HGB Ep. 549 - Morris-Jumel Mansion

Moment in Oddity - The Death of John Shaw

There is a location in Arizona called Canyon Diablo which is about 20 miles from Winslow. It is a ghost town in Coconino County Arizona. One would assume the canyon received that name for all sorts of dark reasons and there are many. However one really stands out. John Shaw was a bit of a scoundrel and his story is one that isn't just a legend retold. After 1am on April 8th in 1905 the Wigwam Saloon in Winslow was still busy with patrons drinking their fill. Of course there were card and dice games taking place amongst the gamblers of the time. John Shaw and his buddy William Evans entered and ordered some libations but soon their attention was drawn to a dice table where monies were laid down for bets. The young men in their early 20's drew their guns, probably imagining they would easily make off with their spoils. They took the gamblers for $200 and escaped into the night. Quickly the law caught up with Shaw and Evans and the ensuing gunfight resulted in John Shaw being killed. Shaw was buried in a plain pine box near where he died in Canyon Diablo. Word traveled quickly and 15 Arizona cattle herdsmen were appalled that Shaw never got to enjoy that last drink. The cattlemen located where Shaw was buried, dug him up, and gave him that last drink of whiskey. When Shaw was disinterred, he had a peaceful smile on his face and his eyes were open. The cattlemen propped him up, poured a shot of whiskey down his throat and took a few photos that can be found online today. Immediately after that, John Shaw was promptly reinterred, prayers were said and the whole historical set of circumstances certainly is odd.

This Month in History - Operation Warsaw Rising Begins

In the month of August, on the 1st in 1944, operation Warsaw Uprising began. Also known as the August Uprising, this was a large WWII operation by the Polish underground resistance to free Warsaw from German occupation. The timing was coordinated with the nationwide Operation Tempest which was begun during the Soviet Lublin-Brest Offensive. The goal of the Polish was to drive the Germans out of Warsaw to help the allied powers of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States in defeating Germany. In addition, the political goal of the Polish Underground State was to liberate Poland's capital and establish Polish sovereignty prior to the Soviet-backed Polish Committee of National Liberation being able to obtain authority. There were many casualties during the Warsaw Uprising. 16,000 members of the resistance were killed and an additional 150 to 200 thousand Polish civilians died, mainly during mass executions. It was later shown in declassified documents that Joseph Stalin tactically stopped his forces from moving in on Warsaw in hopes of exhausting the Polish Home Army. Stalin's goal was to turn Poland into an aligned state with the Soviet Union. Scholars indicate that the two month window of the Warsaw Uprising signaled the start of the Cold War.

Morris Jumel Mansion (Suggested by: Selena Smyth) 

The Morris-Jumel Mansion is located in Upper Manhattan in New York City and has stood for over 250 years. This was not only a home for a British Colonel, but also a wealthy American socialite who was the richest woman in America at the time. Today, it is a museum that is reputedly haunted by several spirits, the most prominent one being that socialite. Join us for the history and hauntings of the Morris-Jumel Mansion.

Roger Morris was a Colonel in the British army before the events of the American Revolution began. He fought alongside George Washington during the French and Indian War under the command of General Edward Braddock. The Colonel was wounded during Braddock's Defeat, a shocking loss for the British side. Morris married a woman named Mary Philipse in 1758 who owned a large plot of land along the Hudson River. Morris retired in 1764 and decided it was time to build a large estate for himself and his family and he chose a spot between the Hudson and Harlem Rivers in northern Manhattan. This 150 acre piece of land was called Lenapehoking, which meant it was ancestral homeland to the Lenape people. Morris used a variety of people to built the mansion from indentured servants to free black people to the enslaved.

The mansion was two-and-a-half stories tall and built from brick that was encased in a rusticated, white, wooden exterior in the Georgian country style. The front featured a full portico with four two-story Doric columns supporting a pediment. The main house was rectangular with a hip roof and there was a two-story oblongated octagonal wing added to the rear of the house. There were two chimneys in the main house and a third in the octagonal wing. The interior was also styled in the Georgian way with a wide central hall with a parlor and library on one side and a dining room on the other side of the first floor. The second floor had the bedrooms and the third floor had guest bedrooms. The kitchen and servants' quarters were in the cellar. The octagonal wing had a salon on the first floor and a three room suite on the second floor. The mansion had a carriage house and long driveway to the west of the house that was sold off and built over with row houses starting in 1890 and continuing until 1902.

