The Cherry Hill Murder: Albany’s Last Public Hanging

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 18, 2026 · How we verify

Most Albany ghost stories attach themselves to a building. The Cherry Hill murder attaches itself to a household: seventeen people living under one gambrel roof on South Pearl Street in Albany, New York, two of them plotting the death of a third. The killing happened in 1827, the trial that followed was contentious enough to draw national attention, and the man convicted of it went to the gallows in the last public hanging the city ever staged. The house is still there, on its rise above the Hudson.

Cherry Hill was built in 1787 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. Its builder, Colonel Philip Kiliaen van Rensselaer, put it up for his bride Maria Sanders, a granddaughter of Peter Schuyler. Van Rensselaer descendants lived in it for nearly two centuries, and because they did, the house kept not only its original interior finishes but its furniture, portraits, kitchenware and family papers. That continuity is the real reason the place matters, and it is also why the murder in its parlor is documented rather than merely whispered about.

The Farmstead Philip van Rensselaer Named Cherry Hill

Philip Kiliaen van Rensselaer married Maria Sanders in 1768, at the age of 21. He ran the family mercantile business out of the South Pearl Street home, selling West Indies imports and buying local farm and forest products to ship down the Hudson on the sloops that carried most of the region’s trade. During the Revolutionary War he served on the local Committee of Correspondence and later acted as a civilian liaison on the supply chain, and by the end of the war Philip Schuyler trusted him to command ten men and oversee the storage of ordnance.

In 1787 he hired a local carpenter, Isaac Packard, to replace the older house standing on the farm he had begun building south of the city limits. The result pairs a Georgian body with the gambrel roof that van Rensselaer’s Dutch forebears favored, a frame dwelling of five bays by four on a stone foundation, clapboard sided, two and a half storys tall. The family moved in later that year. By 1790 the farm ran to almost a thousand acres, and that year’s census records a tannery and a brewery on the property. Van Rensselaer was elected the first supervisor of the newly created Town of Bethlehem in 1794 and died four years later, three months after filing his will. His widow and children stayed on until her death in 1824.

One son, Solomon van Rensselaer, served in the U.S. House of Representatives, as Albany’s postmaster and as the state’s adjutant general. In 1824 he hosted the Marquis de Lafayette at Cherry Hill during the Revolutionary War hero’s return tour of the United States. Three years later the house acquired a very different kind of fame.

Elsie Lansing, Jesse Strang, and the Killing of John Whipple

In 1827 seventeen people were living at Cherry Hill. One of them was John Whipple, a prosperous businessman who had married into the van Rensselaer family. His wife, Elsie Lansing, became romantically involved with Jesse Strang, a drifter who had abandoned his own wife and children in Putnam County and was working in the house as a servant under an assumed name. The two of them plotted Whipple’s murder, and they carried it out.

Strang was caught and confessed in full. The reasoning behind that confession is the part of the story that still makes people uneasy: he appears to have believed that Albany’s establishment would never hang a woman of Elsie Lansing’s standing, and that by tying his fate to hers he would be spared along with her. The calculation failed in the worst possible way. She was acquitted. He was convicted and sentenced to death, and his execution was the last public hanging in Albany’s history. The affair drew national attention, and many observers at the time read Strang as a victim of the socioeconomic inequities of the era rather than simply as a killer.

A Family Fortune Running Out of Road

The class hegemony the van Rensselaers had sat atop since Dutch colonial times was already fraying when Whipple died. Family lands, the original source of the money, were being subdivided and sold, and the semi-feudal patroonship system of land ownership was under legal threat with nothing lined up to replace it. The Erie Canal and the railroads then built industrial fortunes that dwarfed anything the van Rensselaers had, and brought immigrants into Albany who diluted the old families’ political grip. Development pushed south onto the ancestral acreage. By 1872 the ground around Cherry Hill could no longer be called rural, and the city formally annexed it that year. The two dormers on the roof were added sometime between 1850 and 1880.

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the house belonged to Catherine Putman Rankin, a van Rensselaer cousin, with industry and worker housing pressing in close. Rankin and then her daughter Emily spent their time preserving what remained. Emily Rankin died in 1963 and specified in her will that the house should become a museum. Five years later it did.

What Is Actually Reported at Cherry Hill

Here the guide has to be blunt. The documentary record used for this entry covers the construction, the family, the murder, the hanging, the museum and the restoration, and it does not record a single apparition, a single disembodied footstep, or a single named witness to anything unexplained inside the house. Cherry Hill’s reputation as a dark place rests on the Whipple killing and its aftermath, not on a body of reported sightings.

That distinction is worth holding onto. A house where a murder is a matter of court record attracts ghost stories the way a lightning rod attracts weather, and local retellings will supply them. Anything you encounter online about figures on the stairs or activity in the parlor should be treated as oral tradition until someone produces a source for it. The verified horror at Cherry Hill is the one that happened in daylight, in front of seventeen people, and ended on a public scaffold.

Visiting Cherry Hill on South Pearl Street

The house stands on the west side of South Pearl Street, which carries New York State Route 32, between McCarty and First avenues, just north and west of Interstate 787. A driveway climbs from South Pearl a short distance south of the onramp. The slight rise gives the site a view of the Hudson and of the Port of Albany-Rensselaer about half a mile east. Nineteenth-century rowhouses line McCarty and First; the rest of the block is undeveloped and wooded.

Plan before you travel. The collection runs to roughly 20,000 objects, including all of the house’s original furnishings and tableware, plus 30,000 historic documents from the van Rensselaer family archives, and some pieces, such as original eighteenth-century rugs, have been loaned to institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most of that material was stored in the attic, and by the twenty-first century its weight was straining the structural system badly enough that it had to be moved before the building collapsed. In 2009 Cherry Hill closed to visitors and began a four-phase, $3.2 million restoration paid for by a mix of public and private grants. Check with the Historic Cherry Hill Association, which operates the site, for current access and tour arrangements rather than assuming the door will be open.

Address: South Pearl Street (New York State Route 32), Albany, New York

See Cherry Hill for Yourself

Sources

• Albany mansion may be history
• Historic Cherry Hill Unpacks After 10-Year Restoration Project
• National Register of Historic Places Registration: New York SP Cherry Hill (Archives (official))
• Albany Quadrangle, New York, Albany, Rensselaer Cos.
• Cherry Hill Manor, Albany, NY
• Wikipedia: Cherry Hill (Albany, New York)

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