The Chinese Ghost of Stewart’s Folly
On the high ground of Dupont Circle, where Massachusetts Avenue once looked out over an unfinished city, a mansion rose that Washington could neither quite afford nor quite forget. Stewart’s Castle—called Stewart’s Folly almost as soon as the last gilding was applied—passed from a Nevada senator’s ruinous splendor to the yellow dragon banner of the Chinese Empire. When the house was gone, and only foundation stones remained, something older than brick refused to leave: a figure in dark red and mist-blue silk, sandals that made no sound, hands forever rising to loosen the cord twisted tight about his neck.
In 1901, Stewart’s Castle—or Stewart’s Folly, as it was also known—was demolished. It had been built for Nevada Senator William Morris Stewart after the end of the Civil War. It was designed by Bureau of Public Works architect Adolf Cluss, and became one of the first houses constructed in the neighborhood.
Contrary to popular expectation, the phantom that came to haunt the place was not a member of the Stewart family. Its origins belonged to the years the building served as the Chinese Legation, from 1886 to 1893.
Stewart’s Castle was completed in 1873 just off Massachusetts Avenue on Dupont Circle. The house was said to be the most richly furnished residence in Washington. Senator Stewart was rumored to have spent his entire fortune on its interiors; during his time in the capital, he even hired Mark Twain as his secretary. After that vast expenditure, he was forced to leave the mansion unoccupied and uncared for. At the time, the neighborhood was still considered an undesirable part of town.
Moths and rust eventually corrupted the home, and it earned the name Stewart’s Folly “because it was built, as it would seem, to ease a man overburdened with money, more than to please art or cater to comfort, like Shoddy’s wife at a ball, all diamonds and red face.”
In early 1873, whatever optimism still clung to the city’s western fringe was dashed. In February of that year, Congress passed the Mint Act, which placed the United States on the gold standard and demonetized silver. Western miners branded the measure the “Crime of ’73.” It began a long contraction of the nation’s money supply and the so-called Long Depression, which opened that year and lasted until 1879. The era of vast fortunes coined from silver and sold to a guaranteed buyer—the federal government—was over. Gold and copper would soon outrank silver in Washington.
William Stewart spent the rest of his life trying to restore silver as a backing for U.S. currency. In the 1890s, he left the Republican Party for the Silver Republicans. The house he had built when silver still seemed inexhaustible stood behind him, already too rich for the fortune that remained.
In 1877, rumors suggested that Castle Stewart would be occupied by the Spanish Minister.
In January 1880, the mansion caught fire. The damage must have been contained, for it became the Chinese Legation in 1881. Perhaps not all of its fifty rooms were harmed.
In January 1887, the ball given at the Chinese Legation to celebrate the Chinese New Year was the “swellest social affair of the season, outside of the White House.” The ambassador was Chang Yen Hoon (1837-1900); his secretaries and staff wore “costumes silken and finely embroidered, with big diamond studs in the front of their caps.” The other legations in Washington attended, as did members of the Senate and the judiciary.
In February 1887, Washington society was mystified by the public appearance of two strange ladies—evidently Americans—in the company of members of the Chinese Legation. The two women were “dashily dressed in point of color as are the Chinamen themselves.” They were seen with the Chinese at the theater, sitting in their box. When appearing in the front seat in one of the two boxes occupied by the Chinese Legation, they divided the attention given to the opera. They seemed to enjoy the extra attention.
They accompanied the Chinese Minister to the Japanese Minister’s reception but were not introduced to anybody. They remained a part of the Chinese detachment of visitors, simply as spectators.
Everyone wondered who they were. Some said they were New York ladies, acquaintances of the minister who had come to attend the Legation ball held in January; yet they remained, and appeared to be the favorite guests of the Chinese.
They vanished from the newspapers as abruptly as they had entered them, leaving only the question of who had been admitted so far inside the yellow-flagged house—and who had not. Their identity was never known.
The Chinese Legation remained there until 1893, flying the yellow flag with the imperial dragon from the tower. That same year the Stewart family returned. By then Dupont Circle had become one of the most desirable quarters of Washington. Close by stood the Cosmos Club—the largest scientific club in the world—once known as the Curtis Hillyer mansion.