The family lived at the estate from 1765 to 1775 and then the American Revolution started. Morris was a Loyalist and he left for England after moving his family to his wife's family seat in Yonkers. Morris returned in 1777 to New York when it was under control of Britain and he served as provincial colonel until 1783 and then he took his family to England after the British lost the war. So they never returned to their estate after leaving it in 1775. The mansion became a temporary headquarters for George Washington for around a month in 1776 after the Morris family left. The location was perfect as a lookout because one could see for several miles out over Manhattan. Washington used the second story of the octagonal wing as his office. On the seedy side of things, rumors claimed that Mary Morris and George Washington might have had some kind of romantic attraction and that is why he knew about the house. The Battle of Harlem Heights took place nearby on September 16, 1776. When the British took back New York, the mansion became a headquarters for British Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton. By 1779, the Morris Mansion was one of the estates confiscated by the Commissioners of Forfeiture and eventually auctioned off.

Over the next thirty years, various people owned the mansion, using it as a residence and then it became a tavern called Calumet Hall. In 1810, Stephen and Eliza Jumel bought the house and they lived in it intermittently until the late 1830s and then after that, the house became a main residence for Eliza Jumel until her death in 1865. The Jumels decided to restore and refurbish the house and they changed it to Federal and French Empire styling, which took the double door entrance off the front of the house and replaced it with a single door framed by two Adam-like sidelights. The salon received an Empire chimney piece and brass grates. Stephen Jumel was a wealthy French merchant who had come from a family of successful merchants. He set off for Haiti where he built a large coffee plantation, but he was forced to flee to America because of the slave insurrection in 1790. This became known as the Haitian Revolution and was inspired by several factors including how brutal the slave system was in the French colony that was known as Saint Dominique at the time and the revolutions in America and France. The slaves were victorious and named their home Haiti and they lived free while slavery still existed throughout the world.

Stephen Jumel made his way to New York and got involved in the wine business. He also took on a mistress named Betsey Bowen, whom everyone called Eliza. She had come from the family of a sailor and indentured servant. Much of her youth was spent bouncing between brothels where her mother worked to workhouses when her mother was in jail. Eventually, Eliza was indentured to a sea captain and his family when her father died in 1786. She was eleven at the time. Her mother remarried and Eliza and her two siblings moved in with the couple and lived in various places in New England and then they traveled down to North Carolina where Eliza's mother and step-father and older brother all died from Yellow Fever in 1798. Eliza was 24 at the time and she moved to New York and changed her name to Eliza Brown. She found work as a domestic servant and then she met Stephen Jumel and her life would completely change forever. Jumel married her in 1804 and the couple bought the Morris House six years later. For some reason, Eliza wasn't readily accepted into the New York high society and the couple went back to France in 1815.

The Jumels liked to tell people that they were close to Josephine Bonaparte and had received several items owned by Napoleon because they had been given them by the family. Most historians believe they bought the Bonaparte pieces at auction in Paris. While the couple seemed to really love each other, Eliza left Stephen in Paris in 1816 and returned to New York. It seems that Stephen wasn't doing well in business and Eliza was going to handle things. Their French holdings faltered, but in New York, Eliza took control of the Jumel holdings and the financial side of things flourished. She became the epitome of the "girl boss" and went after dishonest business acquaintances of her husband and recoup much of their fortune. This made her quite unpopular in New York. Eliza and Stephen traveled throughout Europe together and Eliza amassed quite a European art collection and brought much of it to America, making it the largest such collection in the US at the time.

The year 1832 brought illness to Stephen and he ended up dying of pneumonia at the age of 67. Eliza didn't grieve long. She was married to Aaron Burr a little over a year later in the front parlor of the mansion. Yes, THAT Aaron Burr. There was nearly a 20-year age difference with Burr being 78 at the time. Eliza thought the marriage would bring her stature, but instead it brought her angst. Burr helped himself to quite a bit of the fortune that the Jumels had amassed. So, that marriage lasted four months and she kicked him to the curb. She had stopped the bleeding and Burr wasn't able to do much with the substantial real estate holdings the Jumels had. The divorce between the couple was finalized September 14, 1836 and then Burr died...literally THAT day. And get this. Guess who her divorce lawyer was? None other than Alexander Hamilton, Jr. 

