Did Edith Wharton suffer from a lifelong spirit attachment, or was it something psychosomatic? In her autobiography A Backward Glance, she wrote about a “dark undefinable menace” that seemed to follow her for decades. The featureless figure that haunted her until her death on August 11, 1937, continues to lurk in the shadows of The Mount, Wharton’s later-in-life home in Lenox, Massachusetts.
The American novelist, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, had a laundry list of phobias that probably seemed irrational to the average person. She was afraid of animals except for the small furry dogs that she treated like her children. In fact, she had a pet cemetery for her beloved puppies on her estate and she would gaze from her bedroom window at their final resting spot.
Wharton would have debilitating panic attacks when she visited her family. She had an irrational fear that a crone would open the door at her parent’s home. She also strongly disliked supernatural-themed stories, especially fairy tales featuring women with magical powers. Wicked witches and evil stepmothers mortified her on a deep, visceral level. Wharton couldn’t even sleep in a room that contained a book of ghost stories until her late twenties.
The famed author was born into New York’s aristocracy. The phrase, “Keeping up with the Joneses?” describes her family. Wharton’s father, George Frederic Jones, made his money from real estate during the Gilded Age and she lived in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island, most of her childhood. Wharton’s relationship with her mother, Lucretia, was strained and it’s believed that her neuroses were exacerbated by strict parenting.
She suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from a near-fatal bout with typhoid fever during a family vacation in Germany’s Black Forest. Wharton was only nine years old when she was stricken with the illness. She was quarantined in the German hospital and was completely cut off from visitors, including her parents. Wharton’s only human contact was the white-robed doctor who treated her. The physician would hover in the doorway, rather than entering her hospital room, to avoid the contagion.
Based on a psychological analysis from Lenor C. Terr’s book called Childhood Trauma and the Creative Product, Wharton possibly replayed the trauma over and over throughout her life. Could this traumatic childhood image be the source of the shadow figure that haunted Wharton? Terr believes the doctor-in-the-doorway scene was responsible for her irrational fear of thresholds. The psychologist also argued that the forced isolation in the Black Forest was at the heart of Wharton’s ghost stories—such as “All Souls,” which featured a bedridden protagonist—and continued to traumatize her into adulthood.
In other words, the only ghosts that existed in Wharton’s world were the ones that lived inside her head.
But that doesn’t explain the shadow-figure manifestations seen not only by Wharton herself, but spotted by visitors at The Mount in the Berkshires. Could it be a “thought-form” or “tulpa” haunting the author’s estate in Lenox? A thought-form entity is created by the human mind and given energy from an individual or group of people. It’s not a spirit in the traditional sense, but a projection of the concentrated thoughts of living people.
I reached out to my friends in the paranormal community and they strongly believe that human-created entities are possible. “Thought-forms are real energy,” explained Barbara Williams, a psychic-medium based in Maine. Ken DeCosta, a respected paranormal researcher and founder of Riseup Paranormal Society in Rhode Island, agreed with Williams. “Once any thought is fully formed, it becomes something tangible,” he told me, adding that he’s experienced thought-forms out in the field and was able to measure them.
Could the entity lurking in the shadows of The Mount be a “thought-form” created by Wharton’s deepest, darkest fears? It’s possible.
LENOX, MA—It felt as if we were being transported back in time when my friend Andrew Warburton and I pulled into the labyrinthine driveway leading up to Edith Wharton’s The Mount. I was psychically drawn to the Georgian Revival gatehouse and stable near the entrance, but I was unable to check it out because it was locked during the winter months.
There was an inexplicable, “something wicked this way comes” vibe as we entered the estate’s promenade hidden behind a series of well-manicured pleached linden trees. Wharton strongly viewed her gardens as a series of outdoor rooms, living in harmony with the house’s white-stucco exterior accented with dark green shutters and juxtaposed with the Berkshire’s rustic landscape.
Mission accomplished.
