Wellscroft Lodge

Perched on the wooded slope of Ebenezer Mountain in Upper Jay, New York, Wellscroft Lodge is exactly the kind of building that stops you cold — a sprawling Tudor Revival mansion with steeply pitched gables, native fieldstone on its lower exterior, a porte cochere, projecting bays, and a roofline that breaks against the Adirondack treeline in a dozen different directions. It was built not as a hunting camp or rustic retreat, but as a statement of private wealth in one of the most scenic corners of the Northeast.

The estate was constructed in 1903 at a reported cost of $500,000 — an extraordinary sum for the era — as a summer home for Jean Wells Smith and her husband Wallis Craig Smith, a Michigan attorney and businessman with interests in iron, hardware, and law. Jean was the daughter of Charles W. Wells, a prominent Saginaw industrialist whose accidental death in 1893 — his canoe capsized while he was shooting game, and he died of heart failure in the cold water before help could reach him — had stunned the Saginaw community and generated public mourning on a citywide scale. The name Wellscroft honored her family. At the time of its completion, it was among the largest private country estates in Essex County. The compound included not only the main house but a powerhouse, firehouse, gazebo, root cellar, reservoir, carriage house, and caretaker's cottage. The interior was finished in Arts and Crafts style, with careful detailing throughout its 22 rooms.

The Smiths held the property for several decades before selling in 1942. What followed was a long and uneven second life — periods as a public lodge, stretches of private ownership, and at least two extended periods of abandonment interrupted by attempts at restoration. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.

The paranormal history of Wellscroft is dominated by a single persistent figure: a woman in a red dress. She has been reported appearing on the main staircase, standing in the front windows visible from outside, and moving through the upper floors when the building's power was completely off. Multiple unrelated witnesses, spanning different decades, describe the same apparition in strikingly consistent terms. A former resident who lived in the caretaker's house in the mid-1980s reported seeing the Lady in Red approximately ten times over four years. His family's two beagles refused to enter a specific room off the main lobby — hair raised, growling — and would not be coaxed past the threshold under any circumstances. That same witness described a Ouija board session in which the planchette allegedly launched itself off the table with no hands on it, sending the group of children involved scrambling out of the building. Phantom music has been reported inside the lodge, along with disembodied voices with no visible source.

A former lodge manager's son described the death of his father in the second-floor master suite on January 6, 1965 — a deeply personal account that underscores the real human grief woven through the building's history, separate from any paranormal claim.

The identity of the Lady in Red has never been confirmed. Whether she belongs to the original family, a later period of use, or to the imagination of a building that simply looks the part is unknown. Wellscroft has been the subject of a 2024 documentary podcast episode titled Seeing Red: The Hauntings of Wellscroft Lodge. It is private property. The mountain keeps its secrets.