No Wood, No Fire: The Breakers Mansion and Alice’s Ghost

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 7, 2026 · How we verify

Cornelius Vanderbilt II wanted a house that could not burn. The Breakers mansion, standing on the cliffs above Easton Bay in Newport, Rhode Island, was built between 1893 and 1895 on ground where an earlier summer house had gone up in flames, and its owner insisted on masonry and steel trusses with no wooden parts anywhere in the structure. It is the grandest surviving statement of the Gilded Age in America. It is also the subject of a persistent, entirely unverified story about a woman in period dress who is said to be seen on the second floor, where Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt’s oval bedroom still sits.

The House on Ochre Point Avenue in Numbers

• Address: 44 Ochre Point Avenue, Newport
• Built: 1893 to 1895, for Cornelius Vanderbilt II
• Architect: Richard Morris Hunt, Renaissance Revival, with interiors by Jules Allard and Sons and Ogden Codman Jr.
• Size: 70 rooms, a gross area of 138,300 square feet, a footprint of roughly one acre on a 14 acre estate
• Status: National Register of Historic Places since 1971, National Historic Landmark since 1994
• Owner: The Preservation Society of Newport County, which runs it as a historic house museum open year round

Built on the Ashes of Pierre Lorillard’s House

Vanderbilt bought the grounds in 1885 for $450,000. The mansion standing there at the time had belonged to Pierre Lorillard IV, and it burned on 25 November 1892. Vanderbilt hired Richard Morris Hunt to rebuild in splendour, and the fire shaped every decision that followed. No wooden parts. Steel trusses over a foundation of brick, concrete and limestone. Indiana limestone walls under red terra cotta tile. The boiler was banished from the house entirely and buried in an underground space below the front lawn. The kitchen was pushed to the far end of the first floor, away from the main house, so that neither flame nor cooking smell would reach the family rooms.

What went inside was the opposite of restraint: marble imported from Italy and Africa, rare woods and mosaics from around the world, and architectural elements bought outright from French chateaux, including the library mantel from Arnay-le-Duc in Burgundy, carved with the line “I laugh at great wealth, and never miss it; nothing but wisdom matters in the end.” The dining room runs to 2,400 square feet, lit by two Baccarat crystal chandeliers wired for gas or electricity. In the morning room, eight of the nine muses appear on platinum leafed panels, and all of that room’s woodwork and furnishings were designed and made in France before being shipped to America and assembled here. Upon completion in 1895 it was the largest and most opulent house in Newport, and it was Hunt’s final project.

Alice Vanderbilt’s Thirty-Five Years Alone in It

Cornelius Vanderbilt II barely got to enjoy the house. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a stroke in 1899, aged 55, having lived at The Breakers only about a year in good health. His will left his widow Alice a life interest in the property and the power to leave it to whichever of their children she chose.

She kept it for thirty-five years, and the cost climbed steadily. Property taxes reached $83,000 a year by the mid 1920s. The household ran on 33 indoor servants and 25 further staff, and the boilers burned more than 150 tons of coal annually. Grief was folded into the rooms too: a bronze bust in the library commemorates William Henry Vanderbilt II, the eldest child of Cornelius and Alice, who died of typhoid at 21 while at Yale. Alice died in 1934 at the age of 89, and left the house to her youngest daughter, Countess Gladys Szechenyi, largely because Gladys had no American property and had always loved the estate.

The Woman Said to Walk the Second Floor

The ghost story attached to The Breakers is a single, tightly focused one, and it belongs to Alice. Guests and staff have reported seeing a woman in the fashion of the period on the second floor, near the oval bedroom that Alice used as bedchamber and study. The room is a perfect oval with four closets to accommodate as many as seven changes of clothing a day, a pager for summoning servants, and concealed corridors that let female staff move through unseen. Nothing about the layout is spectral. It simply makes the room the most personal space in a house otherwise built for display, which is very likely why the story settled there rather than in the great hall.

It should be said plainly that none of this is documented in the historical record of the house. There is no incident report, no verified death in the room, no investigation to point to. The mansion’s stewards have not pursued paranormal work on the site. Visitors who come hoping for a confirmed haunting will find the Preservation Society interested in Ogden Codman’s colour schemes and the 1895 Otis elevator rather than in cold spots. What the story does have going for it is the same thing every good house ghost has: a woman who spent thirty-five years of widowhood in a building designed for a life that had ended.

The Third Floor the Family Kept Until 2018

One of the odder facts about The Breakers is that Vanderbilt descendants were living upstairs while tourists walked the rooms below. Gladys leased the house to the Preservation Society in 1948 for $1 a year, with ground floor rooms opening for tours from 1 July at $1.25 plus tax per adult, while she kept a private apartment in the upper floors until her death in 1965. Access from the museum floors was reportedly blocked at first with nothing more elaborate than an infant safety gate on the stairs between the second and third storeys.

The Society bought the house outright on 28 December 1972 for $365,000 from Gladys’s heirs, who gifted much of the furniture and contents along with it. Her daughter Countess Sylvia Szapary was granted life tenancy of the third floor apartment, eight bedrooms and a living room with ocean views carved out of the old quarters for the Vanderbilt sons. After Sylvia’s death in 1998 the Society let the family stay on, one board president writing that it would help to be able to tell visitors that the original owners’ great-grandchildren still lived in the house. Relations soured in 2015 over the Society’s plan for a visitor centre on the grounds, which family members publicly opposed. The Szaparys vacated the third floor in 2018, and those rooms opened for public tours in 2024.

Touring The Breakers Today

The Breakers is open for visits all year, and as of 2017 it was the most visited attraction in Rhode Island with roughly 450,000 people a year through the doors. Wrought iron baroque gates on Ochre Point Avenue mark the entrance, set into a 12 foot limestone and iron fence that encloses everything except the ocean side. Standard tours cover the great hall, library, music room, morning room, billiards room and dining room on the first floor, and the family bedrooms on the second, including the oval room where Alice’s apparition is reported. The grounds are worth time in their own right: pin oaks and red maples along the pea gravel drive, two Blue Atlas Cedars from North Africa, copper and weeping beeches, and a south parterre garden replanted in pink and white alyssum and blue ageratum from a pattern worked out from old photographs.

Go for the architecture and the social history first. If you want the ghost, the honest advice is to treat it as folklore that has grown up around a house full of absent people, and to enjoy the second floor for what it demonstrably is: the private half of the most public mansion in America.

See The Breakers Mansion for Yourself

Sources

• Breakers, The
• Newport County Tax Records
• Last Will and Testament of Alice G. Vanderbilt, 1934 (Si (official site))
• The Vanderbilts and their fortunes
• Newporters doubt that Countess Laszlo Szechenyi will open The Breakers for Summer 1934
• Wikipedia: The Breakers

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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