Gilded Age Second Empire Mansion on Mansion Row
191 Court Street, Binghamton, NY 13901
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Daytime museum admission by donation; paranormal investigation events priced separately. Check venue website for current rates.
Access
Limited Access
Multi-floor historic home with staircases
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1870 · Second Empire Architecture · Gilded Age Residence · Isaac G. Perry Design · National Register of Historic Places
Sherman David Phelps built his Court Street home in 1870, near the peak of Binghamton's industrial prosperity. Phelps had founded the Susquehanna Valley Bank, served as mayor of Binghamton, and accumulated the fortune typical of the era's railroad and banking class. He purchased three adjoining lots on Court Street, demolished the existing houses, and commissioned a three-story Second Empire residence at a reported cost of roughly $120,000.
The architect was Isaac G. Perry, later known for designing the New York State Capitol's interior in Albany. Builder John Stewart Wells executed the work. The completed house featured marble floors, hand-carved woodwork, fresco ceilings, and a slate-clad mansard roof that signaled the new continental fashion sweeping post-Civil-War American cities. Court Street at the time was lined with similar residences and was known locally as Mansion Row; the Phelps house is the only one of that row still standing today.
After Phelps's death the home passed through family hands until 1905, when it was acquired by the Monday Afternoon Club, a women's literary and civic society founded by two schoolteachers as a network for professional women. The club used the mansion as its headquarters for the next century, preserving much of the original interior in the process. When the Monday Afternoon Club disbanded in 2006, it transferred ownership of the building and its contents to a newly formed nonprofit, the Phelps Mansion Museum, which has operated it as a public-access historic house ever since.
The mansion is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a featured site on New York State's Haunted History Trail.
Sources
The Phelps Mansion's reputation as a site of reported paranormal activity has developed gradually since the home opened to the public. Museum staff and volunteers have described the lingering sense of being watched in particular rooms, footsteps in unoccupied upper hallways, and the unexplained movement of small objects between docent shifts.
Local tradition holds that Sherman Phelps never quite left the home he built. Several family members died within the house during the late nineteenth century, an unremarkable fact for a residence of that era but one that has accumulated lore over time. Visitors on guided tours have reported brief glimpses of figures in period dress and the impression of a man observing them from doorways on the main staircase landing.
Since partnering with the New York-based group Empirical Paranormal, the museum has hosted scheduled public investigations after closing. Participants use standard investigation equipment and access areas not always included on the daytime tour. The reported phenomena across these sessions cluster in the master bedroom suite and the ballroom level, with EVP attempts and reports of cold spots being the most consistently documented.
The mansion appears on PBS's Haunted History segment for the region and is one of the anchor sites on New York's Haunted History Trail, a state-tourism program that links roughly seventy historic locations with reported paranormal activity.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Tour the three-floor 1870 Second Empire home of banker and former Binghamton mayor Sherman D. Phelps, the last surviving mansion on Court Street's onetime Mansion Row. Rooms preserve Gilded Age woodwork, marble floors, and original furnishings, with docents covering Phelps family history and the building's later century as headquarters of the Monday Afternoon Club.
After-hours investigation events hosted by the museum in partnership with Empirical Paranormal. Sessions run on a published seasonal schedule and cover the parlor, master bedroom, and ballroom levels where staff and visitors report the strongest activity.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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