OCTOBER 2021 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 93
SPIRITED
THE GHOSTS OF GREY GARDENS
BY ANNIE WILKINSON
In the dark of night, in a sprawling
mansion just a block from the Atlantic
Ocean, a woman in her prime awaited
her sea captain lover’s return. At the
stroke of midnight, he climbed a ladder
to her upstairs bedroom, and they did
what lovers do.
The seafarer had built the mansion
where they romanced on Long Island’s
South Shore on Lily Pond Lane in 1905.
She, a prominent socialite and model
who sought show business fame, insisted
that the visits did occur at her
East Hampton estate, repeating the
story throughout her life, until her
2002 death.
But there was a problem: The night
visitor she said she had the aff air with
had died, and his ghost was said to
haunt the mansion. And other spirits
have appeared ever since he fi rst set
aft erlife foot in the house. Dubbed “the
Witch House,” its ghostly visitors show
no signs of leaving.
“ROMANCE, GHOSTS, AND
OTHER THINGS”
The woman recalling the visits was
Edith Bouvier Beale (“Little Edie”).
Ever the aspiring entertainer, she
performed memorably in the 1975
award-winning cinema verité documentary
about her home, Grey Gardens.
“Meet a mother and daughter, high-society
dropouts … managing to thrive
together amid the decay and disorder
…” is how Little Edie and her mother,
Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie”),
are described on imdb.com.
In the production, fi lmed when Big
Edie was in her 80s and Little Edie
was in her 50s, the younger Beale said
her home was “oozing with romance,
ghosts, and other things.” She lived
there for 25 years, caring for her mother,
the pair surrounded by dozens of
feral and domesticated cats plus possums
and raccoons in a fl ea-infested,
crumbling eyesore, smack dab in the
middle of the ultrawealthy Hamptons.
Before the Beales bought the mansion
in 1923, former owner Anna Gilman
Hill, a famed horticulturist, poured
her heart into beautifying the land.
She imported concrete from Spain to
shield pale-fl owered plantings from
the forceful Atlantic winds and sea
spray. Hill wrote that she named the
estate “Grey Gardens” because of the
“soft gray of the dunes, cement walls
and sea mists.”
Hill’s ghost likely haunted the Beales
aft er witnessing the deterioration of
the property she had beautifi ed. As
Big Edie and Little Edie aged, they had
neither the fi nancial reserves nor emotional
stability to keep things up. The
climbing, overgrown plants obscured
the garden walls. The raccoons’ claws
punctured the roof. The cat feces piled
up and warped the fl oors.
In the mid-1950s, the Beales hired a
local man, Tom “Tex” Logan, to maintain
the estate. Known as a drinker, he
would leave town for months. Aft er
his fi nal excursion in 1964, he died of
pneumonia in the mansion’s kitchen.
His ghost’s drunken staggering was
competing with the stomping boots
of the sea captain’s spirit in 1971,
when Logan’s successor, Jerry Torre,
started working there. He later told
PhillyVoice.com, “There’s a spirit in
the mansion …. I felt a person in the
kitchen with me.”
Big Edie told Torre that it was the
anniversary of Logan’s death. “And
he died on the Army cot that you sleep
on,” she added.
THE WITCH HOUSE
Gail Sheehy, the bestselling author of
Passages, lived near the Beales in 1971.
As she wrote in New York Magazine,
her 7-year-old daughter saw a light
at night in an upstairs window of
the decaying house surrounded by
growling cats. The child named the
place “the Witch House.”
In 1979, several years after Big Edie
died, journalist Sally Quinn and
her husband Ben Bradlee, famed
Washington Post editor, bought the
property. They promised the Beales
they would renovate the mansion to
use as a summer house, ignoring the
haunted-house gossip. No problem:
Bradlee said of his wife, “She’s a witch,”
because she believed in spirits and
read tarot cards in a cottage on the
property.
Quinn told cnbc.com that she saw an
apparition in her bedroom at night,
one of two ghosts in residence. The
ghost of Little Edie, who died in 2002,
was a regular.
Every night around 9:30, Quinn
said, the hall lights would flicker
once. Guests including Sen. Barry
Goldwater heard noises; he wouldn’t
sleep in Little Edie’s room, cautioning,
“There’s a ghost in there.”
Quinn observed, “Some people think
it’s a man, clomping around in boots.
I’m pretty sure it’s the sea captain.”
A PACT WITH THE
DEPARTED
Quinn and Bradlee made good on their
promise with an extensive renovation.
They viewed the ghosts as benign, especially
one in particular who claimed
to be Big Edie’s best friend. As Quinn
told the New York Post, the apparition
appeared from out of nowhere.
“Big Edie sent me,” she said, though
Big Edie was dead. “She wants you to
know she is very happy you bought
the house, and she will oversee everything.
You will be very happy here.”
The Washington power couple spent
35 happy summers at Grey Gardens.
REAR VIEW
“Dubbed ‘the Witch
House,’ its ghostly
visitors show no
signs of leaving.”
/PhillyVoice.com
/imdb.com
/LONGISLANDPRESS.COM
/cnbc.com
