{"id":2885,"slug":"conference-house-staten-island-new-york","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["On September 11, 1776, three men stepped out of a boat onto the southern tip of Staten Island and walked up to a stone manor that was already nearly a century old. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge had come to the Conference House with only one mandate from Congress: independence was not negotiable. Lord Richard Howe, commanding the largest expeditionary force Britain had ever sent overseas, wanted to talk them out of it.","The meeting lasted three hours. It changed nothing — and because it changed nothing, it changed everything. The conference failed, the war continued for seven more years, and the stone house at the foot of Hylan Boulevard became the place where America chose war over surrender."]},{"heading":"A manor older than the argument","paragraphs":["Captain Christopher Billopp, an English immigrant and Royal Navy officer, built the fieldstone manor around 1680 as the seat of his 1,600-acre Manor of Bentley — a wheat farm overlooking the Arthur Kill and Raritan Bay. By 1776 the house belonged to his great-grandson, Colonel Christopher Billopp, a Loyalist whose home was requisitioned by the British army billeted on Staten Island.","The house is the southernmost building in New York State and one of the city's oldest surviving structures — a two-story rubble-stone manor restored in the 1930s to its mid-18th-century appearance, now a museum inside a 265-acre park."]},{"heading":"What the house is said to keep","paragraphs":["Local lore — repeated for generations on Staten Island — holds that the house's history includes darker chapters than the conference. The best-known legend claims a Billopp killed a servant girl in the house, some versions saying she was thrown down the cellar stairs. Historians find no documentation for the killing, but the story has been attached to the property since at least the 19th century, and staff and visitors have reported apparitions and unexplained sounds attributed to both the Billopp family and the alleged victim.","Revolutionary-era figures have also been reported in the house — fitting, given that the building's claim to fame is a room where Franklin and Adams once sat across from a British admiral and refused him."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["The Conference House is the archive's failed-peace file — the room where the Revolution could have ended in a single afternoon and didn't. The documented conference is the record; the Billopp legends are the folklore that accumulated around a house old enough to have watched the whole thing.","Every ghost tour on Staten Island eventually arrives here, and the draw isn't only the reported apparitions — it's the chance to stand in the room where three tired men decided the war was worth finishing."]}],"name":"Conference House","aliases":[],"type":"HOUSE","type_label":"House","cats":["LOCAL_FOLKLORE","HAUNTED_PLACE","HISTORIC_BUILDING","REVOLUTIONARY_WAR"],"groups":["hauntings","historic-sites","legends"],"desc":"The 1680 Billopp house—where the peace conference failed.","full_desc":"A house in Staten Island, New York, Conference House is filed here for what the record attaches to it. The 1680 Billopp house—where the peace conference failed. HauntHunt files it with the Revolutionary War, local folklore and haunted places. The file’s recurring figure goes by a name, not a description: the billopps. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 1 legend and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The site is open to visitors.","address":null,"city":"Staten Island","county":null,"state":"New York","postal":null,"region":"Northeast","lat":40.50286111,"lon":-74.25377778,"coord_kind":"WIKI","status":"ACTIVE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":"Historic site","research_notes":"NYC batch; VERIFY task auto-queued.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":59.4,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.3999999999999999,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":2619,"type":"NAMED_GHOST_LEGEND","description":"The Billopps are reportedly seen. Conference House wears the claim the way old houses do: visibly, and without comment. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. The report is preserved in sources like 'Conference House'. Named ghosts are the ones that last — this one has lasted.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":"The Billopps","where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Conference House","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_House","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]},{"id":2620,"type":"APPARITION","description":"Reported figures in the house. The house's rooms are where the accounts concentrate — old houses keep their stories in the walls they were built around. Investigators logged it; whether instruments or interpretation produced it is the open question. The report is preserved in sources like 'Conference House'. It is the sighting the place is known for, and it hasn't stopped.","evidence":"PARANORMAL_INVESTIGATION_CLAIM","evidence_label":"Investigation claim","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Conference House","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_House","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"Built 1680; the 1776 conference is documented. A house in Staten Island, New York with this much documented history gives the dossier substance underneath the lore. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The record appears in 'Conference House'. The date is part of the site's documented spine.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":"1680","date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Conference House","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_House","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"The Billopps are reportedly seen. Conference House wears the claim the way old houses do: visibly, and without comment. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. Every community keeps one story like this; this is theirs. The account stays in the file — reported, retold, unresolved.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"Conference House","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_House","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"entities":[{"name":"The Billopps","claimed_identity":"The Billopps","verified":null,"summary":"The Billopps are reportedly seen. Conference House in Staten Island, New York is the kind of old house where every sound eventually gets a name. 'Conference House' carries the account. The lore has a face now: The Billopps. The account stays in the file — reported, retold, unresolved. The reports keep the address on the map.","behavior":"The Billopps are reportedly seen.","area":null,"first_ref":null,"source":{"name":"Conference House","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_House","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Historic house; many are private residences—verify public access before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Conference House","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_House","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Conference House","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_House","desc":"Historic house in Staten Island, New York","extract":"Conference House (also known as Billop House) is a stone house in the Tottenville neighborhood of Staten Island in New York City. Built by Captain Christopher Billopp some time before 1680, it is located in Conference House Park near Ward's Point, the southernmost tip of New York state, which became known as \"Billop's Point\" in the 18th century.\nThe Staten Island Peace Conference, an unsuccessful attempt to find a swift negotiated end to the American Revolutionary War, was hosted there by his heir and grandson, Colonel  Christopher Billop, on September 11, 1776. The house, a National and New York City Landmark, is located at Conference House Park overlooking Raritan Bay. The house is also lo","img":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Conference-house-staten-island.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","score":104,"lat":40.50286111,"lon":-74.25377778},"counts":{"claims":2,"history":1,"legends":1,"entities":1,"sources":1}}