However, as we inched closer to the turn-of-the-century house museum that Wharton lovingly called her “first real home,” it felt like we were being watched. Wharton wrote about being “haunted by formless horrors.” Were the shadows from The Age of Innocence author’s past peering at us from the third-floor window?
Wharton and her husband Edward (Teddy) lived in The Mount from 1902 to 1911. After the couple left, the house became a private residence, a girls’ dormitory for the Foxhollow School, and home of the theatre company Shakespeare & Company. It was during its tenure as a dormitory and Shakespearean performance space that the ghost sightings seemed to surface. The theatre group’s resident actors reported unexplained sounds and ghostly figures wearing period dress.
In 2009 the team from SyFy’s Ghost Hunters checked out the property and followed it up with a second visit in 2015. During the initial three-day investigation, The Atlantic Paranormal Society, better known as TAPS, captured audio and video evidence suggesting paranormal activity, which included phantom footsteps in empty rooms and disem-bodied voices.
Ghost Hunters returned to The Mount six years later after employees at the museum claimed an increase in activity, including the appearance of two full-bodied apparitions sitting in the drawing room. “The figures, a man and a woman, are reported to be reading in silence in a spot where Wharton and her husband, Teddy, were known to recline,” wrote Jennifer Huberdeau in The Berkshire Eagle on November 17, 2015.
In the article called “Ghost Hunters to air new episode filmed at The Mount in Lenox,” Steve Gonsalves from TAPS talked about several pieces of evidence, including a thermal image of a large handprint that left the paranormal team with more questions than answers when they investigated the property in 2009. “The older the building, the greater possibility that the structure will have seen some trauma, such as family deaths and murder,” Gonsalves told The Eagle via email. “It’s not always connected to the structure though; it could be connected to an object or even the land.”
There was a rumor that a servant hanged herself in the cupola of the mansion after she learned she was pregnant. Not true. The legend was debunked by the TAPS team.
However they did pick up high-frequency readings on the K2 meter when the Ghost Hunters investigated the attic. Also, a “black box” device made a loud shriek during an EVP session in the building’s top floor and two crew members heard phantom footsteps running away from them and down the steps.
In the 2015 episode, the Ghost Hunters revisited the mansion and talked with tour guide Robert Oakes. “When I first started working here at The Mount, I was a skeptic,” Oakes told TAPS. “But I’ve heard so many stories from visitors and staff members. I’ve had unusual experiences, which certainly leads me to believe that something strange is going on here at The Mount,” Oakes said. “I was in the drawing room and there was no one around and I heard what sounded like my name spoken in my ear. That was a strange experience.”
Oakes said he’s heard reports of shadow figures throughout the house, especially near the Henry James guest room on the third floor. “I had a co-worker with me and she was running a broom over the floor,” reported Lisa Pixley, a former housekeeper. “One of the floorboards had come up and at the point a black figure floated by. We both saw it and we were both freaked out. It was very scary.”
Also on the third floor, another woman from the cleaning crew claimed to have seen a shadow figure that was approximately seven feet tall peering at her from the doorway and then leaned back in. Terrified, the housekeeper fled the house and never returned.
Oakes told Ghost Hunters that activity had spiked since the first visit in 2009. “More and more people are coming forward with stories with things that they’ve experienced here,” he explained. “The number of stories keeps growing and growing. Some believe that it’s Edith Wharton at The Mount. However, many people seem to think it’s Teddy Wharton’s presence still lingering in the house.”
The Mount is where the Wharton’s marriage began to unravel. Teddy Wharton’s bouts with depression and the fact that he embezzled Edith’s trust fund took a toll on the couple’s relationship. They sold the estate in 1911 and then got a divorce.
What did the TAPS team find during the 2015 investigation? They picked up a female voice on the third floor and a weird figure appeared in the thermal camera near the Henry James guest room. The evidence, which included the sounds of a doors opening and closing, supported the first-hand anecdotes and suggested that the ghosts lingering on the third floor of the mansion aren’t intelligent but residual, so it’s like a videotaped loop playing over and over.