Notorious Eliza - The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel

By Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

You’ve heard of pub crawls; well, this past Saturday, I took a historic house crawl sponsored by the Historic House Trust of New York City. The Historic House Trust helps preserve twenty-three significant sites, many located in New York City parks. The historic house crawl featured four houses in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx: the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the Dyckman Farmhouse, the Van Cortlandt House Museum, and the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum. I’m a native New Yorker, and until a few years ago, I had never heard of most of the museums that the Trust helps preserve, so when I heard about this event, I had to sign up. I was particularly interested in visiting the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum because it is the hardest to get to, as it’s like on the other side of the Bronx near Pelham Bay Park. Although it started to rain towards the end of the day, it was a great experience to see all four houses. I was particularly interested to see that at least three of the houses, Morris-Jumel¹, the Dyckman Farmhouse, and Van Cortlandt Manor, included exhibits and information about the enslaved people who lived and worked at the properties. Given the current political climate in this country and the pushback against these narratives, I applaud these museums for not caving in and removing the information.

I loved visiting all the museums, but I have a special fondness for the Morris-Jumel mansion. The mansion has always had a significant draw for me since my first visit as a kid on a class trip. It’s not far from where I live, and I jokingly call it my ‘uptown mansion.’ The mansion sits majestically on one of Manhattan’s highest hills, looking more like ‘Tara transplanted to 160th Street.’ It is a house out of time amid its surrounding brownstones and apartment buildings. Situated in Jumel-Terrace, a hilly, shaded cobblestoned street, it is an island of serenity. The mansion is the oldest extant house in New York City, built in 1765 by Roger Morris, a loyalist who fled to England during the Revolutionary War. The house was briefly Washington’s headquarters for a month in 1776 and then occupied by the British. After the war, the house passed through multiple owners for the next thirty years; at one point, it was even a tavern.

Enter Eliza Jumel. Her rags-to-riches story cries out to be immortalized on the silver screen by a golden age Hollywood star like Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck. She’s been the subject of a few novels and one flop Broadway musical². Shunned by society during her lifetime, Eliza has come down through history as a scheming gold-digger. Most of the stories about her origins are a mixture of fact and fiction, many of which she promulgated herself. Her obituary in the New York Times at the time of her death claimed that she was born at sea, of mysterious parentage, that she was besties with Benedict Arnold’s wife, Peggy Shipped, that Patrick Henry was in love with her, and that she was present at the first session of the Continental Congress in 1774, which is impressive, considering that she wasn’t born until a year later in 1775. Eliza later claimed she was the daughter of George Washington, the product of a one-night stand, giving new meaning to the title of ‘Father of our Country.’

Eliza Jumel started life as plain Betsy Bowen in Providence, Rhode Island, the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute and a sailor. With her mother in and out of jail, Eliza bounced from the workhouse to foster homes as a child, eventually working as an indentured servant. Considered the ‘handsomest girl in Providence,’ with red-gold hair, blue eyes, and a shapely figure, she had an all-consuming desire to leave the poverty of her childhood behind her. After giving birth to a son³, she abandoned him for the bright lights of New York City.

No one really knows what Eliza did during the six years after she left Providence and before she met Stephen Jumel. She may have worked as an actress for a short time and seems to have used her good looks to gain access to the city’s elite. At some point, she may have become the mistress of one Captain de la Croix, who took her to Paris, where she refined her rough edges.

Now calling herself Eliza Brown, she returned to New York, where she became the mistress of Stephen Jumel, a wealthy wine merchant. Jumel once owned a large plantation in Santo Domingo, but he fled during the 1795 uprising. At forty-five, he was twenty years Eliza’s senior, but more importantly, he was single. Jumel was enchanted with his beautiful mistress, but he wouldn’t marry her. He took delight in showing her off, buying her a large coach and four, in which she paraded around the city.

Eliza craved respectability, but more than that, she wanted social standing, to hobnob with the Knickerbocker families. Legend has it that she pretended to be gravely ill, her dying wish to be married, and Jumel agreed. A priest was summoned and a marriage license secured. Two days after the wedding, Eliza miraculously made a full recovery!

In 1810, Stephen bought the forty-five-year-old Palladian mansion, which was in a run-down state, along with thirty-six acres, for ten thousand dollars, which he put in Eliza’s name. Eliza decorated the house in the French Empire style, adding a new facade with Doric columns, a massive pediment, and a balcony. Renaming the House Mount Stephen, Eliza wrote to her husband that she wanted the inside of the house to look like she was moving from the Roman coliseum towards the heavens.

