Scare tactics

Nearly 150 years after her death, Eliza Jumel’s eyes gaze intently out of an old oil painting. They seem to follow people around as they walk through her Harlem Heights home, Morris Jumel Mansion, the oldest house in Manhattan.

Jumel, whose second husband was Vice President Aaron Burr, is said to be among the spirits still residing in the palatial manor, which was once George Washington’s New York headquarters.

That’s why two centuries later, on a chilly October night, psychic Victor Fuhrman is writhing in front of Burr’s bedroom, flapping his hands at an invisible energy field he claims has manifested just inches from the portrait of the pale-faced Madame Jumel.

“Victor, what do you see?” asks Dom Villella, a self-described ghost hunter who counts Fuhrman as part of his Paranormal Investigation NYC team.

“Wavy lines,” says Fuhrman, whose day job is running the marketing department for a Queens welding company.

“From the floor to the ceiling, like what you see coming off a radiator.”

A crowd of ghost hunters — wielding cameras and gadgets that can sense electromagnetic fields — converge on the doorway, as Furhman continues to flap and shimmy alongside the invisible phenomena.

Days later, a review of audio recorded at the scene will reveal mysterious sounds: what seems to be the sound of a woman sighing when asked about Burr.

On this night, teams led by two of New York’s top paranormal investigators, Villella and Dan Sturges, have combed over Morris Jumel Mansion with armloads of nifty electromagnetic field detectors, digital sound recorders and video equipment.

The pair were once ghost-hunting partners, but according to Sturges, a “difference of opinion” several years ago pushed them to work independently of each other.

Sturges takes a more skeptical, scientific approach, while Villella appears more open-minded about utilizing “metaphysical” methods of exploration. Both work with psychics during their investigations.

Each team cased the house in opposite directions; Sturges started in the attic and worked down, while Villella began in the house’s basement. Other than a few tense moments, they happily attempted to find ghostly evidence on the property.

“Ghosts don’t have a throat or a tongue,” Sturges says, explaining the theory behind electronic voice phenomena recording, a popular ghost-hunting technique frequently seen on television.

“So the belief is that when you ask a ghost questions, they can answer telepathically by manipulating the electrical fields inside an audio recorder.”

At Morris Jumel Mansion, the spirit of Eliza Jumel has been reportedly haunting the house since she died in the mansion at 90. The most vivid alleged sighting came in 1964, when an elementary school class visiting the mansion claimed she emerged from the house’s second floor balcony to “shush” them while they were waiting to be let in to the mansion for a field trip.

Jumel’s first husband, Stephen, is also said to haunt the house — and is allegedly an angry spirit. In the 1960s, the late ghost hunter Hans Holzer and psychic Ethel Myers claimed that he had told them he had been hurt in an accident with a pitchfork — after which Eliza ripped off his bandages and watched him bleed to death in an attic bedroom.

The home, built as a British officer’s country house in 1765, is now a museum managed by an independent not-for-profit corporation — which does not believe in ghosts.

“I’ve worked here for 10 years and even slept in this house, and I’ve never seen anything slightly paranormal,” says Morris Jumel executive director Ken Moss. The property is one of 23 sites that are part of the Historic House Trust of New York City, including Gracie Mansion and the Merchant’s House Museum on East Fourth Street.

Some of the organizations that run the properties embrace their long-term houseguests. Others, like the management of Morris Jumel, believe that the issue sullies the historical importance of the site.

“I keep hearing the theme to ‘Ghostbusters’ in my head,” joked one of the investigators at one point in the evening. “Maybe Eliza Jumel is a Bill Murray fan.”