THE GHOSTLY LEGEND OF ISABELLA AND COLONEL AXTELL
Originally posted Oct. 3, 2022
For the first five years of her marriage, Anna Cora Mowatt lived in a haunted house… or rather haunted mansion, which is probably an entirely different sort of experience. Despite the fact that it was completely demolished over a century ago, around this time of year, the Mowatts’ first home, Melrose, sometimes reappears in the blogosphere or in newspaper columns on lists of “New York’s Most Haunted Spots” because of the particularly appalling story associated with it.
Writers who mention Mowatt in connection with Melrose usually seem to misunderstand when her residence at the mansion occurred. They assume that since Anna Cora was a famous actress and author that she was both of those things while she lived at Melrose. This is a reasonable assumption to make. It’s just not true. The Mowatts moved to the house in 1835. Anna Cora wouldn’t become famous until 1845. The Mowatts were just anonymous, wealthy New Yorkers in 1835.
James Mowatt had his own law firm at the point where he made this purchase. Looking at his life, it is evident that he was a very intelligent person — a creative, out-of-the-box thinker. However, buying a haunted mansion is one of his decisions that make you stop and wonder what the hell was he thinking? How did this seem like a good idea? Of course, marrying a fifteen-year-old girl is another idea of his that seems questionable. Marrying a fifteen-year-old Anna Cora Ogden and bringing her home to a haunted mansion notorious for its story of a young girl abused then abandoned to a slow horrible death by the master of the property appear a downright problematic combination to modern eyes.
To get a proper feel for the setting of the ghost story, one has to let go of the asphalt jungle image Flatbush has collected during its rocky path through twentieth century. The Dutch called the area “Vlakte Bos” or the “plain forest.” During the time around the Revolutionary War, this sparsely populated countryside was network of lush, wooded estates. For the well-to-do land-owner seeking an escape from the bustle of city life, the location provided plenty of privacy as well as room to build and cultivate, while still being within easy travel distance from the city of New York. Viewed from a darker perspective, the fields and forests of Flatbush were isolating. Neighbors were scarce. Terrible things could go on for a very long time before anyone with any power to stop them could arrive.
Colonel Axtell, the second owner of Melrose Hall, reached the U.S. with an ideal pedigree to become a perfect villain for the era. He was a West Indies merchant who was a descendant of an officer in Cromwell’s army who was eventually hanged for his excesses during the English Civil War. Axtell was part of the increasingly resented British forces in the Colonies. He purchased a very comfortable country home for himself and wasted no time in creating a firm connection with the local gentry when he married Margret de Peyster, daughter of wealthy merchant and power broker, Abraham de Peyster.
Pictures don’t capture the scale of the original mansion which stood at the end of a long avenue of pines. An early 20th century writer who had walked through the building described the house as follows;
The hall, the only ancient dwelling of English architecture in Flatbush, was built in 1749 by one Lane. Its solid hand hewn timbers have withstood the wear of more than a century, and to-day the building is in a perfect state of preservation. The mansion is a grand structure, two stories and a half high, with old fashioned gables and wide weather boarding. No plan seems to have been followed, the edifice being an agglomeration of immense rooms, secret passages and innumerable hiding places. A massive oak door, double-bolted and divided horizontally into two sections, opens upon a large waldscotted hall, extending the entire depth of the house, while in the center is a fireplace large enough to roast an ox. To the left, a broad mahogany staircase leads to the rooms above. On each side of the house are large wings; the right containing the ball and banqueting halls and the left the dining rooms and library.1
Melrose was at that time a working farm complete with barns, stables, and slave quarters. The main house was perhaps originally composed of three or four large rooms and was then expanded by the whim of the owner. As an eye-witness states, an unusual feature of the house was that the builder had incorporated a network of secret passages and concealed rooms throughout the structure. It is unknown why Mr. Lane created these hidden areas, but details of the ghost story reveal what made them attractive to Colonel Axtell.
