A Magical Mystery Tour: Part I

We start in Great Barrington, just a stone’s throw from Route 7 on the edge of the quaint downtown crossroads at Searles Castle, a 68,570 square-foot, forty-room beacon of grandeur referred to in literature as “The House that Scandal Built.”

 

The (semi-) abridged version: in 1878, one of the Central Pacific Railroad magnates dies, leaving his wife, Mary Hopkins, his fortune. Now one of the wealthiest women in the country, Hopkins, in her sixties and having had developed a taste for fine living, builds a castle to replace the site’s original homestead, Kellogg Place.

 

Hopkins hires Edward Searles as decorator, a job that also includes elaborate interior architecture. He’s twenty-two years her junior, solidly middle-class, and “a bit of a social climber,” Durwin says. “They called him the Napoleon of Love, because he kind of bludgeoned his way into being her fiancé, almost to avoid scandal."

 

"They got married [a year before the project was finished in 1888], and lived a very reclusive life, considering they had just built this huge castle. There were constant rumors that he and possibly a maid were carrying on and [that] he had built in secret tunnels and staircases throughout the house that he would wander around and try to frighten [Mary]. Within four years she dropped dead, and he inherited just about the largest fortune in the country.”

 

Searles, a crabby sort of fellow who didn’t get along with the town much—even though he donated much of his wealth—built an even bigger castle in New Hampshire and added to his estate in Methuen, Mass., a wise move, perhaps, because he was essentially driven out of GB by constant gossip-mongering following the timely death of Mary, who some believe haunts the estate to this day. (“In the 1950s it became a shelter for records for insurance companies who were afraid of things being lost in the event of nuclear war; then it became a school, which it is today.)

 

The story is swirling in my mind when we knock on the massive front door of what is now the John Dewey Academy. A teenage student answers. “What’s it like to live in a haunted mansion?” I ask, as he leads us inside. “You get used to it,” he deadpans. OK, then, onward!

 

We ogle the seemingly pristine architecture—towering pillars of rose marble, ornate carved moldings awash in gilt, enormous staircases, half darkened—the place must be a you-know-what to maintain in utilities. As we wander upstairs, over cavernous landings and through twisting hallways, Durwin mentions something about a legend of a boy who drowned out by some backyard gazebo. Hmm. We did see a faux-facade of big columns planted before a cinderblock wall far off in the middle of the backyard....

 

Once upstairs, all it takes is a few bangs on a wall, and a tall door opens—a secret passageway! We can’t crawl up it—the bottom steps are conveniently missing. But the narrow space does seem to hark to an illicit time.

 

 

We walk up a working staircase (about five times as wide) and are shown a hallway closet next to a palatial dorm room. Behind the rows of hanging clothes, is the top of the slim corridor. Do the students use it? Not unless they want to be expelled.

 

None of the other kids we meet in the basement kitchen (above the building's "dungeon") can conjure up any stories of spirits or other shadiness, so we slip out a side door and circle back across the driveway. The deliveryman we find out front seems impressed at least.

 

Verdict: Once an ostentatious display of hubris and supposedly smudged with shame, the castle is sort of an unsettling place. Maybe more tunnels exist?

 

Satisfied with finding something, we head north, to a residential street in Lee....