The couple threw lavish parties, but the doors to New York society were still closed to them. How could Eliza, an upstart from the wrong side of the tracks, possibly make any inroads with the doyennes of Knickerbocker society, women whose surnames would go on to grace New York City streets and neighborhoods, Delancey, Beekman, Stuyvesant, and Schermerhorn? Discouraged, Eliza convinced her husband to move back to his native France.

In Paris, the French nobility welcomed them with open arms, and the couple were soon mixing in Napoleonic circles. Jumel family lore suggests that Stephen and Eliza offered to pay for Napoleon’s passage to New York after the Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon apparently refused the offer, but the couple was able to purchase several of his possessions, including a suite of chairs and a sleigh bed, probably at auction. Although Eliza had now achieved the social success that she had longed for, she missed New York. In 1826, she moved back permanently to look after the couple’s investments. Using the power of attorney that Stephen had given her, Eliza proved that she was more than just a pretty face. She began to make significant real estate acquisitions. Stephen soon followed in 1828.

Stephen died after being injured in a carriage accident in 1832⁴. He was traveling on the Kingsbridge Road in a one-horse wagon when he was thrown from the vehicle. Eliza was now one of the wealthiest widows in New York. She continued to increase her wealth, collecting on old debts Stephen was owed by insurance companies and the French government for ships that were seized during the Napoleonic wars. Then she fought the Jumel family in court to keep as much of the money as possible. Little more than a year later, she married disgraced former Vice President Aaron Burr in the front parlor of the mansion. Burr was seventy-seven, and his new bride was fifty-eight. The groom was also broke, and his bride was worth around $300,000 (approximately $9 million in today’s money).

The marriage, however, was short-lived. Eliza objected to her new husband treating her like a piggy bank. Burr ran through $13,000 ($428,000 today) during the first few months of their union. She finally kicked him out of the mansion after four months and filed for divorce. Still, because the only grounds for divorce in New York State were adultery, she accused Burr of “various matrimonial offenses at divers times with divers females.’ Burr had long had a reputation as a lothario. Eliza retained Alexander Hamilton, Jr., the son of Burr’s old enemy, as her lawyer. Hamilton must have relished the chance to go to war against the man who murdered his father. The decree was issued a few hours after Burr died in 1836, alone in a boarding house on Staten Island, permitting Eliza to claim that she was the widow of a vice president for the rest of her life.

Eliza and Stephen never had children, but they did raise her niece, Mary Eliza. After Mary Eliza’s death, Eliza raised her great-niece and nephew, arranging good marriages for them all. As each niece married, Eliza required that the newlyweds reside with her. While she supported them lavishly, she kept a tight hold on the purse strings, keeping them dependent on her, catering to her whims. As the years passed, Eliza became increasingly eccentric. Before long, she had shut herself away in the mansion like Miss Havisham. She died in 1865 at the age of ninety. At the time of her death, she was still one of the wealthiest women in New York. She was buried in Trinity Church and Cemetery uptown near her beloved mansion. Following her death, her relatives fought over her estate, the case dragging on for years until it was finally resolved in 1881. The house went through several hands before the City of New York purchased the building and almost two acres for $235,000.

The mansion has a reputation for being one of the most haunted in the city. The first substantive documentation of ghostly activity was provided by a governess in 1868, three years after her death. She reported being woken up nightly between midnight and one a.m. by loud, rapping noises. On other occasions, they heard a drumming sound like a skeleton’s hand on the windowpane of the nursery, which had been Eliza’s room. Did she object to her room being used as a nursery? Was she keeping a watchful eye on her house?

In 1964, Emma Bingay Campbell, the curator at the mansion, invited parapsychologist Hans Holzer to investigate. Called the ‘Father of the Paranormal,’ Holzer would go on to write 140 books on ghosts and the afterlife. Holzer and medium Ethel Johnson Meyers held two seances at the mansion in Eliza Jumel’s old bedroom on the second floor. Holzer invited journalists from the New York newspapers to witness the events. The first seance yielded the ghost of a young servant girl who attempted suicide after becoming involved with a member of the household.

