The Ghost Of Melrose Hall; or, the Prisoner and the Playwright

This is the story of two women: one was the most famous ghost in Flatbush, and the other spent five of her happiest years in the ghost's haunted mansion.

Melrose Hall stood on 20-odd acres of land at Bedford Avenue between Clarkson and Winthrop Streets. It is now

The mansion was built about 1749 by an Englishman named Lane. It was a two and a half story frame house with two large wings - the whole lower right wing was a library, the lower left wing an enormous ballroom.

Above the ballroom was a room with two little diamond-shaped stained-glass windows, which is where a woman was said to have been imprisoned and starved. It was she who was said to scream and moan as she drifted through the house each night.

The Brooklyn Eagle calls her Alva, sister of Colonel William Axtell's wife. Axtell owned the Hall in the mid-eighteenth century. He was a Tory who was also supposed to have built secret cellars in which he imprisoned rebellious soldiers. There was also a staircase, hidden in a closet, which led to this chamber.

In one variation of the ghost story, Axtell had fallen in love with Alva after becoming engaged to her sister. When Alva came to live with the Axtells, William installed her in the room above the ballroom, which had one door connected with his study. When he went on a trip - and the only servant who knew of Alva's existence died suddenly - she starved to death. On William's return he found her skeleton. In another version of the story, the starved girl is Mrs. Axtell's sister who was not lovelorn, but homesick for England, and sickly as well.

Neither of these stories is true, since William Axtell married a New Yorker, Margaret De Peyster. She did have one unmarried sister Eve (whose name might have evolved into Alva, in the first story).

A later resident was playwright-novelist-actress Anna Cora Mowatt (1819-70), who with her lawyer husband James owned the house from 1836-1841. Mowatt was an extraordinary woman. Born in France to well-to-do New Yorkers, she eloped at age 15 with James Mowatt, a 29 year old lawyer who was her teacher at that time. He bought Melrose Hall for her, and she spent five very happy years there in what was then the countryside.

She wrote about Melrose Hall (which she named for the roses that grew so profusely on the grounds) in her Autobiography of an Actress (1854). She was "brilliantly happy" there, riding her mare Queen Mab, hunting in the woods dressed in "half Turkish costume" and entertaining friends and family "from New York."

Mowatt and several of her sisters also had a wonderful time putting on entertainments in the house, unfazed by the ghostly girl. Mowatt's first novel was published when she was 17, with the magnificent title Pelayo, or the Cavern of Covadonga. By age 22 she was working as a public reader to help with the family's financial problems. Her first play, Gulzara; or, the Persian Slave, was first performed at Melrose Hall.

Her best-known play, Fashion, debuted in New York City in 1845, and in that same year she took to the stage. Soon she was playing leading roles, and toured all over America and Europe for the next eight years. At the right is an engraving showing Mowatt in the role of Beatrice in Shakespeare's As You Like It.

James Mowatt died in 1851, and two years later Mowatt married William Foushee Ritchie, son of a prominent journalist, Thomas Ritchie. Ritchie's father had been so illustrious, in fact, that President Franklin Pierce - and his Cabinet- attended the wedding. By 1860, though, Anna Cora had left her husband and went to live in Europe; she died in England in 1870, having written several more novels.

Image of Melrose Hall from NYPL Digital Gallery; the text at the bottom reads "Entrance to Melrose Park, Flatbush, Brooklyn, N.Y." Image of Anna Cora Mowatt also from NYPL Digital Gallery.

SOURCES

"A Flatbush Legend," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Jun. 22, 1884, transcription here.
"A Tale of Melrose Hall," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Mar. 9, 1890, p. 17.
"The Ghost of Melrose Hall," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 13, 1895, p. 8.
"A Rendezvous For Tories," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Mar. 27, 1901, p. 7.

Anna Cora Mowatt in Wikipedia

Mowatt, Anna Cora. Autobiography of an Actress or, Eight Years on the Stage (Boston: Tichor, Reed and Fields, 1854), pp. 61-2, 131, 400.