Smithville Mansion

This Greek Revival mansion built in 1840 sits on a 250-acre compound once known as Shreveville. Hezekiah B. Smith, an inventor, politician, and bigamist, bought the property in 1865 with his "second" wife Agnes, more than 20 years his junior.

The Smithville Mansion is a circa-1840 Greek Revival estate in Eastampton, Burlington County, that became the centerpiece of an industrial empire under Hezekiah Bradley Smith. In 1865, Smith and his second wife, Agnes M. Gilkerson, purchased the village of Shreveville for $20,000 and renamed it Smithville. Smith was an inventor and industrialist from Lowell, Massachusetts, who had abandoned his first family in Vermont to marry Agnes, a union that was considered scandalous at the time. He transformed the village into a thriving manufacturing center, most notably establishing a bicycle factory and designing the innovative Hotchkiss Bicycle Railway -- a two-mile elevated iron rail system that carried workers over pastures and through woods between their homes and the factory.

Agnes was far more than a society wife. She became a licensed physician, a horticulturist, an entrepreneur who developed her own line of beauty products, and the editor of the New Jersey Mechanic, the town's working-class journal. She was later honored on New Jersey's Women's Heritage Trail and described as one of the freest women of her time. Agnes died of cancer at approximately forty-one years of age in 1881. Hezekiah was devastated and had a memorial statue of her erected at the cemetery. When Hezekiah himself died in 1887, he had arranged extraordinarily elaborate burial preparations. His body was placed in an iron coffin, which was sealed with iron straps and topped with iron spikes. The coffin was then enclosed in an iron cage similar to a prisoner's cell, with heavy iron slabs bolted together. The entire structure was encased in a base of solid masonry and cement. According to contemporary accounts, Hezekiah wanted to ensure that nothing could separate him from Agnes in death.

The haunting began after the destruction of Agnes's statue. One of Hezekiah's sons -- furious over what he viewed as his father's abandonment of his first family -- ordered the memorial torn down and pounded into marble dust. After this act of desecration, townspeople began reporting the ghost of Hezekiah Smith roaming the factory and mansion grounds, as though the iron and concrete could hold his body in the earth but could not contain his spirit. In 2006, the South Jersey Ghost Research group conducted a formal investigation of the mansion and reported finding evidence of a haunting. They captured orbs of light on film and recorded an EVP of a woman's voice beckoning, "Inside, come inside."

Paranormal groups who have investigated the mansion report piano music playing when no one is at the instrument, lights flickering throughout the building without electrical explanation, and apparitions of people walking through walls. The ghosts of both Hezekiah and Agnes are believed to remain in the house, and the spirit of their angry son may also linger. Couples who have hosted weddings at the mansion have reported unusual occurrences during their events. The interior of the house contributes to its unsettling atmosphere -- visitors encounter Victorian-era dolls, a portrait made from human hair, and a mounted moose head among the period furnishings. The mansion is now a county-owned historic site open for tours and events, and the iron-encased grave of Hezekiah Smith remains in the nearby cemetery, its elaborate defenses a monument to a man whose devotion to Agnes transcended death -- or, according to those who see him walking the grounds after dark, failed to.