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Seaview Terrace

Seaview Terrace is a location reputed to be haunted in Rhode Island, US. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.

Where is Seaview Terrace?

Location
Rhode Island, US
Type
House / mansion
Coordinates
41.468, -71.304
Testimonies
0
Last updated
LOCATION

Why is Seaview Terrace said to be haunted?

Newport's strangest great house was not built here: it was moved here. In December 1922 The Washington Times announced that the whiskey millionaire Edson Bradley would dismantle his Dupont Circle mansion in Washington — a house with a private theatre and a Gothic chapel of imported European fragments — and "transplant their treasures" to a property he had bought at Ruggles and Wetmore avenues. An older house of about 1870 was already standing on the lot, called Sea View; the architect Howard Greenley built the new château around it and kept its name. The work ran through the decade: the family said the housewarming was in 1925, a Washington society column reported the Bradleys occupying Sea View Terrace "this year for the first time" in 1926, and the National Register inventory dates it 1927-1929. After the Bradleys came unpaid taxes, army officers, a girls' boarding school, and in May 1966 a television producer who filmed its turrets as Collinwood in Dark Shadows. The ghost stories arrived later, and they keep changing.
Seaview Terrace, Rhode Island, United States
The house photographed on 17 June 1999, when Salve Regina University was still leasing it as a dormitory. The turrets and conical roofs are the ones shot for Collinwood in 1966. The mansion sold on 16 January 2026 and has never been open to the public. Image: Jim McCullars · Beyond My Ken · CC BY 2.5

What is the history of Seaview Terrace?

Seaview Terrace is not really a Newport house. It is a Washington house that was taken apart, put on trains and trucks, and rebuilt on a cliff in Rhode Island around a second, older house that was already standing there. Almost everything odd about the building follows from that. Edson Bradley made his fortune in bourbon. His obituary in the Evening Star of 21 June 1935 describes him as a one-time "whisky baron", for twelve years president of what the paper calls "the whisky trust", the man through whom the Old Hermitage and Old Crow brands were made famous; a native of New Canaan, Connecticut, educated in Munich and Heidelberg. In Washington he bought the old red-brick mansion of Alexander Graham Bell on Dupont Circle and rebuilt it into something the city nicknamed Aladdin's Palace. What was inside it matters, because it is what later travelled. A reporter for The Washington Times, Lelia Wilson Bathon, was shown around the house in the autumn of 1922 and described a two-storey great hall with an elevated stage at one end — a private theatre, said the sightseeing-bus guides — an east gallery whose ceiling had been lifted out of an Italian palace of the late sixteenth century, and a Gothic chapel assembled from "the choicest bits from old cathedrals and churches", its floor laid with tiles "made by the Moors before they were expelled from Spain" and its ceiling a copy of the one in the Farnese Palace in Rome. Bathon also recorded Mrs Bradley's rule for collecting: she was not, she told her, "interested in anything later than the ninth century." That same article, published on 10 December 1922, carries the first notice of what came next. The Bradleys, it says, "are returning within a few weeks to begin the dismantling of their mansion in Dupont Circle. They have bought a house at Newport and will transplant their treasures to their new home." The 1935 obituary adds a reason to have been in a hurry: a fire had destroyed the Bradleys' villa at Alexandria Bay, in the Thousand Islands, in 1922, and many works of art with it. The Newport lot, at Ruggles and Wetmore avenues, was not empty. The AIA Guide to Newport lists the property as the Edson Bradley House (Sea View, or Sea View Terrace, now Carey Mansion) and dates the first house to about 1870, by the Newport architect George Champlin Mason Sr., remodelled in 1887-88 by J.D. Johnston. It was called Sea View and it gave the new château its name. From February 1923, according to James L. Yarnall's history of Newport architecture, Bradley had his architect friend Howard Greenley (1874-1963) build the new house around and over the old one. The obituary describes the operation in one sentence: "When the Bradleys concluded to move into their 150-room Newport villa, they transported the entire interior of the local mansion to the Rhode Island resort. The 'little theater' maintained here, however, was replaced by a private chapel at Newport." Rooms that had already been imported from Europe once, and installed in Washington, were crated and installed a second time. When was it finished? The answer depends on whom you ask, and the usual date of 1925 is the earliest of several. The family's own website said a housewarming was held in the summer of 1925 and that the 63-room house was complete at the end of that year, at a cost of two million dollars. But a Washington Times social column of 29 July 1926 reports that the Bradleys "are occupying Sea View Terrace, their magnificent Newport estate, this year for the first time" — and the 1975 National Register inventory for the Ochre Point-Cliffs district, which catalogues the house as item 58 on Ruggles Avenue, dates it and its Normandy-style garage to 1927-1929. Building, moving and installing went on for most of the decade. Julia Bradley died in the house in 1929. Edson Bradley died in London on 20 June 1935, aged 83, on his annual visit to England; in November 1927 he had already sold part of his collection at the American Art Galleries in New York for $155,787. Their daughter, Julie Fay Bradley Shipman, widow of the Episcopal suffragan bishop Herbert Shipman, kept the house until 1941, and on 24 July 1942 the City of Newport took title for unpaid taxes. The army used it as officers' quarters during the war. In 1949 it sold for $8,000. What saved it was schooling. From 1950 the house ran as Burnham-by-the-Sea, a summer boarding school for girls listed in the Handbook of Private Schools under Ruggles Avenue, Newport, with Mabel H. Emerson in charge; during term time the buildings housed the Hatch School and later the Newport School for Girls. It was as a girls' school, not as a mansion, that a television producer found it: in early May 1966, according to The Dark Shadows Almanac, Dan Curtis arrived in Newport with his set designer and spent an afternoon filming on the grounds of Burnham-by-the-Sea. Millicent and Martin T. Carey of New York bought the estate in 1974, renamed it in everyday speech the Carey Mansion, and leased the main house and outbuildings to Salve Regina University, which used them as a conservatory, classrooms and student residence until 2009.

