by Hans Holzer
Burr soon realized that Jefferson was his mortal enemy. He found himself isolated from all benefits, such as political patronage, normally accruing to one in his position, and he was left with no political future at the end of his term. Samuel Engle Burr, a descendant of Theodosia Barstow Burr, Aaron’s first wife, and the definitive authority on Aaron Burr himself, calls him “the American Phoenix,” and truly he was a man who frequently rose from the ashes of a smashed career.
Far from being bitter over the apparent end of his career, Burr resumed his career by becoming an independent candidate for governor of New York. He was defeated, however, by a smear campaign in which both his opponents, the Federalists, and the regular Democratic-Republican party took part.
“Some of the falsehoods and innuendoes contained in this campaign literature,” writes Professor Burr in his namesake’s biography, “have been repeated as facts down through the years. They have been largely responsible for much of the unwarranted abuse that has been heaped upon him since that time.”
Aside from Jefferson, his greatest enemies were the members of the Hamilton-Schuyler family, for in 1791 Burr had replaced Alexander Hamilton’s father-in-law, General Philip Schuyler, as the senator from New York. Hamilton himself had been Burr’s rival from the days of the Revolutionary War, but the political slurs and statements that had helped to defear Burr in 1804, and that had been attributed to Hamilton, finally led to the famed duel.
In accepting Burr’s challenge, Hamilton shared the illegality of the practice. He had dueled with others before, such as Commodore Nicholson, a New York politician, in 1795. His own son, Philip Hamilton, had died in a duel with New York lawyer George Eacker in 1801. Thus neither party came to Weehawken, New Jersey that chilly July morning in 1804 exactly innocent of the rules of the game.
Many versions have been published as to what happened, but to this day the truth is not clear. Both men fired, and Burr’s bullet found its mark. Whether or not the wound was fatal is difficult to assess today. The long voyage back by boat and the primitive status of medicine in 1804 may have been contributing factors to Hamilton’s death.
That Alexander Hamilton’s spirit was not exactly at rest I proved a few years ago when I investigated the house in New York City where he had spent his last hours after the duel. The house belonged to his physician, but it has been torn down to make room for a modern apartment house. Several tenants have seen the fleeting figure of the late Alexander Hamilton appear in the house and hurry out of sight, as if trying to get someplace fast. I wonder if he is trying to set the record straight, a record that saw his opponent Burr charged with murder by the State of New Jersey.
Burr could not overcome the popular condemnation of the duel; Hamilton had suddenly become a martyr, and he, the villain. He decided to leave New York for a while and went to eastern Florida, where he became acquainted with the Spanish colonial system, a subject that interested him very much in his later years. Finally he returned to Washington and resumed his duties as the Vice-President of the United States.
In 1805 he became interested in the possibilities of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory, and tried to interest Jefferson in developing the region around the Ouachita River to establish there still another new state.
Jefferson turned him down, and finally Burr organized his own expedition. Everywhere he went in the West he was cordially received. War with Spain was in the air, and Burr felt the United States should prepare for it and, at the right time, expand its frontiers westward.
Since the government had given him the cold shoulder, Burr decided to recruit a group of adventurous colonists to join him in establishing a new state in Louisiana Territory and await the outbreak of the war he felt was sure to come soon. He purchased four hundred thousand acres of land in the area close to the Spanish-American frontier and planned on establishing there his dream state, to be called Burrsylvania.
In the course of his plans, Burr had worked with one General James Wilkinson, then civil governor of Louisiana Territory and a man he had known since the Revolutionary War. Unfortunately Burr did not know that Wilkinson was actually a double agent, working for both Washington and the Spanish government.
In order to bolster his position with the Jefferson government, Wilkinson suggested to the President that Burr’s activities could be considered treasonable. The immediate step taken by Wilkinson was to alter one of Burr’s coded letters to him in such a way that Burr’s statement could be used against him. He sent the document along with an alarming report of his own to Jefferson in July of 1806.
