Beechwood Mansion Newport: Astor Ballroom Behind Locked Gates

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 11, 2026 · How we verify

The Beechwood mansion Newport treated as the Astor family’s summer showplace is one of the few Gilded Age houses on Bellevue Avenue that a visitor today cannot get inside. For nearly thirty years it was the opposite: a ballroom full of costumed actors pretending it was 1891, and a stop on a television ghost hunt. Then it sold, the gates closed, and the Rhode Island house went back to being somebody’s private property.

Quick Facts on Beechwood

Where: 580 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island, within the Bellevue Avenue Historic District.

Built: first version between 1852 and 1853, in the Italianate style, to designs by Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux.

Rebuilt: after a fire in 1855, with Vaux altering the original plans.

Famous owners: William Backhouse Astor Jr. and Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, “the Mrs. Astor”.

Current status: private residence, not open to the public as of 2025.

Downing Never Saw the Site, and Vaux Finished the House

Beechwood began as a marine villa for Daniel Parish, a New York clothing merchant whose business reached into Southern cities. Parish commissioned the design from Downing and Vaux, and the plan was for Downing to travel out and see the building site with him in July 1852. That trip never happened. Downing died in a steamboat accident before reaching New York, and Vaux carried the work through alone, completing the house in 1853 with what he called a Palladian spirit and publishing it in his book Villas and Cottages in 1857.

The fire came in 1855. The house was rebuilt the following year with alterations to the original drawings, Vaux superintending the construction. So the building standing on Bellevue Avenue today is already the second Beechwood, which is worth remembering when anyone tells you what happened in a particular room in the 1850s.

What $190,941.50 Bought the Astors in 1880

William Backhouse Astor Jr. bought Beechwood in 1880 for $190,941.50, and Richard Morris Hunt renovated the estate in 1881. His wife, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, became the social arbiter known simply as the Mrs. Astor, and between 1888 and 1890 she brought Hunt back for extensive further work, including a ballroom sized to hold the famous “Four Hundred”. The house also carried a library, a dining room, and a music room papered in wallpaper imported from Paris. Beechwood became the setting for her dinner parties, which is to say it was built up specifically as a machine for deciding who mattered in American society.

Mrs. Astor died in 1908 and left Beechwood to her son, John Jacob Astor IV. He married his second wife, Madeleine, in the ballroom in 1911. He died on the Titanic in 1912, and the house passed to his son Vincent, who later rented it to the New York financier Robert R. Young. In 1940 Vincent sold it to Allene Tew and her fifth husband, Count Pavel de Kotzebue, and over the following four decades it changed hands repeatedly.

Twenty Actors and a Permanent 1891

The Beechwood most people remember arrived in 1981, when Paul M. Madden of Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, a recent graduate of the National Film and Television School in the United Kingdom, bought the place and reopened it with 20 costumed actors trained to stay in character as butlers, footmen, maids, and doormen. Working with the University of Rhode Island history and drama departments, he founded the Beechwood Theatre Company, which eventually ran live theatrical tours for more than a million visitors.

The conceit was total. From February to May the actors played Astor servants and treated arriving visitors as applicants for summer jobs on Mrs. Astor’s staff. In summer they played the family. Everyone on the premises maintained that the year was 1891. Tours covered both the family’s side of the house and the servants’ side, with its kitchens and quarters, including the rooms where Astor children lived until they were considered adults at 17.

Madden also used the house for large social events: a recreation of the “400 Ball”, a dinner dance for Vice President and Mrs. George Bush on August 14, 1981, and the British America’s Cup Challenge Ball in 1983 in honor of Prince Andrew, a dinner for a thousand guests with the Regimental Band of Her Majesty’s Irish Guards playing.

What Ghost Hunters Went Looking For at Beechwood

Beechwood’s paranormal reputation rests on a thin documentary record. The house was featured in a second season episode of Ghost Hunters, in which the TAPS team investigated claims of paranormal activity there. That is the extent of what can be verified from the record: that claims existed and that a television crew came to test them. No specific apparition, no named spirit, no documented death in the house survives in the public account of the estate.

It is fair to note the context. For three decades this was a mansion staffed by actors in Victorian costume who moved through servants’ corridors and back stairs while in character. A building run that way generates stories with very little help from anything supernatural. Anyone who repeats a detailed Beechwood ghost tale should be asked where it came from.

Why You Cannot Tour Beechwood Anymore

In January 2010 the estate sold for $10.5 million to Oracle Corporation co-founder Larry Ellison, who had been in Newport the previous summer training with his BMW Oracle Racing team. The deed filed at City Hall documents the sale of the 39-room mansion. Ellison reportedly spent over $100 million restoring the mansion and the other estate buildings toward the condition Richard Morris Hunt gave them in 1881, though as of August 2018 landscaping of the grounds had not begun. A permanent certificate of occupancy was issued in December 2017.

As of 2012 the stated plan was to convert the first floor into a “Beechwood Art Museum” for his collection of 18th and 19th century art. In February 2019 it was reported that Ellison had bought the Seacliff home at 562 Bellevue Avenue for $11 million, giving him every property between Rosecliff and Marble House and reuniting the original nine acre estate William B. Astor Jr. assembled in 1881.

For now the answer is simple: as of 2025 Beechwood remains a private residence and is not open to the public. You can see the facade from Bellevue Avenue and nothing more. Newport has no shortage of Gilded Age houses that do let visitors in, and readers who want the interior have one other option, which is the house playing itself in season one, episode 8 of the HBO series The Gilded Age.

Address: 580 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island

See Beechwood for Yourself

Sources

• Mrs. William Astor Entertains; Reception at Beechwood, Newport, for Her Granddaughter, Miss Van Alen.
• Takes Astor Estate; Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, Jr., Leases Beechwood, Newport, for Summer. (The New York Times)
• The Marley Bridges Theatre Company
• Astors Beechwood mansion in Newport may be sold for $10.5 million
• Beechwood's owner has museum plan
• Wikipedia: Beechwood (Astor mansion)

Ghost Tours Nearby

Olde Town Ghost Walk★ 4.5 (235)from $24Newport Ghosts: Seaside Hauntings and Hags Tour★ 4.2 (134)from $26Walking Historical Ghost Tour Through Newport RI★ 4.9 (73)from $23

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