Above the banqueting hall is the haunted chamber, around which the traditions of Melrose have gathered. Until recent investigation divulged a secret staircase, opening into a closet on one side of the fireplace in the hall, the only mode of access to the haunted chamber was through the small stained glass window near the roof. In this room the beautiful Isabella, subsequently referred to, is said to have perished from starvation. What appears as a handsome buffet in the dining room is in reality a hidden door. The back moves by the action of a spring concealed in the panels, and a dark passage is disclosed leading into the slaves’ quarters. Deep alcoves, formed by the gables in the roof indenting the rooms and narrow hallways, afforded ample means of concealment to those who wished to be unobserved, and all the apartments are connected by secret passages behind the panels and tapestry.2
The unfortunate “Isabella” is the tragic figure at the center of the story. (I am using this name to be consistent with the sources I quote in this essay. Her name is more frequently given as “Alva.” I have seen one instance that called her “Arabella.”) In all versions, she is a woman of color. Some accounts cast her as a Native American – an Iroquois princess. Other tellings of the tale locate her origins in the islands of Caribbean. Some narrators specify that she was quite young. Others leave her age indeterminate. In some versions, Isabella is a weak, lovesick woman who foolishly follows Axtell to America in hopes of a marriage proposal that never materializes. In others, her degree consent to the situation is unclear. She may simply be a prisoner or another slave. In either case, Isabella was Colonel Axtell’s secret mistress. The Colonel brazenly conducted his extramarital affair in his own house, concealing his lover from his wife in a hidden room in the attic.
Even before Isabella’s story starts in earnest, Axtell’s Melrose Hall garnered a formidable local reputation as a dark and terrible site. During the Revolutionary War, the Colonel was in command of a unit of Loyalist troops recruited from Nassau County known as the Nassau Blues. This special force became infamous for the brutal and sadistic tactics they used against their neighbors. It was widely rumored that Colonel Axtell converted one of the secret rooms below his banqueting hall into a torture chamber and prison for Patriot soldiers captured by the Nassau Blues. Local tradition has it that human remains were found in some of the secret chambers after the Colonel’s time there as the following writer reports;
Beneath the mansion are the dungeons, dark vaults into which the light of day never penetrates, where prisoners were confined during the Revolution. After the death of Colonel AXTELL, a human skeleton is said to have been found in the dark cell, the frame entire, though the skull was fractured, probably in an attempt at suicide, and the clothing had long since moldered into dust. Such was the home in which the famous old loyalist lived and died.3
Normally, hosting a dungeon and torture chamber in your basement is enough to secure your domicile a comfortable spot topping lists of “Creepiest Spaces in the County” for decades to come. However, Colonel Axtell was something of an over-achiever. He still had a mistress in the attic.
In 1778, Colonel Axtell received an assignment from Sir William Howe. It would take him from his home for at least several months. Instead of making any of the reasonable sort of arrangements a person who wasn’t rather sadistic and intent on concealing a nefarious situation might have made, Axtell left Isabella locked in the attic under the supervision of an old slave woman – supposedly the only other person who knew of her presence at Melrose.
Again, different narrators tell different versions of what goes wrong in Axtell’s absence. In some, the old slave who is supposed to care for Isabella dies. In others, as the chaos of the Revolutionary War hits the county, the hall is temporarily abandoned except for the forgotten prisoner in the attic. In other versions, the slave woman just stops taking care of Isabella without explanation.
[I’ve not seen a telling of the story that directly tries to lay any blame at the feet of Mrs. Axtell for Isabella’s death, but I suppose that it is possible that the whole “mistress in the attic” scheme wasn’t as much of a secret from her as Axtell thought it was….]
In all permutations of the story, Isabella meets a terrible end, slowly starving to death, locked in the secret chamber. In many versions, she tries to commit suicide to hasten the inevitable.
