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Will the salon piano fall through the beetle-eaten, 19th-century parquet floors? Is there any way to get the great hall’s 185-pound mahogany pocket door to stay on its track? How many more rainstorms can the patched roof withstand?
In Lenox, Mass., a small town in the Berkshires, a bootstrapped foundation has spent nearly three decades tackling these questions while rebuilding, repairing and protecting a 28,000-square-foot Gilded Age mansion called Ventfort Hall. The pinnacle of grandeur when it was built in 1893, this 17-fireplace, 22-bedroom, Jacobean Revival “summer cottage” first belonged to J.P. Morgan’s sister, Sarah.
Its present-day stewards have a lot on their minds. They are front desk attendants one moment, apprentices to a septuagenarian master craftsman the next. They’ve always been underfunded, and there is always more to do.
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But in the past three years, a new energy is swirling, propelling things forward. Or is it an old energy — old as the mansion’s original owner herself? The museum’s matriarchs, teenage tarot students, pro bono paranormal investigators, and history buffs say it’s the ghost of Sarah Morgan, taking part in the restoration of her manorial magnum opus. She isn’t alone.
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When the prominent American banker Junius Spencer Morgan had a fatal fall from a horse-drawn carriage in 1890, he left a fortune to his children. The financier John Pierpont— J.P. — inherited $15 million, fueling his already powerful banking empire. His sister Sarah inherited $3 million, putting more than a third of it into this real estate passion project with her husband (and distant cousin), George Hale Morgan.
With its gabled carriage house, gatehouse, gardener’s cottage, six greenhouses, and Italianate walled gardens, all designed by the architectural firm Rotch & Tilden, Ventfort Hall was “on a scale never before seen in Lenox,” said the historian Cornelia Gilder, author of “Houses of the Berkshires, 1870 — 1930.”
This stretch of Berkshire County, Mass., drew prominent Americans, including the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies and Edith Wharton, whose 1902 home, the Mount, is two miles down the road.
For three summers, Sarah opened Ventfort Hall with fanfare, throwing lavish parties well into the days of fall foliage. The summer of 1885 was her last. She died in 1896, at 57.
George lived on at Ventfort until 1911, and in the years that followed, the house had many lives: ballet school; dormitory for the nearby music venue, Tanglewood; artists’ enclave and resort; hideaway for a fundamentalist Christian sect. But perhaps the most transformative period was the 13 years it sat abandoned. In the 1990s, a nursing home developer purchased Ventfort and began moving forward with plans to demolish it, but the community stepped in, fund-raised the $40,000 down payment needed to buy the building, and rescued it.
“The house was alive,” said Tjasa Sprague, 85, a Lenox resident who co-founded the Ventfort Hall Association in 1997. She meant it figuratively — the architecture invited imagination with all its nooks and niches — but also literally. Trees sprouted from the gutters. Bats flew out of the fireplaces; squirrels and raccoons made strange noises that echoed through the heating ducts.
When it first set about restoring Ventfort, the association had its work cut out for it. The first winter, the ice on the great hall floor was thick enough for skating. The dining room floor was missing altogether. Maybe most harrowing, however, were the code compliance and fire safety issues. Still, they thought the house was grand.
“We were sufficiently naïve to have absolutely no idea what a nightmare we had walked into with the building inspector,” Ms. Sprague said.
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She and her friends rolled up their sleeves and got to work. Among the first line items: thousands of dollars in tarps for 7,000 square feet of roof, “just to stop the water from pouring in,” she said. Architects and engineers shored up the structure. Artisan craftsmen recreated the interiors.
As Ms. Sprague and her colleagues took the house apart in order to put it back together, strange things would happen: inexplicable “clouds” appearing in her photographs, the illusion of lit candles in the dining room on the day it was finally finished. These oddities could be explained away — but she didn’t always bother.
“I decided that was a ghost,” she said. “It was Sarah, or whoever.” Ms. Sprague said she thought the ghosts were watching. “We always thought Sarah approved of what we did,” she added.
Three years and more than $1.5 million later, Ventfort Hall opened to the public in 2000, Ms. Sprague said. Progress continued, slow and steady. The most dire issues abated. But the slamming doors, sounds of voices and footsteps, and the sense that the Morgans were along for the ride, did not.