Meanwhile, unaware of the conspiracy against his expedition, Burr’s colonists arrived in the area around Natchez, when a presidential proclamation issued by Jefferson accused him of treason. Despite an acquittal by the territorial government of Mississippi, Washington sent orders to seize him.
Burr, having no intention of becoming an insurrectionist, disbanded the remnants of his colonists and returned east. On the way he was arrested and taken to Richmond for trial. The treason trial itself was larded with paid false witnesses, and even Wilkinson admitted having forged the letter that had served as the basis for the government’s case. The verdict was “not guilty,” but the public, inflamed against him by the all-powerful Jefferson political machine, kept condemning Aaron Burr.
Under the circumstances, Burr decided to go to Europe. He spent the four years from 1808 to 1812 traveling abroad, eventually returning to New York, where he reopened his law practice with excellent results.
The disappearance at sea the following year of his only daughter Theodosia, to whom he had been extremely close, shattered him; his political ambitions vanished, and he devoted the rest of his life to an increasingly successful legal practice. In 1833 he married for the second time—his first wife, Theodosia’s mother, also called Theodosia, having died in 1794. The bride was the widow of a French wine merchant named Stephen Jumel, who had left Betsy Jumel a rich woman indeed. It was a stormy marriage, and ultimately Mrs. Burr sued for divorce. This was granted on the 14th of September 1836, the very day Aaron Burr died. Betsy never considered herself anything but the widow of the onetime Vice-President, and she continued to sign all documents as Eliza B. Burr.
Burr had spent his last years in an apartment at Port Richmond, Staten Island, overlooking New York Harbor. His body was laid to rest at Princeton, the president of which for many years had been Burr’s late father, the Reverend Aaron Burr.
I had not been familiar with any of this until after the exciting events of June 1967, when I was able to make contact with the person of Aaron Burr through psychic channels.
My first encounter with the name Aaron Burr came in December of 1961. I was then actively investigating various haunted houses in and around New York City as part of a study grant by the Parapsychology Foundation. My reports later grew into a popular book called Ghost Hunter.
One day a publicist named Richard Mardus called my attention to a nightclub on West Third Street doing business as the Cafe Bizarre. Mr. Mardus was and is an expert on Greenwich Village history and lore, and he pointed out to me that the club was actually built into remodeled stables that had once formed part of Richmond Hill, Aaron Burr’s estate in New York City. At the time of Burr’s occupancy this was farmland and pretty far uptown, as New York City went.
But Mardus did not call to give me historical news only: Psychic occurrences had indeed been observed at the Burr stables, and he asked me to look into the matter. I went down to have a look at the edifice. It is located on a busy side street in the nightclub belt of New York, where after dark the curious and the tourists gather to spend an evening of informal fun. In the daytime, the street looks ugly and ordinary, but after dark it seems to sparkle with an excitement of its own.
The Cafe Bizarre stood out by its garish decor and posters outside the entrance, but the old building housing it, three stories high, was a typical nineteenth-century stone building, well preserved and showing no sign of replacement of the origina
l materials.
Inside, the place had been decorated by a nightmarish array of paraphernalia to suggest the bizarre, ranging from store dummy arms to devil’s masks, and colorful lights played on this melee of odd objects suspended from the high ceiling. In the rear of the long room was a stage, to the left of which a staircase led up to the loft; another staircase was in back of the stage, since a hayloft had occupied the rear portion of the building. Sawdust covered the floor, and perhaps three dozen assorted tables filled the room.
It was late afternoon and the atmosphere of the place was cold and empty, but the feeling was nevertheless that of the unusual—uncanny, somehow. I was met by a pretty, dark-haired young woman, who turned out to be the owner’s wife, Mrs. Renée Allmen. She welcomed me to the Cafe Bizarre and explained that her husband, Rick, was not exactly a believer in such things as the psychic, but that she herself had indeed had unusual experiences here. On my request, she gave me a written statement testifying about her experiences.