Axtell eventually returns, welcomed eagerly by his Loyalist ally neighbors. In the versions of the story in which the old slave woman does not die, the Colonel summons her to ask for news of Isabella. He is devastated by the revelation of his mistress’ awful, lingering death. However, because he is a character in a story, he makes a decision that would not be typical for a person in real life. He decides to have a big party at his house that night. The highlight of all tellings of this ghost story is a scene like the following;
Colonel Axtell came reeling from the servants’ quarters. He raved like a madman. As he approached the hall, the lights all over the house went out. The ballroom was left in darkness. As he entered a sight met his fixing gaze which froze the terrified man to the spot. In the midst of the gayety and dancing the light had been replaced by a sickly, glow worm light shone on every object in the room. Low and unearthly noises were heard throughout the house, then died away mingling with the sighing of the wind through the tall pines. Suddenly the secret passage opened and the spectral form of Isabella entered. The face was ashen pale, each vein strongly defined on the emaciated features, her long black hair hung drooping over her shoulders to the floor, and she seemed clad in airy gossamer. The apparition bore the look of unutterable sorrow, and the hands were clenched in an attitude of woe. Noiselessly she glided through the hall — her sightless eyeballs bent on the petrified form of the colonel, while the lips moved in a ghastly smile as the bony hand pointed to the trembling wife. Nearing the entrance to the secret stairs she turned and with her finger wrote the word “Betrayer,” then vanished. The dismal light gradually faded and glimmered out, leaving everything shrouded in darkness. For a moment all was still. Then an agonizing shriek through the hall, accompanied by the heavy thud, as if a body had fallen. The fearful sound was echoed by the frantic slaves and the howl of the dogs, as the wind blew the windows open and swept through the room. Again the strange glow appeared, lingering just long enough to illuminate the prostrate figure of the Colonel lying before the secret entrance and the spectral woman bending over him with the same heartless smile upon her lips, pointing to a bleeding wound near his heart, which the maddened man had inflicted with his own sword. As the bell tolled the midnight hour, the light died out and the spectre once more vanished. When lights were brought, every attempt was made to save the Colonel’s life, but he only lived a few hours, and his last entreaties were to have the house sold and his family return to England.4
In actuality, William Axtell did not really die in Melrose Hall. As you might derive from the whole “secret dungeon and torture chamber” thing, he was not a popular person in New York at the close of the Revolutionary War when it turned out that the British did not win. His lands were confiscated in 1784 and he fled the country.
I have been referring to the house as “Melrose” during the time that Axtell occupied it, but that is only for my convenience. The mansion did not bear that designation at that time. Anna Cora Mowatt gave the house its name when she moved there in 1835 in honor of the many beautiful flower gardens on the property.
Despite her intense interest in spiritualism and otherworldly phenomenon, Anna Cora did not seem terribly impressed by the ghostly legends about her home. Her only reference to the story in her autobiography is as follows;
I was excessively fond of the country, and early in the spring Mr. Mowatt took me to reside in Flatbush, Long Island. The house in which we boarded was a large, old-fashioned mansion, built before the revolution, and had belonged to General Giles. There were dark and spacious vaults beneath the kitchens, where it was said that English prisoners had been confined; and there was a secret chamber, above the great ball room, to which no access could be found save by a small window. The neighbors affirmed that a young girl had been purposely starved to death in that chamber, and that her ghost wandered at night about the house. Indeed, this report had gained such credence, that nothing could have induced many of the older inhabitants of the village to pass a night beneath the haunted roof. 5
Note that Mowatt eschews all mention of the infamous Colonel Axtell or the house’s builder, Mr. Lane, in favor of the third owner, General Aquila Giles, Axtell’s son-in-law, a Revolutionary war hero. She also mistakenly switches the side of the prisoners who were held in the secret chambers beneath the mansion’s banqueting hall.
At the time of the Mowatt’s residency, the Revolutionary War was nearly sixty years in America’s rearview mirror. Like the house and grounds of Melrose, memories of the war were in the need of a bit of a “glow up.” People of this era liked to emphasize heroic figures and connections like Aquila Giles and Anna Cora’s grandfather, Francis Lewis, who, she never failed to mention, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Stories of neighbors imprisoning and torturing each other in secret dungeons in their basements in Brooklyn were best forgotten. The British were once more friends, global allies, and models of social deportment. Spreading tales of English officers carelessly leaving brown-skinned sex slaves to starve to death in their attics wasn’t particularly tactful when one had a large circle of British friends. Including such a story in one’s book might draw ire and derision from English critics.
Anna Cora characterizes the house not as a dark and haunted place, but as a romantic and idyllic country retreat;
We gave to our place the name of Melrose; not from any likeness that it bore to Melrose Abbey, but on account of the abundance of roses, of every description, that filled our greenhouses and were scattered over the grounds.6
Part of the appeal of the property might have been that it came at a good price because of its poor reputation and run down state. Anna Cora described the extensive upgrades to the property made by her husband;
The house was repaired and refurnished; the gardens and orchards enlarged, and planted with an innumerable variety of fruit trees and flowers ; a green-house built ; a long arbor erected, where I could walk at midday, quite shaded from the sun ; and a summer house reared in its centre, in which I could sit and write, or study. I had numberless pets — birds, dogs, pigeons, rabbits, a goat and kid, and a beautiful Arabian mare for my own especial use. We named her Queen Mab. At sixteen years old I found myself the mistress of this mansion, without a wish ungratified.7
Melrose was no longer quite as isolated as it was in colonial days. William Simpson, the manager of the Park Theatre, was one of the Mowatt’s neighbors. Flatbush’s wooded farmland was quickly developing a more cozy, suburban feel in the 1830’s.
