and patterns. It is still very popular today. Marian and Frederic also added the Fernery, which has a glorious stained-glass ceiling. Marian had an affinity for cherubs, so they make their way into much of the decor. Frederic only lived in the house for six years as he died in 1929 from an undisclosed, long-term illness. Marian remarried to local judge C. Leonard O’Connor, two years after Frederic passed. Marian and Leonard modernized parts of the house through the years and the judge passed in 1971. Marian remained in the house until she passed in 1973 at the age of 85. She would be the last Wickwire to live in the house. The Wickwire Factory shut down in 1971. The building suffered a fire shortly after that and another one in 2005.

The house and contents were sold at auction and the Landmark Society joined Cortland County leaders in preserving the house and reopening it as a museum in 1975. Many of the belongings that had been sold at auction were brought back to the house and other antiques from the Gilded age were bought. In 1984, the 1890 House Museum received its official NYS Charter to operate as a 501(c)(3) historic house museum. The 1890 House Board maintains the property and they host historic, architectural and ghost tours. The house isn't shy about their spirits. The spirits in the 1890 House Museum are believed to belong to Wickwire family members and their servant Margaret. The main activity takes place on the third floor in the billiards room, but shadow figures and sounds have been heard everywhere. Frederic didn't appreciate the restoration efforts that have been done, including recently from February to April of 2025, so activity might be amped up after this. 

Margaret Stack is said to be seen as a full-bodied apparition and she seems to still be carrying on her chores. Her voice has been captured in EVPs and she likes to move objects around. Investigators claim to have picked up on sounds and felt the residual energy of some kind of attack, which is what led to rumors that Margaret had been attacked. Whoever attacked Margaret is also said to be here leaving the feeling of a dark energy in the cupola and crude comments have been caught as EVPs. Chester loved his mansion and is still seen looking out from the cupola as though still trying to survey his factory. His apparition has been seen sitting at the head of the dining table and often that chair is found pushed away from the table as though someone had been sitting there and just pushed back to get up. His shadow figure is seen going from room to room.

A docent in the house claimed he felt a cold hand on the back of his neck during a ghost hunt. He also felt as though someone was watching him. Even though Raymond didn't die in the house, there are claims that his spirit is there. He likes to play on the third floor and a docent once felt a small hand touch him up there. Harry Weston was interviewed by CNY Central around 12 years ago. He was a longtime board member and often ghost hunted in the house. This was a really old guy, so that was kinda cool. His favorite thing to use was a pendulum with a crystal on the end. As the reporter filmed, Weston demonstrated how Victoria would make the pendulum go in circles. He also told the reporter that fingerprints have been seen on the wall of a servant's bedroom. And during a ghost hunt, a recorder was left on the billiard table and when listened to later, there was the distinct sound of pool balls hitting each other. Only problem, there was only one ball on the table. 

Lee Benson has been a guide at the house and is the Vice President of the Board of Trustees. He shared with Cortland Curiosities (YouTube) that a couple had told him when they were in the basement, they heard a little girl say "hi" to them. Another group asked for a spirit to indicate that it was there when they were on the third floor and a flashlight rolled across the floor. He also said that he has heard stories of the pool sticks coming off the wall and that nobody leaves the house without feeling something.

Ghost Hunters visited during Season 9. Raylene Wheatley told the crew that she believed that Ardell haunts the house. She has seen shadow figures at the end of hallways. Board Member Susan Cummins believes that Chester if definitely in the house. Michelle Grimes was the caretaker of the house at the time. She was in her office one day when she heard a loud knock come from upstairs when no one else was in the house. She went upstairs and found that a binder fell into the middle of the floor. They have also heard an audible voice yell, "get outta here!" in the basement. Balls have been heard knocking about in the billiards room when none of the balls are out. Paranormal Investigator Scott Clark took pictures in the house and they captured a female figure with their night vision camera. Jason and Steve heard something shuffling across the floor in the attic. Britt and KJ were in the Billiards Room and their geophone, which detects vibrations, was going crazy on the pool table. They also could hear something that made them think someone was trying to grab one of the pool sticks. And then the REM Pod started going crazy. Adam and Tango were in the basement and they heard shuffling and then Adam felt his left calf get really warm and Tango could feel the difference from his other calf. A board member had been in the basement one time and felt like something rubbed on her calf, almost like a cat. Steve and Jason went down to the basement and set the geophone down on a display case and asked that if Chester or Ardell was will them that they knock on the glass as hard as they good on the count of three and when Jason got to the three, the geophone went off like crazy.

This group of investigators that calls themselves ALONE, investigated in 2022 and they do this really cool experiment we should try with the spirit box or a portal. They have large flash cards of items and ask what is on the card. It seemed to work pretty well for them. It said "Ball" for ball, "Goat" for goat, "Ring" for ring. They asked about playing the banjo and the portal said "harp." They also captured pool balls hitting each other when they weren't in the Billiards Room. Other equipment they had set up on the pool table went off. They asked Frederic if his parrot was with him and the portal said "He dropped dead." REM Pods went off repeatedly and one of the investigators named Rick had his name come over the Portal. This house seems to be very active.

SUNY Cortland's campus is said to have several haunted areas and a few ghosts. Brockway Hall has the ghost of a former cook that likes to stand at the top of a staircase. Clark Hall has a weird apparition that appears in Room 716 once every year and this is the ghost of a bleeding football player called "The Gridiron Ghost." We have no idea what that is about. Cheney Hall features the ghost of Elizabeth who was apparently pushed down the stairs from the fourth floor in the 1980s. She appears in a misty form in the building with her arms outstretched.

Cortland has an interesting history particularly when it comes to many of the weaved wire items we enjoy today. Of course, the production of such things has changed, but one thing that doesn't change is our appreciation for ingenuity and beauty, especially in the form of architecture. Is the 1890 House Museum haunted? That is for you to decide!