Keeping Up With the Morgans
The association’s financial records show that it has put more than $6 million into the restoration, primarily from donors and grants. The main spaces downstairs are immaculate, but the house is far from finished.
Ventfort’s core crew is one of historic preservation enthusiasts, D.I.Y.-ers, and local creatives, many of whom said that from their very first visit, they felt connected to the home.
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Wendy Healey became the mansion’s executive director in December 2022. A creative at heart with a background in finance, she was drawn to the association’s drive to make the house a welcoming and useful place. To Ms. Healey, this means broader-reaching programming. “The Gilded Age has so much romance and drama and glitter and beauty,” she said. “But there was another side to that, and the Gilded Age was only a very short time period in the history of this house.”
Last year, Ventfort hired Chelsea Gaia, 40, as director of programming and events. One of her first projects: a “rebrand” that included a reimagining of the newsletter as a Victorian-era gossip column. Many historic museums take a polished, professional tone — but that does not feel like Ventfort, she said. “The chairs are wobbly. The china is chipped — and we use it! There’s not much behind velvet ropes here.”
Paranormal Policy
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Ventfort’s other big differentiator is the matter of the ghosts. The house has featured in its share of hokey “ghost hunter” shows. Ms. Gaia is, in addition to a marketing maven, a spiritual medium, and the energy at Ventfort is what drew her to the role. To her (and many other people involved) there is no question that past residents, including the Morgans, are present — and able to contribute.
David Raby, a paranormal investigator in Connecticut who has hosted “encounters” at Ventfort for eight years, agrees. “There’s just that stigma that every spirit you communicate with is trapped somehow,” he said, adding, “Not everyone needs help.”
“I don’t think many of the spirits at Ventfort Hall are trapped — they just come and go as they please,” Mr. Raby said.
Ms. Gaia also incorporated tarot and astrology into Ventfort’s programming. “Funny enough, the Gilded Age is when a lot of that took off,” she said of spiritualism. J.P. Morgan himself was said to have been a patron of the astrologer Evangeline Adams, who claimed she furnished the banker with regular readings on the planets’ effects on the stock market.
These activities — including ghost-related events — generate only a small percent of Ventfort’s annual budget. But they have longer-tail benefits.
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It was this “not your typical Gilded Age” community that brought Christiana Wagner and her 13-year-old daughter, Eleadora, to the property. Not long after they moved to Berkshire County from California, they attended a Ventfort ghost tour, an event full of spooky history and hearsay that is offered all year.
Eleadora was initially nervous about wandering the halls of a creepy house in the dark. But she was pleasantly surprised. “I remember honestly being very scared to go in because I didn’t want to see any ghosts,” she said. “Now that I’ve felt the energy more, I’m like, they’re very chill.”
For her upcoming eighth-grade service project, she plans to spend her 40 volunteer hours assisting with Ventfort’s archives — the house’s newest recruit.
In Ventfort’s halls, including at its biweekly tarot club, she feels a sense of warmth and welcome. “It’s almost like Ventfort is my home, even though I don’t live there,” she said.
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Ventfort’s decision to embrace its spooky self goes beyond a rebrand. Ms. Gaia has also written a set of Paranormal Policies, which include a ban on Ouija boards, séances, summoning and “spells of any kind.” Outsider paranormal investigations are no longer permitted.
That’s a lost revenue opportunity, Ms. Gaia acknowledged. “But we all agreed that it was most respectful to the spirits here to only work with people we know, who respect them as well. It’s not worth having bogus narratives and sensationalized, unsubstantiated lore attached to spirits” who can’t speak for themselves, she said.
Ventfort Hall, the Sequel
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Ms. Healey estimates Ventfort Hall’s restoration is “about halfway done.” A wing built for Sarah and George’s daughter, Caroline Morgan, the original basement kitchen and the entire third floor have yet to be tackled. There’s also a deadline: 2043, the house’s 150th anniversary.
While there’s plenty left to do, the scope keeps expanding. This summer, the team leaped at an opportunity it could barely afford: buying back the Ventfort Hall gardener’s cottage. The purchase is part of a broader vision to one day reincorporate all the original outbuildings, and talks are underway about building rentable apartments, which could be another revenue stream. In true Ventfort style, it’s a real fixer-upper.
