ALLARDYCE MANSION
Location: The Allardyce Mansion is located at the northern tip of Long Island on two hundred acres of land at the end of Shore Road, a lonely dirt road near Orient, New York. The postal address is 17 Shore Road, but the area is remote and nearly inaccessible.
Description: Built in 1899, the Allardyce Mansion is a thirty-seven room Neoclassical Revival mansion on a large parcel of land encroached and surrounded by woods near the cliffs of Gardner's Bay. The former estate includes a quaint, old-fashioned gazebo, old-fashioned carriage house converted into a garage and an elegant pavilion and Olympic-sized swimming pool. The house has a Tiffany-style dome, ten fireplaces, inlaid parquet floors and antique furnishings. There is also an old family cemetery on the property.
Ghostly Manifestations: In 1985, members of the Collinsport Ghost Society were asked to confirm an urban legend of an isolated edifice somewhere at the tip of Long Island where a family from Manhattan had supposedly and mysteriously vanished. Descriptions of the layout and style of the property certainly matched many of the historic homes in the area, but none more so than the already enigmatic Allardyce Mansion near the small hamlet of Orient, New York. That's where the research into the legend ended until two years later when William Collins, nephew of the Society founder, used deductive reasoning and detective paperwork to track down and meet Ben Rolf, an English teacher from Queens College. Meeting the man through several associates, Collins eventually was able to meet Rolf and learn from him an account of the hauntings that lead to the creation of the legend, but only with the proviso that the true story would not be published until after he had passed away.
After several days of establishing a threshold of faith and trust, Rolf finally confessed about a summer of frustration, stress and nervous hostility. It was supposed to be a vacation away from the anxieties that came from living in a crampt Manhattan apartment, but it was anything but. Straight from the beginning, something didn't seem right about the place. Roz Allardyce only asked for $900 from the Rolfs to rent the place in their absence from June 1 to Labor Day weekend. Ben thought the flat fee for the whole summer was ridiculously low, and he was equally suspicious when his wife was asked to care for the Allardyces' invalid mother who stayed in the converted attic bedroom. Ben never saw the aged woman once during her entire stay.
During his stay in the house, Ben Rolf began experiencing things that never seemed to be right, but he was a intelligent man who didn't believe in ghosts, and he was sure it was all just his imagination. Looking back on those memories, he sometimes had the feeling that even with his family there that he was never quite really alone. Sensations of being watched followed him, and he was constantly looking up to the top landing in the front hall expecting to find someone watching him. His wife, son and aunt had come up to the house with him, but they were often off following their own pursuits. His son was sometimes off exploring or his wife gardening. Ben would often retreat to work on his book in the study while out the corner of his eye he would catch images of a thin and almost skeletal figure of a woman in long dress flitting through the house. It was often ephemeral and fleeting; the presence moving faster than a normal woman. At first, Ben thought it was his Aunt Elizabeth, a woman who had raised him since he was a boy, but she was frequently no where near the house. While she was at the borders of the property painting her pictures, Ben would see images of a figure that vanished round corners, disappeared into closed off rooms and melted into shadows. One day, he chased the elusive phantom through the house for three hours, but it constantly stayed well away from him.
Objects sometimes vanished or turned up in odd places. Car keys were removed from the upstairs bedroom and turned up hanging from a nail in the pantry. Ben's glasses vanished from his bedside one night and turned up on the piano in the parlor. Items that belonged to no one appeared in traffic areas. A vase of flowers suddenly appeared on an upstairs table, but no one took credit for them. A pair of old cracked eyeglasses Ben found in the pool were being left all over the house as if there was another unseen guest. Ben asked his wife and aunt about them several times, but they never knew they existed.
A few weeks after their arrival, Ben's son, David, discovered the old family cemetery on the property. Hidden away in the trees neglected and overgrown, Ben asked his son just how he had come to find it and David answered that he was just somehow drawn to the area.
Marion meanwhile had been tending to elderly Mrs. Allardyce in the attic room at the top of the stairs in back of the house as well as cleaning and straightening the house. For the first week, she noticed that the woman wasn't eating what she brought and feared the woman had died in her bedroom, another room set aside from the rest of the attic by a wall. After hearing someone puttering around in the other room, she wondered if the woman was somehow sneaking down to the kitchen by herself after dark. Eventually, the trays of food she carried up were being nibbled at and gradually began being consumed. Ben and his Aunt Elizabeth would once and while hear old tintype music playing from the attic bedroom, but when Marion headed up those stairs to the attic, it would suddenly stop.
