The Legend of Melrose Hall
A haunting and sometimes true story for Halloween.
Flatbush was one of the original six towns that became the great city of Brooklyn. Dutch farmers began settling there in the mid-1600s, after kicking the Lenape people out. They were followed by the British almost a hundred years later, including an aristocrat by the name of John Lane. His manor house and farm were on an isolated road, far from the growing number of new neighbors in an agrarian Kings County.
Lane’s three-story house was a rambling affair, with multiple extensions, gables and varying rooflines, and additions that had no rhyme or reason. There, in this English-style manor, he lived in luxury. The most impressive part of his home was a wing containing a large banquet hall and adjoining ballroom. Surrounding the house were formal gardens and terraces. But unbeknownst to most of his guests, the house was also riddled with secret passages, stairs and rooms. John Lane was hiding something. This mysterious manor was called Melrose Hall.
Legend had it that Lane had been banished from England because of his wild partying and degenerate ways and came to the colonies where he took up where he left off. Melrose Hall was the scene of some wild times, so they say. But it all caught up with him, and Lane sickened and sold Melrose Hall right before he died.
The buyer was another party animal, William Axtell, a Jamaican-born Englishman, the second son of a lord. Lane and Axtell probably met at some of the same bawdy functions, as Axtell was known about town for the adventures of his misspent youth and was called “William the Gay.” He was especially known to be a rollicking partier and strong drinker. One of his other nicknames was the “3 Bottle Man.” We probably don’t really want to know.
He was also William the Smart. He cleaned himself up and married extremely well, taking to wife Margaret De Peyster, the daughter of a very prominent and wealthy New York merchant, Abraham De Peyster, Jr. Her mother was a Van Cortlandt, making Margaret a member of two of the wealthiest families in New York City.
The Axtell’s had a mansion on Broadway in Manhattan, where they usually lived, and their summer home at Melrose Hall, which at the time, was quite out in the country. This country home would come in quite handy.
When the stirrings of liberty and revolution began, William Axtell at first sided with the rebelling colonists, but soon became William the Pragmatist. The De Peyster and Van Cortlandt families were staunchly Loyalists, and William didn’t see the colonists winning the upcoming war.
He didn’t declare until right before 1776, when he went to the Loyalist side, and became a colonel and commander of a Loyalist regiment called the “Nassau Blues,” comprised of around 30 men mostly from Nassau County and the rest of Long Island, which included Brooklyn and Queens.
After winning the Battle of Brooklyn, the British occupied Brooklyn and New York City until the end of the war. Many of their Loyalist allies became the secret police and enforcers of the occupiers, eager to show the British they were worthy, and probably more than a few counting on position, riches and land after the British wiped out the rebellion.
Axtell’s Nassau Blues got the nickname “Nasty Blues” for their cruelty and sadism. Rumors soon followed that Colonel Axtell had Patriot prisoners down in special dungeons below Melrose Hall, where they were tortured and held in the worst of conditions. After the war, Melrose Hall was on an official short list of estates that would be confiscated by the new government due to the nature of what had gone on there during the war.
And here is where the legends begin. Colonel Axtell and his wife did not have any children of their own but had adopted a niece named Eliza Shipton. In the early days of 1776, before the war started, the Axtell’s were having parties and balls at Melrose, as if the rumblings and foments of war were not happening at all.
A handsome young man named Aquila Giles showed up at one of these parties, where he met Eliza Shipton. It was love at first sight. The couple strolled in the gardens on the estate, and got to know each other, and by the end of the night, young Giles was ready to announce his intentions.
He expressed to Axtell both his love for Eliza and his sympathies toward the Patriot cause. Neither was well received, to say the least. Giles was banned from the property and from seeing Eliza ever again. He left, and a few days later, a cannonball ripped through a wing of Melrose Hall. The Revolutionary War had begun. Giles joined the Continental Army, and rose through the ranks to colonel, the same rank achieved by William Axtell.
Axtell’s men remained the “Nasty Blues” for only a year before the regiment was disbanded in 1779; the men folded into the Loyalist New York Volunteers. But that was enough time for their reputation to be solidified. Everyone knew about, but no one had ever escaped from William Axtell’s secret prison.
While parties and balls went on in the ballroom and banquet hall, slaves tended the fields and served in the manor, and whispered in whatever private corners they could, about the cries and misery that went on somewhere in the secret confines below Melrose Hall. Some of them may have disappeared there as well. Their lips were sealed. This is why the legend of Melrose Hall has another chapter, as the location for one of the greatest ghost stories in New York state history.
It was said that William Axtell, in addition to his other sins, had a mistress named Isabella. One day, she showed up at Melrose Hall. The tall, dark, mysteriously beautiful woman was quickly whisked upstairs to a hidden room above the ballroom, one that was only accessible through one of the many secret passages in the house. Only a few of the household slaves saw her arrive, but she was soon forgotten, as she was never seen again. The only person, besides Axtell, who knew of her presence was an old, enslaved woman named Miranda, who was charged with taking care of the mysterious lady. Miranda brought Isabella food, and tended to her needs in secret, charged by Axtell to never tell anyone else about her.
