Location: Danbury Manor is located near King’s Point on Long Island’s U.S. Highway 150. The estate borders the city limits on the southwest and Long Island Sound to the north and the King’s Point Nature Reserve to the East.
Description: Built in 1760, the two and a half story Greek Revival-style mansion is largely restored with four front Dorian columns, a grand entrance, a glass crystal chandelier and a roof cupola. The white and black shuttered museum is also a tourist spot on the town’s historical tour
Ghostly Manifestations: Legends and rumors of the formerly dilapidated
Danbury Mansion go back almost two thousand years. Curiosity-seekers, would-be
ghost hunters and potential vandals have all fled the grounds with tales of
shadows moving through its once hollow shell. Phantom gunfire has been heard as
well as the sound of a man’s giggling laughter. Workmen who restored the house
in the fall of 1946 often reported footsteps from closed off rooms, the
sensation of being watched, tools that vanished to be ever seen again and
inexplicable electrical and equipment failures.
Sheldon Gage and his fiancée at the time,
June Prescott, stayed in the house the first weekend after the restoration was
finished. Accompanying him was his psychiatrist and best friend, Dr. Ralph
Greenway, and June’s Aunt Millicent Prescott. Interested in seeing if the
ghosts were real for himself, he didn’t bother to tell anyone about the ghosts.
In one of his last interviews before his
death in 1986, Gage described harpsichord music from the downstairs parlor. He
described the tune as a very old fashioned minuet type of music, and that the
light was on in the parlor as he went to see who was playing it so late at
night. The light had been one of the first he had switched off before turning
in for the night, and the housekeeper, Emily Sondergaard later denied having
switched it on. Nevertheless, as Gage attempted to investigate the music, it
continued playing right up until he entered the room. He stepped one foot inside
and the parlor was empty.
The one locked door to the library was also
left open and the room itself was in a tragic mess. All the books on the
shelves, the papers in the desk and the contents of the drawers had been strewn
around as if “someone was in a mad rush to find something.” The mess must have
made a lot of noise, but no one had heard anything. Gage later learned the same
thing had occurred to the interior decorators when they worked in the house
restoring the mansion to Eighteenth Century specifications.
Sondergaard, a reluctant psychic with some
second sight, admits that she has sensed the presence of at least two spirits
at all times. Although she is unsure if they are the same two spirits at all
times, she has heard their footsteps wandering the house when it was empty. She
has also heard someone call her by name; it’s a female voice and a very
benevolent spirit. In fact, none of the occurrences have been malicious. At
least till then………..
Dr. Greenway felt as if he was constantly
getting attacked by something. A vowed non-believer of ghosts at the time,
today he is not quite as sure. During that weekend, he felt someone slap him in
the face when he was alone. He also found himself tripping and stumbling over
something he could never see. That first night, June even recalled that he had
stumbled into the parlor claiming that he wanted a drink, but the ghosts
wouldn’t let him. Further mumbling that someone had “tooted” in his stethoscope
while he was checking his heartbeat, Ralph later took a week-long vacation to
get over his weekend vacation.
Possibly the most skeptical and rational
person so far was Millicent Prescott up until her bad scare. Heading upstairs
with the brandy glass at one point, she later rushed back to the parlor a few
seconds after leaving “scared to the point of panic.” Incoherent at the time,
she later confessed to paranormal researchers a year later that she had met a
lady coming down the stairs that she didn’t recognize. Doing a double take, she
looked back again and realized that she did not have a head !
There were also numerous electrical problems
the first few weeks after the restoration. Next to the lights in the parlor
coming on by themselves, most of the lights all over the house were always
flickering and threatening to go out and leave them in the dark. The first time
it happened, June thought she heard panicked shrieking as if “one of the spooks
had gotten stuck in the fuse box in the cellar.
Not all of the phenomenon has been in the
house. There is an old abandoned well on the property where historical legend
claims two traitors to the colonial armies in the Revolutionary War were dumped
and denied burial. This is substantiated by an 1865 record that the partial
remains of two bodies were fished out by water surveyors and buried elsewhere
on the property. The plaque on the well marking and describing this incident
has never stayed in place. The brass plate has been bolted to the stone base of
the well repeatedly, but it always pops back off. Reattached for Independence Day
in 1945, witnesses testified that it popped off in mid-ceremony, flew several
feet and nearly hit the town mayor in attendance at the mansion yearly
festival.
To this day, guests who visit Danbury Manor and look up at the portrait of Melody Allen over the fireplace swear that a rosy cheek rushes to her face as she is being looked at. Some people have even heard her lightly giggling somewhere in the house.
History:
Standing empty for almost two hundred years,
the estate was restored by the combined efforts of Sheldon Gage and Dr. Ralph
Greenway. Friends while in the military, both men discovered they had had
relatives connected to the old house. Gage had an ancestor connected by
marriage to the Danburys and Greenway’s ancestor had been a servant there. They
tracked down most of the old
Identity of Ghosts: For years it has always been assumed that the ghosts were just the two traitors, but now it seems as if that must not be alone after all. An impromptu séance one night in 1946 revealed the identity of the female spirit to be Melody Allen, Thomas Danbury’s fiancé who vanished the night of the fire. The oft-seen male spirit seen and heard is believed to be a tinker named Horatio Prim who also vanished that night. Greenway believes he was being victimized by Prim since rumors passed through his family say his ancestor Cuthbert Greenway once locked a tinker in a trunk and stole his horse. Presumably, Prim was that tinker. The identities of the two men killed as traitors in 1780 have never been revealed, but a copy of a letter of recommendation signed by General George Washington to Prim now hangs in the Danbury Manor Library. Some effort has been made to link the supposed traitors to Allen and Prim, but Major Efrem Putnam’s account of the incident insists it was two men.
Comments: The Time Of Their Lives (1946) Phenomenon based on the movie and on
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