In the early morning of July 27, 1961, at 2:20 A.M., she and her husband were locking up for the night. They walked out to their car when Mrs. Allmen remembered that she had forgotten a package inside. Rushing back to the cafe, she unlocked the doors again and entered the deserted building. She turned on the lights and walked toward the kitchen, which is about a third of the way toward the rear of the place. The cafe was quite empty, and yet she had an eerie sensation of not being alone. She hurriedly picked up her package and walked toward the front door again. Glancing backward into the dark recesses of the cafe, she then saw the apparition of a man, staring at her with piercing black eyes. He wore an antique ruffled shirt and seemed to smile at her when she called out to him, “Who is it?”
But the figure never moved or reacted.
“What are you doing here?” Renée demanded, all the while looking at the apparition.
There was no answer, and suddenly Renée’s courage left her. Running back to the front door, she summoned her husband from the car, and together they returned to the cafe. Again unlocking the door, which Renée had shut behind her when she fled from the specter, they discovered the place to be quite empty. In the usual husbandly fashion, Mr. Allmen tried to pass it off as a case of nerves or tired eyes, but his wife would not buy it. She knew what she had seen, and it haunted her for many years to come.
Actually, she was not the first one to see the gentleman in the white ruffled shirt with the piercing black eyes. One of their waiters also had seen the ghost and promptly quit. The Village was lively enough without psychic phenomena, and how much does a ghost tip?
I looked over the stage and the area to the left near the old stairs to see whether any reflecting surface might be blamed for the ghostly apparition. There was nothing of the sort, nothing to reflect light. Besides, the lights had been off in the rear section, and those in the front were far too low to be seen anywhere but in the immediate vicinity of the door.
Under the circumstances I decided to arrange for a visit with psychic Ethel Johnson Meyers to probe further into this case. This expedition took place on January 8, 1962, and several observers from the press were also present.
The first thing Mrs. Meyers said, while in trance, was that she saw three people in the place, psychically speaking. In particular she was impressed with an older man with penetrating dark eyes, who was the owner. The year, she felt, was 1804. In addition, she described a previous owner named Samuel Bottomslee, and spoke of some of the family troubles this man had allegedly had in his lifetime. She also mentioned that the house once stood back from the road, when the road passed farther away than it does today. This I found to be correct.
“I’m an Englishman and I have my rights here,” the spirit speaking through Mrs. Meyers thundered, as we sat spellbound. Later I found out that the property had belonged to an Englishman before it passed into Burr’s hands.
The drama that developed as the medium spoke haltingly did not concern Aaron Burr, but the earlier settlers. Family squabbles involving Samuel’s son Alan, and a girl named Catherine, and a description of the building as a stable, where harness was kept, poured from Ethel’s lips. From its looks, she could not have known consciously that this was once a stable.
The period covered extended from 1775 to 1804, when another personality seemed to take over, identifying himself as one John Bottomsley. There was some talk about a deed, and I gathered that all was not as it should have been. It seemed that the place had been sold, but that the descendants of Samuel Bottomslee didn’t acknowledge this too readily.
Through all this the initials A.B. were given as prominently connected with the spot.
I checked out the facts afterward; Aaron Burr’s Richmond Hill estate had included these stables since 1797. Before that the area belonged to various British colonials.
When I wrote the account of this séance in my book Ghost Hunter in 1963, I thought I had done with it. And I had, except for an occasional glance at the place whenever I passed it, wondering whether the man with the dark, piercing eyes was really Aaron Burr.
Burr’s name came to my attention again in 1964 when I investigated the strange psychic phenomena at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights, where Burr had lived during the final years of his life as the second husband of Mme. Betsy Jumel. But the spectral manifestations at the Revolutionary house turned out to be the restless shades of Mme. Jumel herself and that of her late first husband, accusing his wife of having murdered him.