Isabella stayed hidden at Melrose for some time, and their secret arrangement was working out well when Axtell was ordered out on a military campaign. He could be away from home for several months, maybe as long as a year, depending on the war efforts. Legend has it that on the night before his campaign, he was sitting in his study by the fire, and a secret door opened, and Isabella, accompanied by Miranda, entered the room. Miranda disappeared into a corner and fell asleep, but Isabella went to her lover, and sat at his feet.
Axtell told her that he would be gone, and he didn’t know for how long, and that she should leave, or at least reveal herself to his servants, in case something happened. He offered her gold and said that he was afraid that Miranda could die or prove false. Since no one else knew about her, she could starve to death in the locked room, from which there was no escape.
According to one version of the legend, she angrily spurned his offer of money, and in a lot of flowery language accused him of treating her like a common trollop, instead of as a woman who loved him, and followed him across the ocean to be with him, a woman who would risk everything to be with him, no matter the cost. He then professed his love, declaring that although he was sinning against his wife, and was damned, he couldn’t help it, his love for her was so strong, etc, etc. He charged Miranda with keeping their secret, no matter what. She promised to take care of Isabella as if she was her own and Axtell left the next day.
Well, you can guess what happened. Everything was fine until elderly Miranda suddenly got sick and died, practically overnight. On her deathbed she tried to tell the other slaves about Isabella and the secret room, but they thought she was delirious in her illness. They had never seen or heard about Isabella, or a secret room above the ballroom, so they dismissed her frantic tale of the lady trapped in the room as nonsense. Miranda fell dead, and with her died the existence of the lady Isabella.
Isabella waited in vain for Miranda, and when she didn’t appear after a few days, she knew she was going to die in the room. She starved to death, with help only a hallway away. One legend says she silently suffered, unwilling to pound on the doors or floor, as she didn’t want to betray her lover with her presence. So, she suffered starvation in silence and love, and then died.
Months later, Colonel Axtell came back, welcomed into Melrose Hall by his wife with a huge party. That evening the estate was lit with hundreds of candles, as Axtell’s carriage pulled up, and he was greeted by friends and family. Those around him thought him bothered by something and uneasy; he fidgeted at the table and kept getting up and looking around. Towards the end of the evening, he ran out of the hall and went back to the quarters behind the house.
The slaves were puzzled to see him, and even more puzzled when he asked why he hadn’t seen Miranda about. They told her that the old woman had died several months before. Axtell turned white as a sheet and staggered back into the ballroom. He knew what that meant.
Just then, all the candles blew out, and the light in the room turned a sickly pale color, and everything glowed. The wind blew the doors open, and a keening wail was heard emanating from everywhere, low and deep, as if coming from below the house. Then the sound stopped, and the only thing that could be heard was the wind blowing through the trees.
Suddenly, the door to the secret passage burst open, and the spectral figure of Isabella rushed into the room. She was emaciated, with every bone in her body showing starkly beneath her pale skin. Her veins stood out against her wasted flesh, and her long, stringy black hair hung from her shoulders down to the floor, enveloping her in a gossamer veil. Her hands clenched each other as she embraced herself in woe, and she floated towards the petrified Axtell, her sightless eyes finding him alone in the center of the room, far from his guests, who pressed against the walls in horror.
Isabella turned and found Margaret Axtell in the crowd. She pointed at her with a long, bony finger and smiled sorrowfully. She then floated over to the secret door and used the same bony finger to wrote “Betrayer” on the door. And then she vanished. The spectral light went out, leaving the hall in darkness. As the guests recovered from the shock, an awful cry was heard, and the sound of a body falling to the floor.
The wind blew the doors open again, and for a minute the spectral light came back, illuminating the figure of Isabella kneeling next to the body of Colonel Axtell. She had a pitiless smile on her face, and she pointed to the bleeding wound near his heart, as the maddened lover had tried to kill himself with his sword. The clock struck midnight, and she then vanished again, as the dogs on the estate howled.
Axtell was said to have lived only a few hours after that and told those around him that it was his wish that the house be sold, and the family return to England. According to the legend, they had no problem with that. Upon investigating the secret passage, they found the emaciated body of Isabella, who had foolishly allowed the situation to happen, all in the name of a forbidden love. All of them were now dead, the faithless husband, the loving mistress, and the loyal servant. These are the things upon which a great ghost story thrives.
Historic records show that William Axtell did not die that night, or any night in the United States. He went back to England and died there in 1795. Eliza Shipton did not go back to England. As in any good love story, Aquila, now a general, came back for her, and they were married. When the confiscated estate came on the market, he bought it, and they lived there for many years. Unfortunately, the estate proved to be too expensive to keep up, and it was sold to a man named Bateman Lloyd, who died there, peacefully in his sleep.
Or did he?
Oh what a tangled web we weave when we first practice to deceive. Loved the story; good sleuthing.
Great story!