In addition to the recurring visions, vanishing and reappearing objects and shadowy images traveling along the walls, Ben felt that there was a psychological state of oppression permeating the atmosphere around the house. He was losing his temper very easily in the house. He had sensations of frustrating anxiety as well as moments where he blacked out on what he was doing. He would move from the upstairs bedroom down to the study with no memory of the distance traveled in between. Cut off from civilization and human contact beyond his family, he was becoming irritable as if "he was trapped on an island with a bunch of strangers he hated with no way off." While he was playfully rough-housing with his son in the pool, he became carried away and nearly drowned David and snapped out of his "period of insanity" only after David struck him with a scuba mask. Afterward, Ben could find no answer as to why he had snapped.
In addition to the mental onslaught he was experiencing, Ben Rolf claimed that the house was somehow reminding him of all his old childhood fears. He began having old childhood nightmares once more of his mother's funeral - images that were vivid, disturbing and alarming. Sometimes waking in a cold sweat unable to recall where he was, the images would torment him even during waking hours and while he was awake in the heat of the midday sun.
Both Ben and Elizabeth noticed that the house had a tendency to change and alter itself, or at least challenge their memories of rooms and the layout of the structure. At times, rooms felt altered or restructured, perhaps at a subliminal level. Even as Marion cleaned and redecorated whole rooms, parts of the mansion seemed larger than before while halls seemed shorter. At one time, David felt he had the largest bedroom, but later described it as little more than a closet. In addition to the nightmares he was having, Ben had a dream that the house was "shedding its outer skin to reveal brighter more luminescent white shingles underneath." One day as he and Marion were returning back to the house from the pool, they somehow for some reason took a much longer route around the property for the front of the house instead of just coming straight through the usual back entrance.
Oft times, Ben and David traveled into Orient to do some shopping or spend time together. Away from the house, they reverted back to being friends, but upon returning to the Allardyce Mansion, it was as if, in Ben's words, "a blanket had dropped down over their eyes to mask them from the truth." Time in the once grand house was becoming strict and rigorous. Ben and Marion's loving marriage was deteriorating, David felt as if he was being terrorized by feelings of inadequacy and Aunt Elizabeth, once a vibrant and still active lady, felt herself getting older and older and feeling her years. Two weeks before Labor Day, she passed away in the middle of the night. Ben and David traveled back to Queens to bury her next to Ben's father. Marion stayed behind to tend to the elusive and invisible Mrs. Allardyce. On the drive back, Ben and David stopped to eat in a restaurant and chanced upon Bob Marasco, the Allardyce's attorney.
Marasco revealed to them that Arnold and Roz Allardyce's mother had died nearly twenty years before!
History: Supposedly, several generations of the Allardyce Family have lived in the mansion for all its existence, and this is suggested by two hundred years of Allardyces buried in the family plot. Arnold and Roz Allardyce were the last known members of the family to live in the house with the executor of their estate renting it out as a summer place afterward. For most of their lives, Arnold and Roz cared for their invalid mother and even continued to do so allegedly even long after the woman had passed away. Their mother's body was found in a mummified condition in the attic bedroom after Arnold's death in a media event the press compared with the California serial killer known as Norman Bates. Roz Allardyce was institutionalized uncontested a month later, but caretaker Amos Walker fled the area to be never seen or heard of again. Up to her death in 2001, Roz Allardyce swore that her mother was still alive in the house.
Ben Rolf died in 1999 never completely understanding what he had happened to his wife and son. His wife divorced him shortly thereafter and took David to live in California with her sister. There is no trace of where they are today, but at a theoretical level, a family did vanish in the house in 1976 and spat out a group of strangers distanced by the activity they experienced. Marasco's law partner, Oliver Montgomery sold the property years later to Karen and Betty Reed who turned it into a bed and breakfast. No phenomenon has been reported since.
Identity of Ghosts: Possibly Arnold and Roz's mother
Investigations: In the period the mansion stood empty, the Collinsport Ghost Society gained access to a week long examination of the location to confirm Rolf's stories. Occurring almost ten years to the time of the Rolf's visit, electronic analysis recorded the sounds of creaks and groans from the structure, sounds of footsteps and footage of doors closing and opening - all easily explained samples of phenomenon. However, a remote camera in the attic bedroom recorded the image of a shadow drifting between the light of the camera and the wall. Nobody was in the attic at the time, but the faint image was too thin and elusive to be that of a normal living person; that is, one in the corporeal sense.
Source/Comments: Burnt Offerings (1976)/ Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco, Architecture based on the Dunsmuir Estate and Gardens in Oakland, California. Hauntings based on the Schnell Mansion in Nashville, Tennessee, the Matheson House in Van Nuys, California, the Andrews Mansion in Indianapolis, Indiana and the Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana
burnt offering - (definition) a sacred sacrifice to pagan deities contrary to a blood sacrifice