by Hans Holzer
The three “bachelor girls” were named Phoebe, Sarah, and Gertrude. Phoebe’s main interest was the Carl Fischer piano in the parlor and she and her sister Sarah would often play together. Gertrude, the last of the Tredwell children, born in 1840, was different from the rest of them and kept herself apart. There were also two boys, but somehow they did not amount to very much, it is said, for it became necessary at a later date, when of all the children only they and Gertrude were left, to appoint a cousin, Judge Seabury, to supervise the management of the estate. Brother Horace, in particular, was much more interested in tending the four magnolia trees that dominated the view from the tearoom.
To this day, nobody knows the real reason for a secret passage from a trap door near the bedrooms to the East River, a considerable distance. It has lately been walled up to prevent rats from coming up through it, but it is still there, holding onto its strange mystery—that is, to those who do not know.
Some of the things that transpired behind the thick walls of the Old Merchant’s House would never have been brought to light were it not for the sensitive who walked its corridors a century later and piece-by-piece helped reconstruct what went on when the house was young. Only then did the various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle slowly sink into place, pieces that otherwise might never have found a common denominator.
When the house finally gave up its murky secrets a strange calm settled over it, as if the story had wanted to be told after all those years and free it from the need of further hiding from the light.
Seabury Tredwell’s stern Victorian ways did not sit well with all members of his family. The spinster girls in particular were both afraid of and respectful toward their father, and found it difficult to live up to his rigid standards. They wanted to marry but since no suitable person came along they were just as happy to wait. Underneath this resignation, however, a rebellious spirit boiled up in Sarah. Five years older than Gertrude, she could not or would not wait to find happiness in an age where the word scarcely had any personal meaning.
Tredwell ruled the family with an iron hand, demanding and getting blind submission to his orders. Thus it was with considerable misgivings that Sarah encouraged a budding friendship with a young man her father did not know, or know of, whom she had met accidentally at a tearoom. That in itself would have been sufficient reason for her father to disallow such as friendship. He was a man who considered anyone who referred to chicken limbs as legs, indecent, a man who ordered the legs of his chairs and tables covered so they might not incite male visitors to unsavory ideas!
It took a great deal of ingenuity for Sarah to have a liaison with a strange man and not get caught. But her mother, perhaps out of rebellion against Tredwell, perhaps out of compassion for her neglected daughter, looked the other way, if not encouraged it. And ingenious Sarah also found another ally in her quest for love. There was a black servant who had known and cared for her since her birth and he acted as a go-between for her and the young man. For a few weeks, Sarah managed to sneak down to meet her paramour. Accidentally, she had discovered the secret passageway to the river, and used it well. At the other end it led to what was then pretty rough ground and an even rougher neighborhood, but the young man was always there waiting with a carriage and she felt far safer with him than in the cold embrace of her father’s fanatical stare. Although Tredwell boasted to his friends that his house had “seven hundred locks and seven hundred keys,” there was one door he had forgotten about.
Why an architect in 1830 would want to include a secret passage is a mystery on the surface of it, but there were still riots in New York in those years and the British invasion of 1812 was perhaps still fresh in some people’s memories. A secret escape route was no more a luxury in a patrician American home than a priest hole was in a Catholic house in England. One never knew how things might turn. There had been many instances of slave rebellions, and the “underground railroad,” bringing the unfortunate escapees up from the South was in full swing then in New York.
One meeting with the young man, who shall remain nameless here, led to another, and before long, nature took its course. Sarah was definitely pregnant. Could she tell her father? Certainly not. Should they run off and marry? That seemed the logical thing to do, but Sarah feared the long arm of her family. Judge Seabury, her father’s distinguished cousin, might very well stop them. Then too, there was the question of scandal. To bring scandal upon her family was no way to start a happy marriage.
Distraught, Sarah stopped seeing the young man. Nights she would walk the hallways of the house, sleepless from worry, fearful of discovery. Finally, she had to tell someone, and that someone was her sister Gertrude. Surprisingly, Gertrude did understand and comforted her as best she could. Now that they shared her secret, things were a little easier to bear. But unfortunately, things did not improve. It was not long before her father discovered her condition and all hell broke loose.
With the terror of the heavy he was, Tredwell got the story out of his daughter, except for the young man’s name. This was especially hard to keep back, but Sarah felt that betraying her lover would not lead to a union with him. Quite rightfully, she felt her father would have him killed or jailed. When the old merchant discovered that there had been a go-between, and what was more, a man in his employ, the old man was hauled over the coals. Only the fact that he had been with them for so many years and that his work was useful to the family, prevented Tredwell from firing him immediately. But he abused the poor man and threatened him until the sheer shock of his master’s anger changed his character: where he had been a pleasant and helpful servant, there was now only a shiftless, nervous individual, eager to avoid the light and all questions.
The fireplace supposedly incapable of being photographed...
