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Courtesy of The Mount
A postcard from around 1902 showing the Mount
Twelve-year-old Hannah Emerson Clapp came to the Mount, a mansion surrounded by nearly 50 acres of woods and manicured gardens, to see where novelist Edith Wharton wrote "Ethan Frome" and "The House of Mirth" and entertained Henry James. The experience left her looking as if she'd seen a ghost—which was exactly what tour guide Anne Schuyler intended. Ms. Schuyler, attired in a long, dark hooded cloak, leads ghost tours, complete with spooky stories of hauntings, apparitions and shrieks in the night. There's even a nocturnal stop at the pet cemetery where Ms. Wharton's dogs Jules and Mimi are buried.
"Some people hear the sound of barking dogs," Ms. Schuyler says.
During the tour, a cleaning woman materialized to talk about seeing mysterious shadows, hearing screams and, one night, fleeing in terror. Hannah seemed shaken. She smelled mysterious cigar smoke, she says, glimpsed the figure of "a man or a woman" crouching at a window. She thinks she may have seen Edith Wharton herself. The girl's mother, Susan Emerson Clapp, says "Hannah is very sensitive and artistic."
The Mount's dabbling in the supernatural is one way to cope with an all-too-real financial crisis looming over the estate. At $20 a ticket, ghost tours are a money-maker and have drawn more visitors to the grounds.
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