Over the course of the past four years, during which Brandi Carlile and her band have been more or less constantly on the road, they have developed a lively interest in ghosts. This is partly because they tend to play old theatres and town halls in out-of-the-way places. These buildings often have local legends attached to them, which stagehands regale the band with during sound check. But it is also because the band has been trying to unravel the mystery of its live performances: what is it that makes a show good, and how can it be captured on a record?
“Near as we can figure out, it’s this aura that develops around people who spend a great deal of time together,” Carlile, who is twenty-nine, said last week during a stopover in New York, where the band opened for Sheryl Crow at Radio City Music Hall. Her bass and guitar players, Phil and Tim Hanseroth, are identical twins, and they live in Maple Valley, Washington, where Carlile lives, too. Phil is engaged to Carlile’s sister. “So we are literally together all the time, and some kind of fourth dimension emerges from that,” Carlile said. But the band’s three albums with Columbia—the last two, “The Story” and “Give Up the Ghost,” were produced by T Bone Burnett and Rick Rubin, respectively—haven’t quite captured that dimension. The “ghost” in the most recent album’s title just won’t give itself up.
All of which explains why, on the Monday after the Radio City gig, Carlile and the twins were standing on the front porch of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, a spooky-looking house on a hill in Washington Heights which has scared generations of youngsters. It was a wet, gloomy day, perfect for ghost-spotting. Carlile, slim in a short-waisted tailored jacket and equestrian leggings, approached the front door, then lost her nerve.
“You knock,” she said to the twins.
Carlile had never seen a ghost. “I’m not sure I’m ready to,” she said. The twins said that, as children, they used to see ghosts peeking around the corners of rooms—“peekers,” they called them.
As the oldest freestanding house in Manhattan, the mansion has its share of ghost stories, but the best-known apparitions are Eliza Jumel and her husband Stephen, a French planter from Santo Domingo. Stephen died in 1832, and Eliza married Aaron Burr a year later. In 1964, a group of schoolchildren on an early-morning class trip spotted a woman who looked like Eliza Jumel on the balcony above the front door; she scolded them and told them to keep quiet. When a custodian arrived shortly afterward, the children told him about the mean lady upstairs, and he said that was impossible, because the house was locked and no one was inside. Around the same time, a medium who held a séance in the house reported that Stephen appeared to her and told her that his wife had murdered him by ripping the bandages off a pitchfork wound and letting him bleed to death.
Phil, the bass player, stood under the balcony and knocked on the front door. Ken Moss, the executive director of the mansion, opened it and invited the band inside. The mansion is open to the public from Wednesday to Sunday, but it was empty that day, and its stately rooms seemed to vibrate with silence. Moss, a historian, said that he wasn’t a big fan of ghost stories involving the house. He prefers to emphasize the historical facts: it was George Washington’s headquarters for a month in 1776, and he, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams all dined there together one Sunday afternoon in 1790.
Carlile and the band followed Moss from room to room. In a dramatic octagonal ballroom, Carlile stepped up to the fireplace and turned, as if to face a crowd of spirits, rising up on her toes. She sang a few notes, making her distinctive goose-bumpy yodelling sound—daring Mme. Jumel to shush her. The twins watched the doorway for peekers.
Although no ghosts gave themselves up, “there is definitely something magnetic about this house,” Carlile said as they were leaving.
“Maybe next time we’re in New York we could stay overnight here!” Tim, the guitar player, said. ♦