If you’re looking for a mansion in Staten Island for around $2 million, and don’t mind if it’s rumored to be haunted by its previous residents, then the Gustav Mayer House might be just the place you’re looking for!
The reportedly haunted mansion in Staten Island, New York, is on the market for $2.31 million dollars, reports the New York Post, and comes complete with its enormous and newly renovated front porch, a history of over 150 years, and the aforementioned resident ghosts which give the haunted Staten Island mansion an additional, distinctive charm.
Your potential new haunted mansion home is located at 2475 Richmond Road in Staten Island and is 7,700 square feet with 10 bedrooms.
Built in 1855, the original owner, Gustav Mayer, lived in the mansion with his daughters until his death in 1918. Along with the haunted rumors and other colorful history of the Staten Island mansion, it’s also neat to note that Mayer created a sugar cookie that ultimately became Nabisco’s Nilla Wafer!
It is Mr. Mayer and the ghosts of his two daughters who are said to still haunt the mansion. The Mayer daughters, reportedly lived to be over 100 years-old and never left the mansion, staying mostly in just two bedrooms and rarely even going down stairs. For food and other necessities, the two sisters — Paula and Emilie — created elaborate pulley systems to bring them what they desired.
The presence of the sisters, eerie and ghostly enough in the mansion when they were alive, is even spookier now that just their ghostly presence remains.
Not everyone is thrilled with the Staten Island mansion’s being haunted, however, particularly the haunted mansion’s owner, Bob Troiano, who tries to dismiss any notions that the ghosts of Mr. Mayer and/or the Mayer girls still roam the ghostly halls.
According to one source, Troiano is “super-touchy” about his Staten Island property being considered a haunted mansion, particularly as he goes through the process of trying to sell the place. At the same time, according to the source, even Troiano admits that his haunted Staten Island mansion can seem “creepy and eerie.”
Troiano lives on the renovated first floor of his haunted mansion, with the rest of the home remaining in its “un-doctored” condition, reports Curbed. This unaltered state of the mansion has made the Gustav Mayer house a prime photo shooting destination.
As can be seen on the Gustav Mayer House Facebook page, the haunted Staten Island mansion provides many wonderful backdrops, haunted and otherwise, for photo shoots, and a potentially spooky setting that rivals any other haunted mansion, whether in Staten Island or elsewhere.
Much of the charm of the haunted Staten Island mansion, and what attracts photographers, comes from the ghostly stories that pervade the living walls and floors which are mostly original, giving it a sense of being “frozen in time,” according to the New York Post.
But the ghosts of Mr. Mayer and the Mayer daughters is “positive,” according to Mark Anthony, also known as the “psychic lawyer.”
“It’s the fear and superstition attached to spirit communication which makes people think that encountering a spirit is spooky,” said Anthony.
That, or laying awake at night, staring at the ceiling of your new haunted mansion villa in Staten Island, listening through the dark to the pulleys of some ghostly sisters as they haul up their loot to the smell of Nilla Wafers.