Craig House — America's first licensed private psychiatric hospital, treating Zelda Fitzgerald and Rosemary Kennedy — reopened in May 2026 as an overnight-bookable luxury inn after 25 years vacant.
2 Tioronda Ave, Beacon, NY 12508
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$$
Luxury inn; room rates reflect the $73 million restoration. See beacon.mirbeau.com for current pricing.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Restored historic mansion with elevator access; grounds include garden paths
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1859 · America's First Privately Licensed Psychiatric Hospital (Craig House, 1915) · Zelda Fitzgerald Patient March–May 1934 · Rosemary Kennedy Patient · Civil War General Joseph Howland Estate (1859)
The Tioronda Estate at Beacon, New York was constructed beginning in 1859 for Joseph Howland, a New York merchant who served as a brigadier general in the Union Army during the Civil War. The name Tioronda is of Lenape origin. Howland and his wife Eliza Woolsey Howland owned the estate until the early twentieth century; the Woolsey family had prominent connections to Civil War nursing through Eliza and her sisters.
In 1915, Dr. John Turner Craig purchased the Tioronda mansion and converted it into Craig House, positioning it as America's first institution to obtain a private license to operate a psychiatric hospital under New York State law. Craig House operated on a model distinct from the large state asylums of the era: private rooms, grounds for outdoor exercise, therapeutic programming, and discretion for its wealthy clientele.
The patient record at Craig House over its eight decades of operation reads as a catalog of mid-twentieth century cultural figures whose mental health crises were managed out of public view. Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was admitted in March 1934 during one of her psychiatric episodes and remained through May 1934; Atlas Obscura has documented her stay from the period records. Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of John F. Kennedy, spent time at Craig House. Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote were also treated there, according to the Mirbeau Inn's own historical documentation.
Craig House closed in 1999 as financial pressures, changing psychiatric practice, and the end of the private-institution model made its operation unsustainable. The mansion sat vacant for more than twenty-five years, during which its condition was documented by urban explorers and the building was the subject of repeated preservation advocacy.
A $73 million restoration project converted the mansion and grounds into Mirbeau Inn & Spa Beacon, which opened in May 2026. The inn operates 72 guest rooms in the restored historic mansion and ancillary structures on the property.
Sources
Craig House entered the abandoned-places documentation circuit after closing in 1999. Atlas Obscura's entry — titled 'Zelda Fitzgerald's Abandoned Sanatorium' — became one of the more-read pieces about the site, drawing visitors interested in both the literary history and the ruin aesthetics of the decaying mansion.
The site's paranormal potential derives primarily from its twenty-five years of vacancy and its specific patient history. Zelda Fitzgerald's time at Craig House in 1934 followed years of psychiatric episodes and preceded her death in a 1948 fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. The gap between the glamour of the Jazz Age literary world she and Scott Fitzgerald inhabited and the institutional reality of her treatment at Craig House is the kind of contrast that paranormal narrative tends to colonize.
The $73 million restoration and May 2026 reopening as Mirbeau Inn & Spa have introduced a new layer to the building's biography. Whether guests in the restored mansion will generate paranormal reports — and whether those reports will cohere into a consistent lore — is a question the building's new life is only beginning to answer. The building's documented history is sufficient to draw visitors without any embellishment.
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Media Appearances
Book a room in the restored neo-Gothic Tioronda mansion, built in 1859 for General Joseph Howland and converted in 1915 into Craig House, America's first privately licensed psychiatric hospital. Guests sleep in the same restored corridors where Zelda Fitzgerald, Rosemary Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Truman Capote were treated.
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