Craig House returns from its past
Famed sanitarium will again welcome the rich to recoup
mysterious mansion peeks out from tangled roadside greenery along highway 9D in Dutchess County near Beacon.
It is Tioronda, the centerpiece of a sprawling constellation of buildings and gardens known collectively as Craig House. The property was once a sanitarium at the forefront of a new approach to mental health care that had a star-studded guest list.
Although it’s been abandoned for more than two decades, the mansion is remembered by the many generations who lived and worked there and a curiosity by those who pass it.
“It looks like something straight out of a Hollywood movie from the 1930s,” said Tim Delaney, a longtime Beacon resident and amateur historian who lectures on the property’s past. “I mean it looks like Bela Lugosi should live there.”
Delaney has spent years digging through records at the Beacon Historical Society to piece together the history of Tioronda and Craig House.
From its beginnings as the estate of a Civil War general to its role as the nation’s first private residential mental health facility, the property’s history is populated with names like Rosemary Kennedy and Jackie Gleason, and reports of the paranormal.
From farm to estate
Located where Fishkill Creek meets the banks of the Hudson River, Tioronda earned its name from a Native American word meaning “meeting of the waters.” The location was attractive to shipping magnate Joseph Howland, who, with his wife, Eliza, in 1859 began transforming the humble country farm into one of the Hudson Valley’s most memorable estates, built in a Gothic style.
“When you walk around the place, you’re just struck by this landscaping, this architecture that’s totally eccentric,” said Delaney, who has spent many hours on the property. “No matter how many pictures you look at, they just don’t do it justice ... Tioronda has this presence about it,” he said.
Designed by architect Frederick Clarke Withers, Tioronda is surrounded by lush landscaping, which was the work of Henry Winthrop Sargent and a reflection of Howland’s deep interest in horticulture.
Howland didn’t get to enjoy his country estate for very long. He left Beacon in 1861 to fight in the Civil War. When he returned, his battlefield experiences left him with PTSD, accelerating a lifelong interest in mental
health care.
Howland dedicated his post-war life to the construction of the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane, while also starting Beacon’s Howland Library (now the Howland Cultural Center) and serving as New York state treasurer from 1866 to 1867.
Illness was constant. After his death in 1886 in France, his wife never returned. The property sat uninhabited until just before Eliza Howland died in 1917, when she sold the main house and its 200plus acres to local psychiatrist C. Jonathan Slocum.
Craig House is born
“It was a pleasure meeting you and (I am) feeling tremendously pleased with your beautiful plant (Craig House) but also coming to the conclusion that you are perhaps the very best man to help Zelda at the present.”
So wrote American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald to Slocum in 1934, nearly two decades after Slocum bought Tioronda.
Originally known as the Slocum Sanitarium, the property was renamed Craig House after a psychiatric facility in Scotland, which focused on keeping patients in a homelike environment, a novel concept that Slocum dreamed of introducing in the United States.
A promotional brochure from this period claims “atmosphere is an important factor in the patient’s well-being and recovery,” a philosophy that resonated with the elite in and around New York City.
A 1935 article in Fortune magazine rated Craig House as one of the best sanitariums in America for treating nervous disorders. Slocum and his wife created an environment redolent in the trappings of upper-class life: access to fine dining and pursuits such as golf and painting, along with several employees dedicated to each guest.
The grand mansion in Beacon and its gardens helped fit this look and feel but perhaps even more important, Slocum was discreet, which made Craig House popular with the wealthy and the famous.
Rich history unfurls
For some celebrities, Craig House was a place to recalibrate. Jackie Gleason was rumored to frequent the property to dry out, a legacy memorialized with a pool table he gifted the Slocums that remained one of the residents’ favorite ways to pass time.
Some, like Zelda Fitzgerald, sought treatment for depression. Transferred to Craig House after suffering her third breakdown, she seemed to have enjoyed her time at Craig House, spending the days in the care of a private nurse, painting, writing an article for Esquire magazine, and playing many rounds of golf on the nine-hole course.
Others stayed for years or even decades. The artist Constance Whitney Warren arrived in 1930 and remained until her death in 1948; Rosemary Kennedy, the younger sister of John F. Kennedy, arrived in 1957 following a botched lobotomy for a three-year stay in one of the private cottages.
For others, it was the final place they knew. Frances Seymour — wife of Henry Fonda, and mother of Jane and Peter — was sent to Craig House and died by suicide there in 1942, reportedly not long after her husband asked for a divorce.
Other well-known cultural figures who are widely believed to have spent time at Craig House include Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe.
Ghost tales emerge
Slocum died in 1950, and his son Jonathan took over, but Craig House struggled to find footing in a world where a new, pharmaceutical-first approach to mental health care was ascendant. After a long, slow demise, Craig House closed in 2003. Because of its focus on personalized care, Craig House employed generations of local residents who share a vivid oral history of the place.
“When you start talking to people and asking questions about Craig House, stories just come out of the woodwork — still all these years later,” Delaney said.
“I’ve never heard anyone say a negative thing about Craig House,” said Sharon Hunt, who grew up in the area and whose grandparents met while working at Craig House. “It was just a really, really respected place.”
To Hunt, that’s partly due to Slocum’s philosophy about mental health care.
“People with mental health issues were generally treated horribly back then,” she said.
“Dr. Slocum ... just took this really different approach, one based on talking and dignity, and I think that just really resA onated with people.” This good reputation was also helped by how both Slocums fostered connections with the local community.
Another common thread that weaves through comments on local blogs and Facebook groups is that Craig House possesses a haunted feeling. It’s this reputation that has made the property’s abandoned buildings popular with paranormal aficionados.
Stories of doors slamming shut and shouts and screams are bolstered by othet accounts, like that of Hunt’s aunt, who claims to have seen the ghost of a woman with long brown hair in an upstairs window of Tioronda on occasion.
That doesn’t surprise Linda Zimmerman, a local paranormal expert who has investigated other sanitariums in and around the Hudson Valley.
“Asylums are my least favorite places to go to because there is so much emotion, so many chaotic thoughts swirling around,” she said.
“If you have even the slightest level of sensitivity to things like that, you're bound to experience something.”
Return to wellness
If a spooky experience is what you’re after, hurry up to Beacon. A new owner purchased the property in 2018 for $5.5 million with plans to turn its 64 acres into a 15-room boutique hotel with an opening targeted to 2023.
Later phases of the project include a 25,000square-foot Nordic spa, 20 treehouse suites facing the Hudson River, a music studio, a conference center and co-working facility.
Those with a connection to Craig House have mixed feelings about this latest incarnation.
For Sharon Hunt, the focus on health and wellness represents a nice tether to the past. “I’m happy to see the place restored to its original purpose, as a place of healing.”