Timeline: the documented record of Seaview Terrace

  1. c. 1870, remodelled 1887-88 The first house on the lot at Ruggles and Wetmore avenues is built to designs by the Newport architect George Champlin Mason Sr. and remodelled in 1887-88 by J.D. Johnston. Known as Sea View, it later gives its name to the château that swallows it.
  2. 10 December 1922 The Washington Times publishes Lelia Wilson Bathon's tour of the Bradley mansion at Dupont Circle and announces the move: the Bradleys "are returning within a few weeks to begin the dismantling of their mansion in Dupont Circle. They have bought a house at Newport and will transplant their treasures to their new home."
  3. February 1923 Bradley commissions his friend the architect Howard Greenley to fold the existing Sea View into a new château, according to James L. Yarnall's history of Newport architecture, which dates the work 1923-25.
  4. 30 October 1923 A society column in the Evening Star notes that Mr and Mrs Edson Bradley "have closed their villa at Newport which they occupied through the summer" — the old house, while the new one was being built around it.
  5. Summer 1925 According to the account the Carey family published on the house's own website, a housewarming is held in the summer of 1925 and the 63-room house is finished at the end of that year, at a cost of two million dollars. This is the source of the completion date of 1925 repeated almost everywhere.
  6. 29 July 1926 Jean Eliot's Newport column in The Washington Times reports that Mr and Mrs Edson Bradley "are occupying Sea View Terrace, their magnificent Newport estate, this year for the first time, and are doing a lot of entertaining there", with a large dinner planned for 22 August.
  7. August 1929 Julia Williams Bradley dies at Seaview Terrace. Her husband's obituary six years later states plainly that she "died at the Bradley residence in Newport, Sea View Terrace, in 1929".
  8. 20 June 1935 Edson Bradley dies of pneumonia in London, aged 83. The Evening Star obituary records that the Bradleys "transported the entire interior of the local mansion to the Rhode Island resort" and that the Washington "little theater" was replaced by a private chapel at Newport.
  9. 24 July 1942 The City of Newport takes title to the estate over unpaid back taxes, a year after Julie Bradley Shipman left it. During the Second World War the army uses the house as officers' quarters; in 1949 it changes hands for $8,000.
  10. 1950-1971 The house reopens as Burnham-by-the-Sea, a summer boarding school for girls run by Mabel H. Emerson; the 1958 Handbook of Private Schools lists it at Ruggles Avenue, Newport, for boarders aged 14 to 20. In term time the buildings house the Hatch School and later the Newport School for Girls.
  11. Early May 1966 Dan Curtis arrives in Newport with his set designer and spends an afternoon filming on the grounds of Burnham-by-the-Sea, according to The Dark Shadows Almanac. The black-and-white footage first reaches the screen in episode 2 of Dark Shadows, broadcast on 28 June 1966, the day after the premiere.
  12. 11 August 1967 Dark Shadows switches to colour with episode 295. The Newport location footage, shot on black-and-white film, can no longer be used, and for the rest of the run the exteriors of Collinwood are colour slides. The house's screen life is therefore concentrated in 1966 and the first half of 1967, not spread evenly over 1966-1971.
  13. 1974-2009 Millicent and Martin T. Carey buy the estate and lease the main house and outbuildings to Salve Regina University as a conservatory, teaching space and student residence. The lease ends on 31 August 2009 and the house returns to family use.
  14. 18 March 1975 The Ochre Point-Cliffs Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its inventory catalogues "Seaview Terrace, by Howard Greenley" as item 58 on Ruggles Avenue and dates it, with its Normandy-style garage, to 1927-1929 — two to four years later than the date usually given.
  15. 1999 Eleyne Austen Sharp's Haunted Newport prints the earliest ghost account of the house I have been able to date: "Fable or not, one of the many stories about Carey Mansion (aka Seaview Terrace) is that of a nun who hung herself", in a dormitory "where smoke detectors go off for no" apparent reason.
  16. 27 October 2021 Maeve McCann, writing in Salve Regina's student newspaper The Mosaic, prints a different story: a 1940s affair between William and Nina, a wife named Amber who sets the house on fire and kills them both, and a suicide in the same room. No nun appears in this version.
  17. 28 February 2024 Newport firefighters are called to the mansion shortly after midnight and find four fires set in the basement. Foster Krupa, 25, is charged with arson and fifteen other counts and held without bail; no damage was visible from the road.
  18. 16 January 2026 Lila Delman Compass announces that Seaview Terrace has sold for $16 million, the highest sale recorded in Newport since 2021. Page Six identifies the buyer as the painter Hunt Slonem. No public access has been announced.