This went on for some weeks or months. Then the time came for the baby to be born and the master of the house had another stroke of genius. He summoned the black servant and talked with him at length. Nobody could hear what was said behind the heavy doors, but when the servant emerged his face was grim and his eyes glassy. Nevertheless, the old relationship between master and servant seemed to have been restored, for Tredwell no longer abused the man after this meeting.
What happened then we know only from the pieces of memory resurrected by the keen insight of a psychic: no court of law would ever uphold the facts as true in the sense the law requires, unfortunately, even if they are, in fact, facts. One day there was a whimpering heard from the trapdoor between the two bedrooms upstairs, where there is now a chest of drawers and the walled-off passageway down to the river. Before the other servants in the house could investigate the strange noises in the night, it was all over and the house was silent again. Tredwell himself came from his room and calmed them.
The actual dress worn by Gitty, whose ghost has never left the house
“It is nothing,” he said in stentorian tones, “just the wind in the chimney.”
Nobody questioned the words of the master, so the house soon fell silent again.
But below stairs, in the dank, dark corridor leading to the river, a dark man carried the limp body of a newborn baby that had just taken its first, and last, breath.
Several days later, there was another confrontation. The evil doer wanted his pay. He had been promised a certain sum for the unspeakable deed. The master shrugged. The man threatened. The master turned his back. Who would believe a former slave, a run-away slave wanted down South? Truly, he didn’t have to pay such a person. Evil has its own reward, too, and the man went back to his little room. But the imprint of the crime stuck to the small passage near the trapdoor and was picked up a century later by a psychic. Nobody saw the crime. Nobody may rightfully claim the arrangement between master and servant ever took place. But the house knows and in its silence, speaks louder than mere facts that will stand up in court.
When Sarah awoke from a stupor, days later, and found her infant gone, she went stark raving mad. For a time, she had to be restrained. Some
how, word leaked out into the streets of the city below, but no one ever dared say anything publicly. Sarah was simply “indisposed” to her friends. Weeks went by and her pain subsided. Gradually a certain relief filled the void in her insides. She had lost everything, but at least her lover was safe from her father’s clutches. Although she never knew for sure, whenever she glanced at the manservant, she shrank back: his eyes avoided hers and her heart froze. Somehow, with the illogical knowledge of a mother, she knew. Then, too, she avoided the passage near the trap door. Nothing could get her to walk through it. But as her health returned, her determination to leave also received new impetus. She could not go on living in this house where so much had happened. One day, she managed to get out of the door. It was a windy fall night and she was badly dressed for it. Half-mad with fear of being followed, she roamed the streets for hours. Darkness and mental condition took their toll. Eventually she found herself by the water. When she was found, she was still alive, but expired before she could be brought back to the house.
Her death—by her own hands—was a blow to the family. Word was given out that Sarah had died in a carriage accident. It sounded much more elegant, and though no one ever found out what carriage, as she had been in bed for so long, and just learned to walk about the house again, it was accepted because of the unspoken code among the Victorians: one man’s tragedy is never another’s gossip. Then, too, the question of suicide was a thorny one to resolve in an age that had not yet freed the human personality even in the flesh: it had to be an accident.
Thus Sarah was laid to rest along with the others of her family in the Christ Churchyard in Manhasset, Long Island, properly sanctified as behooves the daughter of an important citizen whose ancestor was a bishop.
What had happened to Sarah did not pass without making a deep and lasting impression on the youngest girl, Gertrude, whom they liked to call Gitty in her younger years. She tried not to talk about it, of course, but it made her more serious and less frivolous in her daily contacts.
She was now of the age where love can so easily come, yet no one had held her hand with the slightest effect on her blood pressure. True, her father had introduced a number of carefully screened young men, and some not so young ones, in the hope that she might choose one from among them. But Gertrude would not marry just to please her father, yet she would not marry against his wishes. There had to be someone she could love and whom her father could also accept, she reasoned, and she was willing to wait for him.
While she was playing a game with time, spring came around again and the air beckoned her to come out into the garden for a walk. While there, she managed to catch the eye of a young man on his way past the house. Words were exchanged despite Victorian propriety and she felt gay and giddy.
She decided she would not make the mistake her sister had made in secretly seeing a young man. Instead, she encouraged the shy young man, whose name was Louis, to seek entry into her house openly and with her father’s knowledge, if not yet blessings. This he did, not without difficulties, and Seabury Tredwell had him investigated immediately. He learned that the young man was a penniless student of medicine.
“But he’ll make a fine doctor someday,” Gertrude pleaded with her father.
“Someday,” the old man snorted, “and what is he going to live on until then? I tell you what. My money.”
Tredwell assumed, and perhaps not without reason, that everybody in New York knew that his daughters were heiresses and would have considerable dowries as well. This idea so established itself in his mind, he suspected every gentleman caller as being a fortune hunter.
