Perhaps the most famous spirits in New York City are the ghosts that haunts Merchant House Museum. The Merchant’s House Museum, known formerly as the Old Merchant’s House and as the Seabury Tredwell House, is the only nineteenth-century family home in New York City preserved intact — both inside and out. Built “on speculation” in 1832 by Joseph Brewster, a hatter by trade, it is located at 29 East Fourth Street, between Lafayette Street and the Bowery in Manhattan.
Joseph Brewster, the builder, sold the house to Seabury Tredwell, a wealthy New York merchant, for $18,000. Tredwell’s daughter, Gertrude, was born in the house in 1840. Gertrude and her seven siblings, two brothers and five sisters, all lived in the house together with their parents, four servants, and an ever-changing assortment of nieces, nephews, cousins, aunts and other relatives. Only two daughters and one son ever married, which was unusual for that era and for an affluent family with social position.
Seabury died in 1865 and the remaining family lived at the home into old age. Gertrude, the youngest member of the immediate family, lived here alone for 24 years after the death of her sister Julia in 1909. As she grew older and more eccentric she became obsessed with holding on to the elegant home in a neighborhood that had become, by the early 20th century, a run-down, semi-industrial, and disreputable part of town. Burdened with severe financial hardship in her last years, she somehow managed to keep the beautiful home in nearly original condition, long after all the neighboring private homes had been demolished or converted into rooming houses, tenements, or commercial structures.
The Merchant House is also considered Manhattan’s most haunted house. The 3 ghosts that are seen the most often are all members of the Tredwell family. Since the early 1930s museum staff, volunteers, visitors and neighbors–including people who just pass by the home have reported seeing, hearing and smelling unexplainable things.
The Youngest Daughter
Right after Gertrude’s death a restoration worker saw, “a small elderly lady in a light colored dress standing in the doorway.” This woman then promptly vanished.
Not long after this a group of noisy children playing outside the home were interrupted “when the front door burst open and a tiny elderly woman flew out onto the high stoop in a rage, waving her arms wildly.” Neighbors who witnessed this event stated she was the spitting image of Gertrude Tredwell.
Ever since Gertrude’s ghost has been seen many times. She sometimes appears as a young woman but more often as an elderly lady. She is seen on the staircase, in the front bedroom where she died and “hovering within view of the front door.”
In the early 1980s, one group of tourists who rang the bell for entry where greeted by an elderly lady dressed in period clothing. She proceeded to tell them the museum was closed for the day. But they discovered later the museum was open that day and that the staff never wears period clothing.
The Youngest Son
In July of 1999 a former volunteer at the museum brought her young son and boyfriend so they could take a self- guided tour of the Merchant House. Once upstairs she left the two and went into Mr. Tredwell’s bedroom alone.
She was perusing a group of photographs of the family when she heard a voice with an old fashioned accent state, “Looking at the family, eh?”
She was overwhelmed with the scent of mothballs–this odor made her feel faint. She then saw an old man with a weatherworn face standing uncomfortably close to her.
It was a hot summer day and she was surprised to see this man wore an old style heavy winter dress coat. He proceeded to share several Tredwell family stories with her. He mentioned that he had known the original owner of the house well– he pointed to portrait on the bedroom wall of Joseph Brewster. She now suspected that “he was a nut.”
Her boyfriend and son then entered the room. As she turned back to the odd man he was gone. Later as she sat in the home’s front parlor she saw this same man again as he passed by the room’s door–she then heard the front door open and close.
As she stood her knees buckled for she realized the man who had shared the family stories with her was a ghost. She rounded up her family and left quickly.
It wasn’t until 6 months later she gathered the courage to return to tell the museum staff about what she had seen, smelled and heard. One member showed her a photo of a young man wearing graduation robes. She stated he was “younger” but it was the same man. This photo was a picture of Samuel Lenox Tredwell, the long-dead youngest son in the family.
The Father
Three men who visited the museum in the mid 1990s didn’t stay long. The museum’s manager was surprised to see them return their self-guide tour book within minutes of their arrival. She asked them if something was wrong.
They told her that an older man, dressed in strange clothes had blocked their entrance–he had firmly told them “he wished them to leave.”
They then pointed to a portrait of Seabury Tredwell that hangs in the home’s parlor. They stated, “that is the man who blocked our way.”
Paranormal investigation
We began upstairs, in the servant’s quarters. Both tri-fields were placed in the rooms, and each of us hit record on our devices. At least, I thought I hit record on mine, but it seems to have turned off about halfway through. I didn’t know that this would become significant later.
Dan announced to any spirits who may be present who he was and what our intentions were. He told the spirits about the presence of the tri-field meters in simple terms even a 19th century vestige would understand (“It’s a little blue box and if you go near it, it will make a noise”). Then each of us said our names, and Dan proceeded to ask a series of questions. Though it would seem to the casual observer that he was merely talking to an empty room and then taking loooong pauses, in fact he was allowing the spirits to respond via EVP — electronic voice phenomena — that he would later theoretically hear when he played back the digital recordings. EVPs are somewhat mysterious in that they cannot be heard in real time, only in playback. Dan’s theory is that the voices are transmitted telepathically onto the recording, and don’t pass through the air like regular sound waves (which is why we can’t hear them).
The kind of hilarious thing about doing an EVP session is that you have to announce yourself whenever you make a noise, and state any ambient noises you may hear, so that when someone plays the sessions back later, they don’t mistakenly assume your rumbling tummy is a demon. So essentially you get two hours of people standing in an empty room asking questions into the silence and occasionally saying, “Car honking,” “Floorboards creaking,” or “That was me.”
Dan’s questions ranged from specifics about the spirits’ lives and times in the house (“Were the Tredwells good people to work for?”) to questions about the investigations themselves (“Do you remember what happened the last time I came here?”). Dan would also invite any other spirits who may be present to show themselves, whether they were part of the Tredwell household or not.
We did this room by room, with somewhat inconclusive results. No entity ever manifested itself over the tri-fields in any very significant way, nor did we hear or see anything moving, except for a few brief thumps that might have come from upstairs, right near the end of our session. The thumps, and the few very mild squawks coming from the tri-fields seemed to happen when we were talking about things the family might have understood — their children, for example, or what a night out on the Bowery might have been like in 1855. Other than that, very little occurred that seemed significant.
One interesting thing did happen to my audio recorder, though. Despite being filled with freshly charged batteries, the little machine drained its batteries twice. Maybe I was futzing with it too much, or maybe the triple A’s I picked up at the deli were just cheap pieces of crap. Who knows? Some say that battery drainage correlates to spirit activity, though it’s by no means conclusive evidence of anything. Dan took it all in stride, though I thought it was a little odd (then again, I am terrible with tech, always).
The audio session have yet to be played back, so perhaps some interesting EVPs will reveal themselves. They certainly have before. So even though nothing earth-shattering happened while I was there, I was still really impressed by the laid back style, simple tech (Dan used a notebook and pen!), and lack of forced drama that occurs in a real investigation.
There is no doubt something is afoot at the Merchant’s House — about four paranormal occurrences, from the servants’ bells ringing on their own, to actual apparitions of family members — still happen every year, as they have been since the house first opened to the public as a museum in 1936. But what exactly is going on, or what’s causing it, remains a mystery that won’t be solved in one night.
Investigations can and do reveal interesting results, but not quickly.
Source: Boroughs of the Dead
