History Goes Bump: Ghost Tours For The Mind · Diane Student

Ep. 611 - Haunted Newport Mansions

·44 min·4 clips

Oliver Belmont's violent honeymoon with Sarah ended with her fleeing America while pregnant, after he took up with a French dancer.

Diane wants Newport badly. She and Kelly open with Rhode Island mansions, Gilded Age scenery, and houses grand enough that you almost expect a ghost to clear its throat in the hall. The mood is quick and friendly. One report has voices humming or moaning near a suit of armor, the kind of detail that can make a gorgeous room feel suddenly awake. Then Seaview Terrace enters. Also known as the Cary Mansion, it is described as the fifth largest Newport cottage, which is a ridiculous word for a place this big. Edson Bradley Jr. built it, with bourbon whiskey money behind him and a Washington, D.C. past that includes a fight against Prohibition. His first mansion was Aladdin's Palace, built in 1907 on the south side of DuPont Circle. Modest, no. It covered more than half a city block and had a ballroom, an art gallery, a Gothic chapel, and a 500-seat theater inside the home. Kelly clocks the assignment right away: Bradley wanted Newport, but he also wanted his old mansion, so he took it apart and moved it. That is not relocation. That is a rich man's jigsaw puzzle. The move is described as one of the largest buildings transferred that way in the country. Newport already had a mansion on the site, an Elizabethan revival house from 1898, so Bradley folded that into the one he brought with him. Two mansions became one. He planned the combined estate as a 50th anniversary gift for his wife, Julia Wentworth Williams, which is sweet and wildly overbuilt. Construction finished in 1929. The finished place leaned chateau-esque, with inspiration from 16th-century France. The episode lands right where History Goes Bump likes to live: architecture, money, local lore, and weird noises in elegant rooms.

As heard by us

Newport's gilded mansions anchor a brisk, spooky history tour.

Newport's mansions give the episode a vivid stage, and the mix of history and haunting works in its favor. It moves from Gilded Age summer cottages into the stranger corners of the story, with eerie house noises and the odd, memorable path of Seaview Terrace, also known as Cary…

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Why you'd press play

Ghost tours, Newport mansions, and one palace literally moved to Rhode Island.

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