Eliza continued her extensive traveling and often took her two adopted grandchildren with her. She unfortunately started showing signs of dementia and people started watching as her behavior got more eccentric. She may have even become a target of mockery at this point, which is sad considering that she came from abject poverty and helped manage and amass a great fortune that made her the richest woman in New York at the time. She died in 1865 at the age of 90. An interesting side note is that Anne Northup, who was a well known chef and also the wife of kidnapped and enslaved black musician Solomon Northup who wrote "Twelve Years a Slave," worked at the mansion for two years. She lived there with her three children as well.

Upon her death, the mansion went to her sister Eliza Chase's children, which didn't go over well with their brother William Chase. He had been left out of the will and he sued and the court battles escalated all the way to the Supreme Court. This was a well publicized battle that lasted for 17 years and eventually the Chases sold the house in 1887. French photographer and filmmaker Louis Augustin Le Prince bought the mansion in 1889 and moved into it with his family. He planned to debut the first moving motion picture at the mansion in 1890, but before that could happen, the filmmaker and the movie disappeared. For good. Neither was ever found. Apparently, Le Prince had visited his recently widowed brother in Dijon and he was coming back through Paris and Liverpool before heading on to New York and that is when he went missing. Most people have never heard of this man and credit Thomas Edison with the first motion picture, but the Le Prince was the real Father of Film. Nat Segnit wrote in Harper's Bazaar in 2022, "On the morning of October 14, 1888, Louis Le Prince set up a heavy wooden box in the garden of his father-in-law’s small manor house on the outskirts of Leeds. The box was made of Honduran mahogany, burnished to a soft sheen, and stood on splayed applewood legs with iron fixtures. Le Prince turned the brass crank and began filming. The surviving footage is so mundane that it takes a mental adjustment to recall that for its early viewers it would have been nothing short of a miracle: the world’s first motion picture." Several members of his family appeared in this footage and they would live in the mansion for awhile, but left when they gave up on finding Le Prince. But Louis' wife Lizzie believed she knew exactly what happened. Eight months after her husband disappeared. Thomas Edison presented his Kinetoscope to the world and it was a clear infringement on her husband's machine. And even though she didn't need more proof, she later was on a boat returning to Manhattan from New Jersey when she spotted Edison talking to her husband's patent advisor, attorney William Dameron Guthrie. At that moment she was sure that Edison had had her husband killed.

The next occupants of the house were General Ferdinand Earle and his family. They lived there from 1894 to 1903 and they called the mansion Earle Cliff. When the General died, his wife Lillie sold the house to the City of New York with the promise that it would be preserved as a historic site and this saved it from demolition. The city of New York gave it to the Washington Headquarters Association of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Restoration work was done in 1907, 1945 and 1975 and the house was placed on the historic register in 1966. The museum and grounds can be visited. Some of the Empire furniture in the museum was owned by Eliza Jumel and Napoleon. The Napoleon pieces include a set of gilt Heraldic wings, a suite of chairs, and a sleigh bed with swan motifs. Roger Morris Park is all that is left of the original 150 acres that the Morrises had owned. It includes a sunken garden designed by Helen Elise Bullard in 1934 and features a stone retaining wall and stone paths that lead up to the mansion. The mansion is a museum that offers a variety of arts and cultural events and is open for self-guided tours and paranormal historical investigations. There are also virtual tours and walking tours of the neighborhood. *Fun Fact: Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote some songs for the musical "Hamilton" while sitting in a chair at the mansion.* 