The Cosmos Club once occupied Dolley Madison’s house on Lafayette Square for decades, then moved into the rebuilt Hillyer–Townsend mansion on Massachusetts Avenue.
Nearby, at 2000 Massachusetts Avenue, James Gillespie Blaine broke ground for a new brick mansion. Like Senator Stewart, his fortunes turned within months of the work beginning. In September 1881, President Garfield was killed by an assassin’s bullet. Blaine, serving as Secretary of State, lasted only three months in the Chester A. Arthur administration. He lived only two years in the house on Massachusetts Avenue, then rented it out. He died in 1893.
In 1899 Senator William Clark of Montana purchased the Castle. It was not quite grand enough for him. He razed it in 1901 to build something larger. Funds ran out; while Clark worked things out, the lot sat vacant, strewn with the rubble of the castle.
Was there something about this land that brought financial ruin to anyone who tried to raise a structure upon it?
In August 1902, The Washington Post described an encounter a passerby experienced near the vacant lot where Stewart’s Castle had stood.
Some weeks earlier, late one evening, a Mr. S. L. Lwehg was walking home to Georgetown. The night being particularly warm, he stopped to rest on a nearby park bench and noticed the erratic movements of a man dressed in Chinese garments at the newly razed site. At first it seemed the figure might be searching for something; then it became clear he was simply wandering. “The Celestial would walk first in one direction and then in another, and sometimes would go across the lot from sidewalk to sidewalk.” Finally he vanished.
The identity of the ghost was linked to a news story from August 1886. A new minister had brought with him a protégé from China whose father held an eminent position at court. The young man was to be trained in politics and was to inherit a vast fortune.
Residents of the city promenaded on Dupont Circle, where the Castle stood. There the young man saw the beautiful daughter of a War Department official. He began to call at her home in the afternoons until, one day, he asked her to marry him. She refused and told him jokingly that she could “never think of such a thing as long as he wore a queue and his native costume.”
He returned after cutting off his queue, dressed in a modern suit. She was horrified to realize he had taken her words seriously. Her parents explained that a marriage could not take place. When he went back to the Legation, a furious argument erupted between the minister and the young man.
When he discovered that the girl’s parents had sent her away from the city, he threatened suicide.
The story that appeared on August 14, 1886, described pedestrians in the Dupont Circle neighborhood seeing a young “Celestial, attired in a loosely fitting garment of silk, standing on the windowsill” of the fourth floor. He had a rope around his neck. He jumped and was gurgling when servants burst the door down and pulled him in. In one hand he held a picture of the young woman he had fallen in love with.
It was said this was his second attempt. The first time he had tried to drown himself in a bathtub, or to hang himself. Mystery surrounds what became of him. In one version he was rescued in time; in another he had been dangling for some time before he was taken back into the Legation and was already dead. The Legation was notably reticent about the affair—no doubt a suicide on the premises would have been embarrassing—yet the story circulated as far as London.
The Stewart family returned to the house in 1893 and redecorated it. It was sold in 1899 to Senator Clark.
Clark first thought of an apartment building or hotel, then decided on a large residence. He too met unexpected political turmoil after buying the property. Embroiled in a scandal over bribing members of the Montana Legislature, he was refused a seat in the U.S. Senate. He never lived at Stewart’s Castle and returned to New York, though he allowed charity functions to be held there.
In 1901 Stewart’s Folly was razed. Clark built another house next to the site at 1915 Massachusetts Avenue; that house, too, would eventually be demolished.
The identity of the mysterious victim was never ascertained, nor even whether the death had been murder or suicide. Yet there seemed a clear link with the spirit seen in 1902, reported by several people wandering the grounds where the Legation had stood.
It was described as “only one of the picturesque figures to be seen in the vicinity of the Chinese legation.” Upon further inspection, “in the glare of the electric light, the flowing sleeves of his dark red jacket appear very filmy, and the gown of light blue looks like mist.” What’s more, his “feet make no sound as the ghostly sandals pass along the walks.” Finally, and most tellingly, just before the spirit vanished, its hands would spring up “to loosen the long black cord that is tightly twisted and knotted about his neck.”