* * *
One day in January 1967 I received a note from a young lady named Alice McDermott. It concerned some strange experiences of hers at the Cafe Bizarre—the kind one doesn’t expect at even so oddly decorated a place. Miss McDermott requested an interview, and on February 4 of the same year I talked to her in the presence of a friend.
She had been “down to the Village” for several years as part of her social life—she was now twenty—and visited the Bizarre for the first time in 1964. She had felt strange, but could not quite pinpoint her apprehension.
“I had a feeling there was something there, but I let it pass, thinking it must be my imagination. But there was something on the balcony over the stage that seemed to stare down at me—I mean something besides the dummy suspended from the ceiling as part of the decor.”
At the time, when Alice was sixteen, she had not yet heard of me or my books, but she had had some ESP experiences involving premonitions and flashes of a psychic nature.
* * *
Alice, an only child, works as a secretary in Manhattan. Her father is a barge officer and her mother an accountant. She is a very pretty blonde with a sharp mind and a will of her own. Persuaded to try to become a nun, she spent three months in a Long Island convent, only to discover that the religious life was not for her. She then returned to New York and took a job as a secretary in a large business firm.
After she left the convent she continued her studies also, especially French. She studied with a teacher in Washington Square, and often passed the Cafe Bizarre on her way. Whenever she did, the old feeling of something uncanny inside came back. She did not enter the place, but walked on hurriedly.
But on one occasion she stopped, and something within her made her say, “Whoever you are in there, you must be lonely!” She did not enter the place despite a strong feeling that “someone wanted to say hello to her” inside. But that same night, she had a vivid dream. A man was standing on the stage, and she could see him clearly. He was of medium height, and wore beige pants and black riding boots. His white shirt with a kind of Peter Pan collar fascinated her because it did not look like the shirts men wear today. It had puffy sleeves. The man also had a goatee, that is, a short beard, and a mustache.
“He didn’t look dressed in today’s fashion, then?”
“Definitely not, unless he was a new rock ‘n’ roll star.” But the most remarkable features of this man were his dark, piercing eyes, she explained. He just stood there with his hands on his hips, looking at Alice. She be
came frightened when the man kept looking at her, and walked outside.
That was the end of this dream experience, but the night before she spoke to me, he reappeared in a dream. This time she was speaking with him in French, and also to a lady who was with him. The lady wore glasses, had a pointed nose, and had a shawl wrapped around her—“Oh, and a plain gold band on her finger.”
The lady also wore a Dutch type white cap, Alice reported. I was fascinated, for she had described Betsy Jumel in her old age—yet how could she connect the ghostly owner of Jumel Mansion with her Cafe Bizarre experience? She could not have known the connection, and yet it fit perfectly. Both Burr and Betsy Jumel spoke French fluently, and often made use of that language.
“Would you be able to identify her if I showed you a picture?” I asked.
“If it were she,” Alice replied, hesitatingly.
I took out a photograph of a painting hanging at Jumel Mansion, which shows Mme. Jumel in old age.
I did not identify her by name, merely explaining it was a painting of a group of people I wanted her to look at.
“This is the lady,” Alice said firmly, “but she is younger looking in the picture than when I saw her.”
What was the conversation all about? I wanted to know.
Apparently the spirit of Mme. Jumel was pleading with her on behalf of Burr, who was standing by and watching the scene, to get in touch with me! I asked Alice, who wants to be a commercial artist, to draw a picture of what she saw. Later, I compared the portrait with known pictures of Aaron Burr. The eyes, eyebrows, and forehead did indeed resemble the Burr portraits. But the goatee was not known.
After my initial meeting with Alice McDermott, she wrote to me again. The dreams in which Burr appeared to her were getting more and more lively, and she wanted to go on record with the information thus received. According to her, Aaron poured his heart out to the young girl, incredible though this seemed on the face of it.