The Mowatts made no nefarious use of the secret rooms in the basement or the attic that spawned new ghost stories, but they did throw gala parties in the huge banqueting rooms of Melrose. Anna Cora’s first play, “Gulzara; or the Persian Slave” was staged at a lavish private party at the mansion. The amateur production starred herself, two of her sisters, and two school friends. The six backdrops that served as sets for each act were painted in Paris by scenic artists from the Comedie Francais. Costumes for the performers were designed and hand-constructed by Parisian costumiers. The party was attended by friends, relatives, and host of New York literati. The play was published a few months later in Park Benjamin’s literary newspaper. The event helped launch what would eventually become Anna Cora’s careers in literature and acting years later after the Mowatts lost their fortune.
Even a glittering such as the night of the performance of Gulzara was not enough to completely erase the memory of the Colonel and the terrible stories connected with his residency, though. The Mowatts’ facelift of the old mansion ultimately did little to change the popular perception of the place except to give the house a lovely name so at odds with its horrible history.
Notes:
“A Flatbush Legend: The Ghost Story of the Mansion.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle. June 22, 1884. http://bklyn-genealogy-info.stevemorse.org/Town/1884.MansionMelrosePk.html
ibid.
ibid.
ibid.
Mowatt, Anna Cora. Autobiography of an Actress; Eight Years on the Stage. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1854.
Pages 61-62
Ibid, 64.
Ibid, 62.
Addendum: I ended up drawing most of my quotes I used to write this essay from one source. However, here is further reference material on the legend of Melrose Hall if you care to do additional research:
Newspaper Articles: “A Flatbush Legend: The Ghost Story of the Mansion.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle. June 22, 1884. http://bklyn-genealogy-info.stevemorse.org/Town/1884.MansionMelrosePk.html “Brooklyn’s Splendid Landmarks Provide Attractive Settings for Speculative Builders’ Flats and Houses.” The Sun. New York, NY. Sunday, Oct 08, 1916. Vol: 84. Page 14. “End of a Haunted House.” New York Herald. Saturday, Sep 15, 1883. Page: 6, col. 3. “Flatbush on The Stage: “Romance of Melrose Hall, a Story of the Revolution, To be Played.” New-York Tribune. Sunday, May 10, 1908. Vol: 68. Page 59, col. 4. “The Ghost of Melrose Hall: The Tragic Fate of the Fair Alva.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle. October 13, 1895. http://bklyn-genealogy-info.stevemorse.org/Cemetery/ghosts/1895melrose.html “Ghost of Melrose Hall.” Omaha World Herald. May 12, 1901. Page 19. “Romantic and Historic Melrose: Melrose Hall and Its Wealth of Interesting Associations.” New York Herald. Saturday, September 15, 1883. Page 9, col. 1. “The Story of “Melrose Hall.” Springfield Republican. April 17, 1901. Page 6.
Cartoons: “Melrose Hall of Flatbush: First of Two Parts.” Staten Island Advance. Tuesday, Oct 20, 1987. Page 28. “The Ghost of Melrose Hall: Last of Two Parts.” Staten Island Advance. Tuesday, Oct 27, 1987 . Page 54.
Blogs: “The Haunting of Melrose Hall: A Ghost Story of the American Revolution.” Freaky Folk Tales. https://freakyfolktales.wordpress.com/the-haunting-of-melrose-hall-a-ghost-story-of-the-american-revolution/ “Walkabout: The History and Legend of Melrose Hall.” Brownstoner. https://www.brownstoner.com/history/walkabout-the-history-and-legend-of-melrose-park-part-1/ (This is a four part series.) “More Brooklyn Ghosts.” Boroughs of the Dead. https://boroughsofthedead.com/more-brooklyn-ghosts/
This essay is also available online in video format at Youtube
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