"Grey Gardens Is Haunted," Two Former Occupants Confirm
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The full story of Grey Gardens is featured in season 2 of House Beautiful’s haunted house podcast, Dark House. Listen to the episodes here and here.
The story of East Hampton’s iconic Grey Gardens estate is equal parts fascinating, mysterious, and hair-raising. Originally built for a newspaper heiress, the oceanfront mansion fit in perfectly among the other grand homes in the country’s most expensive zip code. However, by the 1960s, the property was near ruin, overrun by raccoons, infested with fleas, and covered in cobwebs. Though the estate has since been beautifully restored, according to some who have lived there, the house is definitely haunted.
"For 50 years people would come to [Grey Gardens] and they'd all have the same conclusion: That it was definitely a haunted house," the former homeowner Sally Quinn tells Dark House podcast hosts Hadley Mendelsohn and Alyssa Fiorentino. Aside from owning the infamous Hamptons estate of Grey Gardens for over four decades, Quinn also ran her own Washington Post column on religion and has written several books. But perhaps most intriguing of all her accomplishments: Quinn is a self-proclaimed psychic witch. And she's here to confirm that Grey Gardens is indeed haunted.
"I mean, what would make me say, 'this is the most beautiful house when I've ever seen,' when it was a garbage pit? The floor of the living room was sunken. And I went to the piano, I went 'dink, dink, dink,' and the whole piano just collapsed," she recalls of her first visit to the house. 'The glassed-in porch was completely shattered and covered with vines. But I just knew. Sometimes I have those feelings—I'm psychic."
Indeed, it would take quite the visionary to see beyond Grey Gardens's dilapidated state in 1979 when Quinn first encountered the home, which was made famous by the 1975 film Grey Gardens, starring then-owners "Big" and "Little" Edie Bouvier Beale, aunt and cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (you can read more about the home's history here). So, what convinced her that she and her family weren't alone in the home?
"It's haunted by two people: Anna Gilman Hill, the famous gardener who was in the East Hampton Historical Society [and former owner]," says Quinn. "Occasionally, you could just feel her kind of wafting around the upstairs, just floating down the hall. She was wearing a long skirt and a gardener's blouse with a scarf around her neck... One night, she walked into our bedroom and Ben sat up in bed and said, 'What's that?' And I looked up and saw her standing there and she just kind of stood in the doorway for a few minutes and then disappeared. My son saw her a number of times and one housekeeper who came out to stay with us left the next morning because she was so freaked out by the ghost."
Another ghost was less easy to name, but Quinn's money is on a secret lover of Little Edie's who she calls "The Sea Captain." Quinn suspects this mystery man would visit her Rapunzel style vis-a-vis a ladder so that Big Edie wouldn't find out about their rendezvous. Her theory? "I think that he fell off the ladder and was killed. I'm not sure, but you could hear [someone] clumping around at night in the yellow room that was Little Edie's old bedroom," she divulges, adding, "I never told people the house was haunted and never told them specifically that the yellow room was haunted because some people just would get too scared." One such guest was none other than Arizona senator Barry Goldwater.
"He was staying with us and my parents were there, too, so I put him in the yellow guest room," she recalls. "The next morning I came downstairs and Barry was lying on the sofa in the kitchen, and I said, 'what are you doing here?' He said, 'there's some goddamn ghost up there in that room and I'm not spending another night there.' So, I know I'm not the only one who saw ghosts."
If you're a nonbeliever, though, she gets it. "What can I tell you? All I can tell you is that I saw this, it was weird, and it's inexplicable."
Before the Bradlees and Quinns ever set foot in Grey Gardens, both Big and Little Edie as well as their extended house guest and close friend Lois Wright believed it was haunted. During a short scene featuring archival footage shot by the Maysles brothers in Lee Radziwill's 2018 film That Summer, the Beales are overheard talking on the phone with Lois, arguing about an apparition.
"Lois, darling, I made visual contact with somebody in mother’s room," says Little Edie.
"Yes, I pierced the veil. I made no identification, I saw no features no face but there were no workmen here. We may be getting into very dangerous territory here!"
"You know there's only one person I hope it was," she continues, in reference to a former lover, Julius A. "Captain" Krug, who had recently died.
The viewer can also see the mess in the background that got the home famous—and may well be scarier to most than the prospect of any ghosts, but was actually embraced by both Edies. In archival footage, Little Edie remarks on the deteriorated state of the once-grand home, explaining, "Oh, Mother thinks its artistic this way, like a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Don't you love the overgrown Louisiana Bayou look?"
As an artist, palmist, and generally spiritual woman, Wright had a few otherworldly experiences in the home herself. On her very first night in the mansion, she said she thought she saw a ghost she recognized as Big Edie’s brother and Kennedy Onassis's father, "Black Jack" Vernou Bouvier. One passage in her published logbook from the year she lived in Grey Gardens reads, "I didn’t finish the page in my logbook and therefore I don’t know why I wrote it: ‘Felt a presence in my room last night.’ Perhaps I didn’t care to describe it." Another time she writes, “One of the animals made a great deal of noise last night. Or was it the animals, since I couldn’t see them? In a deserted room next to mine, it sounded like a mattress being pushed and slid across the floor." The deserted room was likely the Yellow Room, based on the layout of the home.
Wright also mentioned that the Beale women often bolted themselves into their room at night, to protect themselves and their many cats, from "ghosts, rats, and heavens know what else walked through the house at night." Perhaps most notable is the following ghostly tale: "This morning, a large puddle of urine suddenly appeared on the floor of the eye room. I heard it pour on the floor and could smell it. A raccoon in the attic no doubt. I looked up at the ceiling and found it was dry and clean, nothing! Odd. perhaps a spirit of some kind…" So, why wasn't she scared? "It was impossible to worry, some of the ghosts were so reassuring," Lois claimed. But, when she left the home about thirteen months after she got there and only a few months before Big Edie passed away, she felt a shift.
A late entry prior to her departure reads: "Perhaps I will leave soon. There seems to be a change. The house wants something." A few days later, she writes: "I have a feeling that a strong current, a stream of consciousness that runs through the house is moving me swiftly and gently from the Eye Room as if it were doing me a favor. I did wonder how the Beales would get along. I knew the terrible answer within a few weeks. As I packed, I realized a couple of ghosts-spirits were leaving with me, and I was glad of it."
Wright also claims to have seen Big Edie in a vision after her death. Once Little Edie sold the property to Quinn, Wright showed up at Grey Gardens to pass the message along to Quinn, alerting her that Big Edie's spirit said she'd oversee the renovations and make sure everything went smoothly despite the many challenges the project seemed to present. They did indeed come in under budget and finished earlier than predicted, leading Quinn to believe that Big Edie's spirit was watching over everything. Wright's second book is a memoir aptly entitled The Ghost of Grey Gardens.
Another famous line in the movie? Little Edie, eyes darting around the front porch with summer sounds buzzing in the dark beyond, whispers through laughter to the camera: "I can't stand a country house. In the first place, it makes me terribly nervous. I'm scared to death of doors, locks, people roaming around in the background, under the trees, in the bushes. I'm absolutely terrified." So, was it just shadows playing tricks on the women of Grey Gardens or something else? Perhaps we'll never know for certain!
Curious to hear more about Grey Gardens? Listen to this episode of our haunted house podcast series, Dark House, for exclusive ghost stories and insights into the home's compelling history.
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