There are thought to be several spirits here. Eliza Jumel is the most prominent and people claim that her two former husbands like to quarrel with each other in the basement. A fourth spirit presents as a drunken Hessian soldier who likes to hang out on the staircase where he may have died and a maid jumped out of a window and now haunts the place. Eliza herself had claimed the mansion was haunted when she lived there. Madeline Mungo, who is the Public Programs and Visitor Services Manager at the mansion, told ABC7 NY in 2023, "Things are always happening that are unexplained. Hearing things, sometimes whispers, we get a lot of footsteps, shadows, things breaking." Mungo also talked about a story that dated to the 1960s where some school children were visiting the mansion and they got rowdy outside. They were quickly quieted down when a woman came out onto the second story balcony and yelled at the kids. One of the teachers with the children asked the docent who was giving them the tour, who the woman on the second story balcony had been. The docent frowned. "We're the only people here," she answered. She also went on to say that the mansion was locked until they entered. The docent clarified that the teacher said that a woman had come out onto the balcony and then she remarked that it was impossible as the balcony could no longer hold any weight. The group entered a room with a portrait of Eliza Jumel and the children said that this is the woman who yelled at them. The docent said that was also impossible as Eliza had died 100 years earlier.

Hans Holzer read the story in a newspaper and he came to the mansion to investigate. The show "The Holzer Files" opened up his case on the mansion and investigated what he described as a dark and mysterious presence that he had tried to help move on. The medium who joined Holzer went into a trance and said, "They buried me alive." When Holzer asked where this person had been buried, the medium said several times, "I don't know" and then "All I know, I was cold." This was a seance in 1964 and the show went with the idea that Eliza had killed Stephen. Hans also communicated with Eliza Jumel. She claimed to be the lady of the house, said "This is my house" and "I'll stay here." Hans put the house on the map as a haunted location and he claimed to have moved Stephen on from the house. Cindy Kaza picked up on a maid in the house when she went through her initial walk through. She saw a candle and feathers and thought that there was some spell work done in the house. They picked up on some disembodied footsteps and they heard an audible cough in the basement. A staff member told Dave Schrader that he had come down the stairs one day and saw a woman in a period dress out of the corner of his eye and when he looked in that direction, the figure had disappeared. A woman who had visited that house several times told Dave that one day she was exiting a bedroom and she got a growl right next to her face. Then she was pushed in the middle of her back. Dominicans in the neighborhood feel the house is cursed and they've tried to bless it with Santaria. On a second day of investigations, they got activity on all three floors. There was an audible female voice that was picked up on camera. One whole wall looked blue on the FLIR camera. The temperature gauge showed blue for cold. Cindy thinks another medium came into the house after Holzer and opened the place up so it is a free-for-all in there. An EVP said, "Get out." The show made the place seem extraordinarily scary, but how much of it was just show?

Boroughs of the Dead investigated in July of 2016 and reported on its website that they heard footsteps coming from the second floor when no one was up there. The K2 lit up by the room where Eliza and Aaron Burr married each other. Carol Ward was the Executive Director of the mansion at the time and the website wrote, "Carol had noted in previous investigations that when there are a lot of men present they get very little activity in Eliza’s bedroom. Carol wanted to split the group so only women would investigate Eliza’s bedroom and then they would switch to all men. Interesting the K2 wires and EMF pumps were extremely active in Eliza’s bedroom as a group of women huddled around her bed asking Eliza questions such as “Do you consider yourself a feminist?” “Are you happy to see so many people visiting this room?” When the group switched places and it was all men, they detected no activity in Eliza’s bedroom."

Carol was with a staff member at another time and they were in the gift shop and distinctly heard the scraping of table legs down in the basement. They thought they were the only people in the mansion, so they ran to the basement door and found it locked. They went downstairs and searched everywhere and found no one. They had no idea what made the noise. Paranormal investigator Vincent Carbone told the CBS Sunday Morning Show producer in 2019, "I haven't seen much, but I have heard disembodied voices, footsteps. I've heard objects moving. Other staff members have seen things; they have heard things as well...About two years ago we were recording in this room [Aaron Burr's], and about a week after the investigation the team lead sent us this clip and said, 'Hey, guys, we got something in Burr's room and I don't know what it is.'" Carbone played the video clip and said, "Notice none of us react to it, because we didn't hear it. But also notice that it's so loud that it has an echo, much like our voices in the room at that same time." It's a hard EVP to make out. Some people think it was saying "He doesn't love you" while others thought it said "They're gonna laugh at you."

There are centuries of history at the Morris-Jumel Mansion. Some people believe it is cursed while others think that nothing strange is happening there. Based on reports of many personal experiences, it does seem that something strange is going on here. Is the Morris-Jumel Mansion haunted? That is for you to decide!