A stone manor house built c.1680 by Royal Navy officer Christopher Billopp at the southernmost tip of Staten Island; site of the September 11, 1776 peace conference between Lord Howe and Franklin, Adams, and Rutledge.
7455 Hylan Boulevard, Staten Island, NY 10307
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Admission set by the Conference House Association; check conferencehouse.org for current rates.
Access
Limited Access
Historic manor house with stairs; surrounding park has paved paths
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1680 · c.1680 fieldstone manor — among NYC's oldest buildings · Original land grant: Manor of Bentley (1676) · Site of September 11, 1776 Staten Island Peace Conference · National Historic Landmark
The Conference House sits at the southernmost tip of Staten Island, in Tottenville at 7455 Hylan Boulevard, within Conference House Park. The building is a two-story stone manor of native fieldstone constructed circa 1680 by Captain Christopher Billopp, a British naval officer who had been granted a 932-acre property known as the Manor of Bentley by the Crown in 1676. The Billopp family held the house through the colonial period.
The building's principal place in American history is the unsuccessful Staten Island Peace Conference of September 11, 1776. Lord Admiral Richard Howe, the British commander, hosted American delegates Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge in an effort to negotiate an end to the Revolutionary War. The talks failed, and the war continued for seven more years.
After the Revolution, the house was confiscated by the State of New York. Over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the building served variously as a multi-family dwelling, a hotel, and — most curiously — a rat-poison factory, before falling into disrepair. The house was deeded to the City of New York in 1926; it has been administered as a historic-house museum since restoration efforts in the twentieth century, and is now operated by the Conference House Association in partnership with the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation. The Conference House is a National Historic Landmark and is one of the oldest surviving structures within New York City.
Sources
The most-repeated paranormal claim at the Conference House concerns Christopher Billopp and a young servant — variously described as a fifteen-year-old maid or 'serving girl' — said to have been working in the house during the Revolution. According to the legend (most fully recounted in Atlas Obscura's entry, in New York Haunted Houses' Billopp House profile, and in the NYC Department of Records & Information Services' 2017 'Haunted Buildings of New York' blog post), Billopp returned from a Continental-army imprisonment to find that the servant had placed a lantern in a window as a signal to American troops across the water at Perth Amboy. Enraged, Billopp threw her down the stairs, killing her instantly.
Visitors and museum staff have reported seeing the apparition of the servant girl in the stairwell and a male figure in colonial dress identified as Billopp himself. Apparitions of British soldiers — drawn from the documented battles and encampments around the manor during the Revolution — have also been described on the grounds; the NYC Records archive notes that several British soldiers are believed to be buried near the house. Neighbors report hearing a man's shouting and a woman's screaming followed by the sound of a fall.
The servant-girl narrative is best understood as folklore: the historical record contains no contemporaneous documentation of a fatal assault, and the story circulates primarily through Conference House ghost-tour material and twentieth-century retellings. We treat the paranormal layer as folkloric.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Guided tour of the c.1680 stone manor and the room where the September 11, 1776 peace conference between Lord Howe and Franklin, Adams, and Rutledge was held. Conference House Park surrounds the building.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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