Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify
Reported Phenomena
- Phantom organ music
- Unexplained whispering
- Footsteps on the stairs
- Dormitory-era activity
Reported by visitors & local legend. Stories, not verified claims.
Set behind a hedge at the corner of Ruggles and Wetmore avenues in Newport, Rhode Island, Seaview Terrace is the mansion most people know without knowing its name: its turrets and stained glass stood in for Collinwood on the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. It is also known as the Carey Mansion, and it carries a local reputation as one of the state’s most haunted houses, built largely on reports of organ music and whispering in a house whose organ no longer works.
Seaview Terrace at a Glance
- Where: Ruggles and Wetmore avenues, Newport, Rhode Island, near the Cliff Walk
- Built: Interiors completed in 1925, the last of Newport’s great summer cottages
- Style: Chu00e2teauesque, modelled on 16th century French chateaux
- Size: Fifth largest of Newport’s mansions, after The Breakers, Ochre Court, Belcourt Castle and Rough Point
- Access: Privately owned and not open for tours or tourist visits
The Mansion That Arrived by Railroad Car
The strangest fact about Seaview Terrace has nothing to do with ghosts. Much of the house was not built in Newport at all. In 1907, whiskey millionaire Edson Bradley put up a French Gothic mansion on the south side of Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., a pile that covered more than half a city block. It held a Gothic chapel seating 150, a large ballroom, an art gallery, and a 500 seat theatre finished in 1911 that Bradley called Aladdin’s Palace.
In 1923 he began taking it apart and moving it to Newport. An 1885 Elizabethan Revival house called “Sea View” already stood on the property; it was folded into the new design and gave the chateau its name. Work on the exterior ran two years and required many railroad cars and trucks. Rooms that Bradley had imported intact from France and installed in Washington twenty years earlier were dismantled a second time, reassembled in Newport, and the new building was raised around them. It is believed to be one of the largest buildings ever relocated this way.
When the interiors were finished in 1925 there were 17 rooms on the first floor, 25 on the second and 12 on the third. The house cost over $2,000,000. Turrets, stained glass windows, high arching doorways and shell motifs suited to the seaside all made their way into the design, and in 1928 the American League of Architects gave Bradley’s architect, Howard Greenley, a medal for the chateau.
Julia Bradley’s Funeral in the Chapel
The Bradleys had barely four summers in the completed house. Julia Williams Bradley died in August 1929, and her funeral was held in the mansion’s own chapel. Edson Bradley spent five more summers at Seaview Terrace before his death in 1935.
Their daughter, Julie Bradley Shipman, took over the estate and lived there until 1941. Her husband, the Right Reverend Herbert Shipman, Episcopal Bishop of New York, had died in 1930. She left the house after a dispute with the city over three years of unpaid back taxes. During World War II the U.S. Army used the mansion as officers’ quarters, and in 1949 the property sold for only $8,000, a startling figure for a house that had cost two million to assemble.
Burnham-by-the-Sea and the School Years
In 1950 the mansion became an exclusive all girl summer boarding school renamed “Burnham-by-the-Sea,” owned and run by Mr. and Mrs. George Waldo Emerson. During the academic year Mrs. Emerson served as headmistress of the Mary Burnham School for Girls in Northampton, Massachusetts. That school merged into the Stoneleigh-Burnham School in 1968, but the Emersons kept the Newport summer school going until they sold the house. In the regular school year the operation ran as the Newport School for Girls, and in 1971 and 1972 the mansion also housed The New School, grades 2 through 8, under headmaster Fr. Toller Cranston.
Those years matter to the ghost stories. A large share of the reported activity at Seaview Terrace comes from people who slept in the building as students or dormitory residents rather than as guests or tour groups.
Collinwood, Scooby-Doo, and Gatsby Next Door
From 1966 to 1971 the producers of Dark Shadows used Burnham-by-the-Sea as the exterior of the fictional Collinwood Mansion. Its silhouette travelled further than that: the Collinwood look inspired the Kingston Mansion in the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! episode “What the Hex Is Going On?”
