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1897 mansion of North Adams's first mayor; a 1914 crash triggered four deaths in ten days. Now closed to the public.
172 Church Street, North Adams, MA 01247
Research updated August 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Private property; the exterior is visible from Church Street. The building is not on a public tour schedule and has been vacant since a 2017 sale.
Access
Limited Access
Residential sidewalk on a sloped street; the house sits above street level on a hillside lawn.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1897 · Home of North Adams's first mayor, Albert C. Houghton · Church Street-Caddy Hill Historic District (NRHP, 1985) · Georgian Revival design by architect Henry Neill Wilson · North Adams Masonic Lodge property, 1926-2017
Albert Charles Houghton served as the first mayor of North Adams and built his fortune as president of Arnold Print Works and the Beaver Mill, two of the textile firms that drove the city's Gilded Age growth. In 1897, at the height of that prosperity, he commissioned a Georgian Revival mansion at 172 Church Street from Berkshires architect Henry Neill Wilson. The house is a contributing property in the Church Street-Caddy Hill Historic District, added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 25, 1985.
On August 1, 1914, Houghton, his daughter Mary, and family friends Dr. and Mrs. Robert Hutton were being driven through Pownal, Vermont, when the car swerved to avoid a group of horses on a road under repair and rolled down an embankment. Sybil Hutton was killed instantly. Mary Houghton survived the initial crash but died later that afternoon at North Adams Hospital. Albert Houghton, then seventy years old, never recovered from his injuries and died at the mansion ten days later, on August 11. The Houghtons' longtime chauffeur, John Widders, who had been driving that day, took his own life the following morning.
Houghton's surviving daughters inherited the mansion and sold it to the North Adams Masonic Lodge (Lafayette-Greylock Lodge) in 1926, which used it as a Masonic temple for the following nine decades. The Lodge sold the property to a private developer in 2017 for $160,000; it has remained largely vacant since, with reported plans for hotel conversion that have not been completed. The mansion is not open to the public.
Sources
Houghton Mansion's paranormal reputation grew out of the Masonic Lodge's decades of occupancy after 1926. Lodge members described shadow figures on the stairs, disembodied voices, and doors that opened and closed without anyone nearby — activity they connected to the 1914 tragedy that killed Mary Houghton, her friend Sybil Hutton, Albert Houghton, and chauffeur John Widders within the span of eleven days.
The Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures crew investigated the mansion for the second episode of the show's first season, broadcast October 25, 2008, one of the program's earliest cases. Zak Bagans and his team reported EVP recordings and equipment activity during their overnight lockdown. Seven years later, the Syfy series Ghost Hunters covered the property in "Houghton Hears a Who?" (season 10, episode 9, aired October 21, 2015); the TAPS team reported footsteps on a staircase with no one present and described communicating with a presence using EMF equipment, while Lodge members recounted their own history of shadow figures and touches.
Most tellings of the story attribute the mansion's activity to Widders, framing his death as an act of grief and self-blame over the crash rather than dwelling on how it occurred. No specific claims about the Houghton family members' own spirits appearing have been documented beyond general "presence" reports tied to the family tragedy as a whole.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
See the 1897 Georgian Revival mansion designed by Berkshires architect Henry Neill Wilson for Albert C. Houghton, North Adams's first mayor, from the public sidewalk on Church Street. The building is part of the Church Street-Caddy Hill Historic District and is not open for interior tours.
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