The young man was, of course, he argued, not after his daughter’s love, but merely her money and that would never do.
Gertrude was no raving beauty, although possessed of a certain charm and independence. She was petite, with a tiny waistline, blue eyes and dark hair, and she greatly resembled Britain’s Princess Margaret when the latter was in her twenties.
Tredwell refused to accept the young medical student as a serious suitor. Not only was the young man financially unacceptable, but worse, he was a Catholic. Tredwell did not believe in encouraging marriages out of the faith and even if Louis had offered to change religion, it is doubtful the father would have changed his mind. In all this he paid absolutely no heed to his daughter’s feelings or desires, and with true Victorian rigidity, forbade her to see the young man further.
There was finally a showdown between father and daughter. Tredwell, no longer so young, and afflicted with the pains and aches of advancing age, pleaded with her not to disappoint him in his last remaining years. He wanted a good provider for her, and Louis was not the right man. Despite her feelings, Gertrude finally succumbed to her father’s pleading, and sent the young man away. When the doors closed on him for the last time, it was as if the gates of Gertrude’s heart had also permanently closed on the outside world: hence she lived only for her father and his well-being and no young man ever got to see her again.
Seabury Tredwell proved a difficult and thankless patient as progressive illness forced him to bed permanently. When he finally passed away in 1865, the two remaining sisters, Gertrude and Phoebe, continued to live in the house. But it was Gertrude who ran it. They only went out after dark and only when absolutely necessary to buy food. The windows were always shuttered and even small leaks covered with felt or other material to keep out the light and cold.
As the two sisters cut themselves off from the outside world, all kinds of legends sprang up about them. But after Phoebe died and left Gertrude all alone in the big house, even the legends stopped and gradually the house and its owner sank into the oblivion afforded yesterday’s sensation by a relentless, ever-changing humanity.
A secret trap door leading to a passage connecting the house to the East River
Finally, at age ninety-three, Gertrude passed on. The year was 1933, and America had bigger headaches than what to do about New York’s last authentic brownstone. The two servants who had shared the house with Gertrude to her death, and who had found her peacefully asleep, soon left, leaving the house to either wreckers or new owners, or just neglect. There was neither electricity nor telephone in it, but the original furniture and all the fine works of art Seabury Tredwell had put into the house were still there. The only heat came from fireplaces with which the house was filled. The garden had long gone, and only the house remained, wedged in between a garage and a nondescript modern building. Whatever elegance there had been was now present only inside the house or perhaps in the aura of its former glories.
The neighborhood was no longer safe, and the house itself was in urgent need of repairs. Eventually, responsible city officials realized the place should be made into a museum, for it presented one of the few houses in America with everything—from furniture to personal belongings and clothes—still intact as it was when people lived in it in the middle of the nineteenth century. There were legal problems of clearing title, but eventually this was done and the Old Merchant’s House became a museum.
When the first caretaker arrived to live in the house, it was discovered that thieves had already broken in and made off with a pair of Sheffield candelabra, a first edition of Charlotte Brönte, and the Tredwell family Bible. But the remainder was still intact and a lot of cleaning up had to be done immediately.
One of the women helping in this work found herself alone in the house one afternoon. She had been busy carrying some of Miss Gertrude’s clothing downstairs so that it could be properly displayed in special glass cases. When she rested from her work for a moment, she looked up and saw herself being watched intently by a woman on the stairs. At first glance, she looked just like Princess Margaret of England, but then she noticed the strange old-fashioned clothes the woman wore and realized she belonged to another age. The tight fitting bodice had a row of small buttons and the long, straight skirt reached to the floor. As the volunteer stared in amazement at the stranger, wondering who it could be, the girl on the stairs van
ished.
At first the lady did not want to talk about her experience, but when it happened several times, and always when she was alone in the house, she began to wonder whether she wasn’t taking leave of her senses. But soon another volunteer moved into the picture, a lady writer who had passed the house on her way to the library to do some research. Intrigued by the stately appearance of the house, she looked further and before long was in love with the house.
There was a certain restlessness that permeated the house after dark, but she blamed it on her imagination and the strange neighborhood. She did not believe in ghosts nor was she given to fancies, and the noises didn’t really disturb her.
She decided that there was a lot of work to be done if the museum were to take its proper place among other showplaces, and she decided to give the tourists and other visitors a good run for their money—all fifty cents’ worth of it.
The next few weeks were spent in trying to make sense out of the masses of personal effects, dresses, gowns, shoes, hats, for the Tredwells had left everything behind them intact—as if they had intended to return to their earthly possessions one of these days and to resume life as it was.
Nothing had been given away or destroyed and Mrs. R., writer that she was, immediately realized how important this intact state of the residence was for future research of that period. She went to work at once and as she applied herself to the job at hand, she began to get the feel of the house as if she had herself lived in it for many years.