In the summer of 1973, The Great Gatsby was filmed next door at Rosecliff, the old Oelrichs property. The children at the school, held to a 9 p.m. curfew, spent their evenings listening to the sound of cars being driven up and down the neighbouring estate.
The Careys and Salve Regina University
Millicent and Martin T. Carey of New York bought the mansion in 1974. Upkeep on one of Newport’s largest houses proved expensive, and the main house and gatehouse were leased to Salve Regina University, which renamed the building the Carey Mansion. The former stables were leased as a dormitory called “Seaview.” The Drawing Room, used by the university for performances and practice, was renamed Cecilia Hall for Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music. During the 1980s the house served as headquarters for the American syndicate of the America’s Cup. Salve Regina ended its lease on August 31, 2009. The Careys’ daughter, Denise Anne Carey, an architect from New York, lives there now.
Organ Music, Whispers, and a Room Built to Carry Them
The best known legend attached to Seaview Terrace holds that Julia Williams Bradley has kept playing the house organ since her 1929 funeral in the chapel. Visitors, students and paranormal investigators have described faint organ music, unexplained whispering, and footsteps on the stairs. All of that is reported experience and local tradition, not documented event, and the house has never produced verified evidence of a haunting.
Two documented details are worth setting beside the lore. First, the Estey organ, Opus 2140, built by Jacob Estey of the Estey Organ Company in Brattleboro, Vermont, is no longer operational and its console is missing. Whatever people hear, it is not that instrument being played. Second, Cecilia Hall contains a whispering gallery, an elliptical room in the manner of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, in which someone standing at one focus can hear the slightest whisper spoken at the other. A house with a room engineered to carry murmurs across it is a house where whispering in the dark has a mundane explanation available.
The mansion’s paranormal reputation reached television twice. Syfy’s Stranded featured it in the second episode of its first season on March 6, 2013, and Travel Channel’s Ghost Nation visited for a Halloween broadcast on October 31, 2020.
Treasures in the Glass
Among the imported fittings is The Flagellation, an early Renaissance stained glass window made around 1544 to 1547 for Milan Cathedral as part of a series on the Passion of Christ, and believed to have come from the workshop of Currado Mochis da Colonia. Bradley bought it while the mansion still stood on Dupont Circle, and it may once have belonged to Stanford White.
The February 2024 Fire
On February 28, 2024, a fire destroyed parts of the Carey Mansion. Anyone planning to look at the house should expect a building in the middle of a difficult chapter rather than the postcard chateau of the Dark Shadows credits.
Seeing Seaview Terrace Without Trespassing
Seaview Terrace is privately owned and is not open for tours or tourist visits. There is no route inside, no ticket, and no visitor programme. What makes the property unusual for Newport is the absence of a real barrier: the house has never had rigid fencing or a wall around it, only two main gateposts and a decorative hedge that the property’s own history admits works rather unsuccessfully at keeping people away, and which is the largest of its kind in Newport. A short stretch of five foot fencing runs along the western edge, dividing the estate from Fairlawn, and it extends between the Fairlawn carriage house and Seaview’s gate house from Ruggles Avenue to roughly 150 feet short of the property’s southwestern corner.
The lack of a wall is not an invitation. This is a family home, and a fire damaged one. The honest way to see it is from the public roads at Ruggles and Wetmore avenues and from the Cliff Walk that runs nearby, where the turrets and the roofline are visible above the hedge and the resemblance to Collinwood becomes immediately obvious.
See Seaview Terrace for Yourself
Sources
- Newport man charged with setting mansion fire, carjacking Salve Regina student
- Seaview Terrace on Stranded
- esteyorgan.com
- GeoHack – Site of Carey Mansion Newport, Rhode Island
- Wikipedia: Seaview Terrace
Address: 207 Ruggles Avenue
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Seaview Terrace located?
Seaview Terrace is located at 207 Ruggles Avenue.
Can you visit Seaview Terrace?
Seaview Terrace is on private property and best viewed from a distance. Always follow posted rules and respect private property.
Reader sightings
Nobody has reported anything here yet. If you have been, you would be the first.
Report your own visit to The Silent Organ of Seaview Terrace, Newport’s Carey Mansion
How haunted is this place?
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