Is there a rational explanation for Seaview Terrace?

The haunted reputation of this house is younger than its television career, and that order matters. The earliest printed ghost account I have been able to date is Eleyne Austen Sharp's Haunted Newport, published in Newport in 1999. Sharp does not vouch for it: "Fable or not," she writes, "one of the many stories about Carey Mansion (aka Seaview Terrace) is that of a nun who hung herself", with a death room supposedly boarded up; she adds that the Ruggles Avenue house was by then a Salve Regina dormitory "where smoke detectors go off for no" apparent reason. Thirty-three years had passed since Dan Curtis pointed a camera at the turrets. The stories also change shape, which is what folklore does and what testimony does not. In the student newspaper of Salve Regina, The Mosaic, on 27 October 2021, Maeve McCann told a completely different tale: in the 1940s a man called William was having an affair with Nina; his wife Amber caught them, set the house on fire and killed them both, and later hanged herself in the same room. No nun, no dormitory smoke detectors. That version cannot be squared with the documented occupancy: the city took the house for tax arrears in July 1942, the army used it as officers' quarters, and it stood largely empty until it sold for $8,000 in 1949. A fire that killed two people in one of the largest houses in Newport would have left a paper trail, and I found none. The same Mosaic article, to its credit, applies exactly this test to another campus building and reports that the child said to haunt it never existed. Two of the phenomena most often repeated about the house have machinery inside the building itself. Cecilia Hall, the old drawing room, is a whispering gallery: an elliptical room in which a person standing at one focus hears a whisper uttered at the other. And the chapel organ, Estey Opus 2140, built for the Edson Bradley residence in Newport, was supplied with an electric detached console and an Automatic Player — that is, a mechanism for playing without an organist. A house where whispers carry across a room and the organ can play by itself is a difficult house to read, whatever the reading. Finally, the incentives. The mansion has been the set of paranormal television at least three times — the Ghost Hunters season-seven episode titled "Dark Shadows" in 2011, in which the owners Denise and Chris Carey reported voices, temperature changes and door handles turning; Syfy's Stranded in 2013; and Ghost Nation in 2020 — and was still being marketed as one of the most haunted houses in Rhode Island while it sat on the market. Salve Regina's own Halloween feature of 31 October 2025 retells the campus lore without endorsing any of it. One detail we have removed from our own earlier text: a "cold presence near the main staircase" that Newport tour guides were said to repeat. No source we consulted contains it, and the house has never been on any tour route, because it has never been open to visitors.

Can you visit Seaview Terrace?