The article stirred interest. A few days later the newspaper published a follow-up. Onlookers began to gather. An MPD officer, Sergeant Sullivan, helpfully advised them that between one and two in the morning was the most auspicious hour to see the ghost—or at least the hour at which he usually saw it.
The land where Stewart’s Castle once stood remained unoccupied and overgrown for the next twenty years. Only foundation stones of the house remained. Clark sold the lot in 1922 to Riggs Bank (now PNC Financial Services).
Curtis Justin Hillyer and the 1873 house
Curtis Justin Hillyer (1828–1906) was an Ohio-born lawyer who made his fortune in the Comstock silver world and then in Washington real estate. With Senator William Morris Stewart and Thomas Sunderland, he formed the so-called Pacific Syndicate or Pacific Pool (Dupont Circle was first called Pacific Circle).
All three men had made their fortunes in silver mining in the West after the Civil War.
In February 1873, Senator Stewart pulled a parcel for himself at what is now 2121 Massachusetts Avenue—then the ragged western edge of the city, where Massachusetts Avenue more or less died at Boundary Street (today’s Florida Avenue).
He took out a permit that year for a substantial residence. It is not certain whether Hillyer’s house or Stewart’s Castle rose first; some accounts say Hillyer started first to pull his friend Stewart onto the same speculative ground. Either way, both houses were Gilded Age bets on a neighborhood that still looked like hinterland.
Hillyer weathered the Panic of 1873 better than Stewart, kept his legal practice, and held the property. Hillyer Place, just around the corner, still carries his name.
Mary Scott Townsend and the house inside the house
In 1898 Mary Scott Townsend—railroad and coal heiress—bought Hillyer’s place. With her husband Richard H. Townsend, she hired Carrère and Hastings to enlarge it into a Beaux-Arts mansion in the manner of a French townhouse (sometimes compared to the Petit Trianon). Construction ran 1899–1900.
Almost none of the 1873 exterior survives, but walls of the Hillyer house were kept inside the new fabric. The usual explanation is superstition: Mary had been told that if she ever slept under a brand-new roof she would die within the year, so she insisted the old structure remain.
Richard died in 1902; Mary stayed until 1931 and spent enormous sums entertaining. Their daughter Mathilde later lived there with diplomat Sumner Welles. Franklin Roosevelt briefly used the house before his 1933 inauguration. During World War II, parts of the estate served the American Women’s Volunteer Service and then the Canadian Women’s Army Corps. In 1950, the estate sold the property to the Cosmos Club for about $364,000–$365,000.
The Cosmos Club: Lafayette Square first, then Embassy Row
The Cosmos Club was founded on November 16, 1878, at the home of John Wesley Powell as a society for men of science, letters, and public service (women were admitted in 1988).
Its first rooms were in the old Corcoran Building. From 1886 to 1952, it occupied historic houses on Lafayette Square, including the Cutts–Madison House at 1520 H Street / Madison Place—the house Dolley Madison lived in as a widow from 1837 until she died in 1849. The club bought that house in 1886 for $40,000, raised the roof, added assembly rooms, and later bought neighboring lots.
The federal government purchased the Lafayette Square holdings in 1940; the club leased them back until it moved. After the club left, the Dolley Madison House became federal offices; NASA used it, and in 1959 the Mercury Seven astronauts were introduced to the press in its ballroom.
The club bought the Townsend House in 1950 and moved in 1952. The stable and coach house became an auditorium; later additions include dining rooms, a bar, sleeping rooms, and, in 1997, the nearby former French Military Mission, renovated as “Hillyer House” and linked by a bridge. The clubhouse is on the National Register and is a D.C. landmark.
What remains true is the geography of ambition. Nevada money tried to civilize a muddy circle. One house became a Chinese legation and then a ghost story in the rubble. The other was wrapped in limestone so a superstitious heiress would not sleep under a new roof, and then became a private club of scientists and writers. The land between them filled in; the names—Hillyer Place, Townsend House, Cosmos Club—are what is left of the syndicate that once called the circle Pacific.