Morris-Jumel Mansion

The oldest house in Manhattan was built by a Loyalist, occupied by George Washington, and haunted by the woman who married Aaron Burr in it. Colonel Roger Morris built Mount Morris in 1765 as a summer retreat on a hundred and fifty acres of Harlem Heights — a Georgian-Palladian villa with an octagonal wing, the first of its kind in America, eleven miles from a city that ended at Chambers Street. When the Revolution came Morris fled to England; Washington seized the house in September 1776 and ran the Battle of Harlem Heights from the octagonal room.

The Jumels bought it in 1810 — Stephen, a French wine merchant, and Eliza, who had clawed her way up from poverty in Rhode Island and turned herself into the richest woman in New York. She brought back furniture from Paris she claimed had been Napoleon's, and when Stephen died in 1832 she married the seventy-eight-year-old Aaron Burr in the front parlor. The marriage lasted months; the divorce took years; Burr died the day it was finalized. Eliza stayed until 1865, growing steadily more eccentric, and she's the ghost — staff and visitors have reported her on the stairs for a century, which is fair enough, since she's the one who made the house famous.

In the 1840s the cook in the Jumel kitchen was Anne Northup — wife of Solomon Northup, the free Black man kidnapped into slavery who wrote Twelve Years a Slave. The house has been a museum since 1904, the only pre-Revolutionary residence left on the island, sitting in a neighborhood that grew up around it while it stayed exactly where the Morrises left it.