Seaview Terrace is a private house and it is not open to visitors. It never has been. It is not one of the properties of the Preservation Society of Newport County, so no Newport Mansions ticket includes it, and there are no tours, no open days and no interior access. The address is 207 Ruggles Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island 02840, on the eight-acre block between Bellevue Avenue and the shore. The house changed hands in January 2026: Lila Delman Compass announced a sale of $16 million, the highest recorded in Newport since 2021, with Kimberly Doherty representing the buyers; the seller's agent was not named. Page Six identified the buyer as the painter Hunt Slonem, and no plan for public access has been announced. The legal way to see it is from the Cliff Walk, the public shoreline path that runs behind the Ochre Point estates: the turrets and the conical roofs are visible above the trees from the stretch below Salve Regina University, and the Breakers is a few minutes' walk north. From the street, the Ruggles Avenue sidewalk gives the porte-cochere front. The property is bounded mostly by hedge rather than by wall or fence, which makes it easy to walk onto by accident: don't. On 28 February 2024 the Newport fire department was called to four fires set in the basement, and a 25-year-old man, Foster Krupa, was charged with arson and held without bail; security on the estate has not become more relaxed since. One caution about sources: the house's old official website, seaviewterrace.org, which until the mid-2010s carried a history page and a "Christmas at Seaview" section, expired and now resolves to a parked advertising page. Nothing served there today comes from the owners.

Sources consulted

  1. Lelia Wilson Bathon, «Many Furnishings Brought Here From European Castles (p. 44)» — The Washington Times (Washington, D.C.), 10 December 1922, 1922 newspaper archive
  2. Jean Eliot, «Capital Folk in News of Newport (p. 6)» — The Washington Times (Washington, D.C.), 29 July 1926, 1926 newspaper archive
  3. Evening Star staff, «Edson Bradley: One-Time Whisky Baron Was Noted for Lavish Entertainment Here (obituary, p. 3)» — Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 21 June 1935, 1935 newspaper archive
  4. Evening Star staff, «Society (p. 9): the Bradleys close their Newport villa» — Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 30 October 1923, 1923 newspaper archive
  5. Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission / National Park Service, «National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination: Ochre Point-Cliffs Historic District (ref. 75000211; Seaview Terrace is item 58, Ruggles Avenue)» — United States Department of the Interior, listed 18 March 1975, 1975 report
  6. James L. Yarnall, «Newport Through Its Architecture: A History of Styles from Postmedieval to Postmodern (Sea View Terrace, Edson Bradley House, 1923-25)» — Salve Regina University Press / University Press of New England, 2005 book
  7. Ronald J. Onorato, «AIA Guide to Newport (Edson Bradley House: Sea View or Sea View Terrace, now Carey Mansion, pp. 208-215)» — American Institute of Architects / Newport, 2007 book
  8. The Carey family, seaviewterrace.org, «Seaview Terrace: History (the owners' own account of the house, archived 17 October 2011)» — Internet Archive Wayback Machine (the domain has since expired), 2011 archive
  9. Porter Sargent, «The Handbook of Private Schools, 39th edition (Burnham-by-the-Sea, Ruggles Ave., Newport, R.I.)» — Porter Sargent, Boston, 1958 book
  10. Kathryn Leigh Scott and Jim Pierson (eds.), «The Dark Shadows Almanac (Dan Curtis in Newport, early May 1966, filming on the grounds of Burnham-by-the-Sea)» — Pomegranate Press, 1995 book
  11. Dark Shadows Episode by Episode / Dark Shadows Commentary, «Dark Shadows Episode 2 (June 28, 1966) and the end of the Newport location footage at the switch to colour» — Online episode commentaries, 2015 web
  12. Eleyne Austen Sharp, «Haunted Newport (Carey Mansion: the nun, the boarded room and the smoke detectors)» — Austen Sharp, Newport, Rhode Island, 1999 book
  13. Maeve McCann, «Salve Regina's Most Well-Known Supernatural Stories» — The Mosaic (Salve Regina University student newspaper), 27 October 2021, 2021 newspaper archive
  14. NBC 10 WJAR newsroom, «Man accused of carjacking, setting fire to Newport mansion held without bail» — turnto10.com, 28 February 2024, 2024 web
  15. Ryan Belmore, «Seaview Terrace sells for $16 million, marking Newport's highest sale since 2021» — What's Up Newp, 16 January 2026, 2026 newspaper archive
  16. Estey Organ Company shop orders, transcribed at esteyorgan.com, «Estey Organ Company opus list, Opus 2140: Edson Bradley Residence, Newport, R.I. (electric detached console, automatic player)» — Internet Archive Wayback Machine, snapshot of 12 March 2013, 1925 archive
  17. Syfy, «Episode Recap: Dark Shadows (Ghost Hunters, season 7: Denise and Chris Carey at Seaview Terrace)» — syfy.com, 2011 web
  18. Salve Regina University, «Salve's haunted halls tell stories of faith, folklore and the Gilded Age» — salve.edu, 31 October 2025, 2025 web

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-13 · How we verify our content

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