Stables on the First Floor: Haunted Belcourt Castle, Newport

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 21, 2026 · How we verify

Search for the haunted Belcourt Castle and you will find no shortage of people willing to tell you what walks there. Search the documented history of the building and you find something else: a 60-room summer villa on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, built for a man who put his horses on the ground floor and his bedroom above them, and then nearly missed his own opening season because he was mugged in New York. This entry sticks to that record, and is explicit about where it stops.

Belcourt at a Glance

Belcourt is a former summer cottage designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt for Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, standing on Bellevue Avenue at Lakeview Avenue. Construction began in 1891 and was completed in 1894, for a house intended to be used only six to eight weeks of the year. It runs to 50,000 square feet and 60 rooms, which makes it the third largest mansion in Newport after The Breakers and Ochre Court. It is open today as a tour house, art gallery and event space under the name Belcourt of Newport.

A $3.2 Million Hunting Lodge for a 33-Year-Old

Hunt designed the villa for a 33-year-old Oliver Belmont, basing it on the Louis XIII style hunting lodge at Versailles and incorporating his client’s love of pageantry, history and horses. Belmont wanted the building made precisely to his specifications. Hunt was hesitant, but worked from his guiding principle that it was his client’s money he was spending.

The money was considerable. Construction cost $3.2 million in 1894, roughly $80 million in 2011 dollars. Belmont employed some thirty servants at Belcourt, with aggregate wages of approximately $100 per week, around 40 percent of the national average wage at the time. The exterior was framed in brick and Westerly granite around fields of stucco, with a roof sheathed in Pennsylvania slate and pierced by elliptical ox-eye dormers. Three hundred imported artisans finished the interior in carved oak, mosaic marble floors, sculpted plaster and silk damask. The wrought iron and bronze railings carry a shell motif and the monogram “OB.”

Horses Downstairs, Newport’s First Standing Shower Above

When construction finished in 1894, the entire first floor was given over to carriage space and stables for Belmont’s prized horses, reached through two huge carriage entrances on either side of the north facade. Upstairs was a master bedroom with wall scenes depicting the life of a nobleman, and a bathroom containing Newport’s first standing shower.

The house was scheduled to open for July 4 of that year. It stayed closed for the season instead, because Belmont was hospitalized in New York City as the victim of a mugging. A full year passed before he saw his completed mansion.

Belmont had disdain for the nouveau riche building ostentatious piles between Bellevue Avenue and the Atlantic, so guests arrived through an entrance just off Ledge Road, the short street running parallel to Bellevue. Inside, the Grand Staircase, now a replica of the stairs in the Cluny Museum in France, climbs from the Lower Grand Hall to the Upper Grand Hall. The original blood red damask in the Gothic rooms has long since been replaced with the same fabric in gold.

Alva Belmont Rebuilds the Place

Belmont married his neighbor Alva Vanderbilt, former wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt, on January 11, 1896. She set about reshaping an already eccentric house into something stranger still, converting the carriage room into a banquet hall and turning a study into a boudoir lined with imported 18th-century French paneling. In 1899, Belcourt hosted the nation’s first automobile parade.

Oliver Belmont died in 1908. Alva died in France on January 26, 1933, and Belcourt passed to 80-year-old Perry Belmont, the eldest Belmont child. At the onset of World War II he moved most of the contents to his other estates, Newport being a naval base and a potential target, and select pieces of Alva’s were auctioned off.

Sold for $1,000, Then Rented to the Army

The middle of the twentieth century was unkind to the house. In 1940 Perry Belmont decided to rid himself of it, selling to entrepreneur George Waterman for $1,000 on condition that the castle be restored as closely as possible to Hunt’s original plans. Waterman intended an antique auto museum, repaired the third-floor roof and removed an addition overlooking the courtyard, and was then informed that zoning would not allow the museum.

In 1943 Waterman sold to Edward Dunn, who never lived there during the eleven years he owned it. Dunn rented the stables of the rundown castle to the military for repairing equipment. He sold to Louis and Elaine Lorillard in 1954 for $22,500, and they envisioned the lawns, which could hold more than 10,000 people, as a seat for the Newport Jazz Festival. Neighbors protested. In November 1956 the Lorillards sold the mostly abandoned castle, largely uninhabited for over two decades, to the Tinney family.