Five months later, on the anniversary of Stephen Jumel’s death, they held a second seance. In a room of thirty witnesses, Meyer channeled the spirit of Stephen Jumel, who claimed that Eliza Jumel had murdered him! According to the spirit, Eliza arranged for a young boy to push Stephen off a hay wagon onto a pitchfork. Eliza was the next to speak up. She described herself as a lady and told Holzer to go away or she would call the police! Holzer later attempted to have Stephen Jumel’s body exhumed from St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral cemetery on Mulberry Street, where he was buried, but the Catholic Church denied the request. But thanks to Holzer, who wrote about the investigation at the mansion in several books, and the newspaper reports of the seances, the story that Eliza Jumel murdered her husband to marry Aaron Burr persists to this day.

In recent years, the museum and Eliza have been featured in numerous programs that deal with the paranormal, including Ghost Adventures, Inside Edition, The Holzer Files, Haunted USA: New York, and Surviving Death. The mansion hosts paranormal investigations at least once a month, which sell out quickly. I personally spent the night at the mansion on my birthday years ago, along with several friends, as part of a paranormal investigation. My birthday is November 2, which is All Souls Day, also known as the Day of the Dead, the perfect time to see ghosts. Also, I’ve always wanted to spend the night in a haunted house. I learned several things that night. Number one, I’m too old to sleep on a wooden floor in a sleeping bag, and two, you want Leanna Renee Hieber with you because she’s like a ghost magnet. I’m not kidding; in the kitchen, all the paranormal activity seemed to be centered around where Leanna was. The EMF meters (Electromagnetic Field meters) that we were using were off the charts where we were sitting, and later, we looked at this screen. All the white blobs, which indicated paranormal activity, were around the bench where we were seated.

The most memorable hour of the night was when a group of attendees sat in Eliza’s chambers and asked questions aimed at the lady of the house. A simple flashlight was set in the center of the floor, the lid unscrewed so the top only barely rested against the batteries, and it remained off. Posting questions to the room, the theory was that if a spirit in the house answered, it would cause the flashlight to flicker. Two flickers for yes, one for no. The leading male investigator wasn’t having any luck with bold, too-personal questions. The flashlight remained dark. Only once Leanna and I pointed out that it was improper, from Eliza’s perspective, to have strange men in her rooms did the flashlight flicker “yes,” as if to prove the point. The men left, and the women remained to ask questions, presumably of Eliza. Did she enjoy having company in her house, provided they were polite about it? The flashlight flickered twice for “yes.” Forever entertaining in her fine home.

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1. After Eliza died, George Washington Bowen claimed that he was Eliza’s son and that George Washington was his father. He sued her estate but lost to Nelson Chase, her nephew by marriage. Bowen's claims rested upon rather slender evidence. It appeared from the testimony given in the suit that Mme. Jumel had been accused by gossip of having drowned a child, a son. Mme. Jumel had emphatically denied this on several occasions, declaring that she had left the son in Providence, R. I., and that some day or other he would turn up and make trouble. Was he actually Eliza’s son? It’s still a mystery.

2. The 1938 musical GREAT LADY, music by Frederick Loewe, who later wrote the music for MY FAIR LADY. The show ran for sixteen performances at The Majestic Theatre.

3. In 1841, in Saratoga Springs, Eliza met Ann Northup, whose husband, Solomon, had been captured and sold into slavery, hiring her to cook at the mansion. Ann’s son, Alonzo, also worked as an apprentice to Eliza’s coachman, and her daughter, Elizabeth, was trained to be a lady’s maid. Ann only lived at the mansion for about two years before she moved the family back to Saratoga. The mansion has an excellent self-guided tour about Ann Northrup and the other free and enslaved servants, as well as an exhibition in the downstairs kitchen.

4. There were rumors at the time that Eliza deliberately loosened his bandages and left him to bleed to death to become a wealthy widow. The reality is that Jumel probably died because his doctors bled him to reduce his fever, a standard treatment at the time. Eliza didn’t need to kill Stephen since she still had his power of attorney.

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Elizabeth Kerri Mahon is a native New Yorker, actress, and history geek. Pretty Evil New York: True Stories of Mobster Molls, Violent Vixens, and Murderous Matriarchs (Globe Pequot Press), her first foray into historical true crime came out in October 2021.

You can find her and more of her writing on substack at the link provided: Elizabeth Kerri Mahon | Substack