The Tinneys, the Chandelier and the Missing Reliquary

The Tinney family of Cumberland, Rhode Island, bought the place in 1956 for $25,000, renamed it Belcourt Castle, and filled it with their own collection of antiques and reproductions, including a coronation coach built by son Donald and a 1701 copy of a Hyacinthe Rigaud portrait of Louis XIV. The centerpiece was an enormous Imperial Russian-style chandelier holding 13,000 rock crystal prisms and 105 lights, hung a few feet above the rose marble mosaic floor of the banquet hall.

They kept altering the house for decades: raising the Organ Loft ceiling 11 feet for a 26-rank tracker organ, converting a kitchen into a coach hall between 1966 and 1970, turning the open loggia into a French salon in 1969, and making the northwest reception room a chapel with German Renaissance stained glass in 1975. In 1983 robbers attempted a million-dollar heist of the antiques. Police recovered many artifacts, but not a 14-pound silver reliquary containing a relic from the third century.

Donald Tinney married Harle Hanson in 1960, who had come to Belcourt to work as a tour guide. She was the only surviving family member when the castle was sold in 2012, and said she was ready to part with the home after her husband’s death in 2006.

What This Record Does Not Say About Ghosts

Belcourt’s reputation as one of the more talked-about haunted houses in New England circulates widely, but the documented history assembled here contains no ghost accounts at all: no apparitions, no named spirits, no dated incidents, no witnesses. That absence is worth stating plainly rather than papering over. Anyone offering you a confident roster of hauntings at Belcourt is drawing on something other than the building’s documented record, and until those claims come with sources, they belong in the category of story rather than history.

What the record does supply is a long list of reasons why a house like this attracts stories. It stood largely uninhabited for over two decades before 1956. It has been filled, since then, with religious objets d’art, Persian rugs, French royal furnishings and a chapel full of Renaissance glass, collected from 33 European and Asian countries and 37 other Newport mansions. A 60-room castle stuffed with other people’s heirlooms and open to paying visitors since 1957 is fertile ground, with or without anything restless in it.

Visiting Belcourt of Newport

On November 12, 2012, Belcourt was purchased for $3.6 million by Carolyn Rafaelian, owner of the Cranston, Rhode Island company Alex and Ani. She reopened it in summer 2014 as a tour house, art gallery and event space under the name Belcourt of Newport, and reports spending $5 million on renovations, including $3 million for a new roof.

Under the Tinneys, over a dozen of the 60 rooms were viewable on tour, including the English library added in 1910 by John Russell Pope, with a ceiling replicating the one in Haddon Hall’s Long Gallery, plus the banquet hall, chapel, music room, Empire-style dining room, French Gothic ballroom and two principal bedrooms. Belcourt was then the only mansion in Newport both open to the public and occupied by its private owner, and Harle Tinney frequently guided tours through her own home.

The grounds are worth time on their own. The lawns hold bronze, terra cotta, marble and stone sculpture depicting mythological scenes, nymphs and cherubs, and the drives are lined with arborvitae the Tinneys planted a few years after moving in. The gate piers on Bellevue Avenue went up in the early 1980s, hung with gates acquired from the Taylor estate in Portsmouth and altered so they stand as the tallest estate entrance in Newport. Check current tour and event schedules before traveling, since the house has changed hands and changed purpose repeatedly.

Address: Bellevue Avenue at Lakeview Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island

See Belcourt of Newport for Yourself

Sources

• Grand Ball at Newport (NYT archives)
• Newport history for sale
• History of Belcourt Castle
• Ghosts Be Gone (The New York Times)
• Newport mansion Belcourt Castle sold to jeweler
• Wikipedia: Belcourt of Newport

Ghost Tours Nearby

Newport Ghosts: Seaside Hauntings and Hags Tour★ 4.2 (137)from $26Olde Town Ghost Walk★ 4.5 (250)from $24Walking Historical Ghost Tour Through Newport RI★ 4.9 (76)from $23

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