A House That Traveled
Some people move house. Edson Bradley moved a house.
Seaview Terrace, the turreted French chateau near the end of Ruggles Avenue, did not start life in Newport at all. Much of it began in Washington, D.C., where Bradley, a wealthy whiskey distiller, had built a grand mansion. When he decided to make Newport his home, he brought the mansion with him.
The house has had many lives since then. And according to Newport lore, it has kept at least one resident through all of them.
Please note: Seaview Terrace is a private residence. It is not open for tours, and visitors should view it only from the public street and respect the owners' privacy.
From Dupont Circle to Ruggles Avenue
Moving a Mansion
In 1923 Edson Bradley had his Dupont Circle mansion in Washington taken apart and moved to Newport. Rooms that had originally been imported from France were reassembled here, and the new building, designed by architect Howard Greenley in the Châteauesque style, was constructed around them. An older 1885 house on the site, called Sea View, was worked into the design as well. The mansion was completed in 1925.
Julia Bradley, Edson's wife, died in 1929, only a few years after the house was finished.
School Days and Television
Beginning in 1950 the house served as Burnham-by-the-Sea, a summer boarding school for girls. In 1974 it was purchased by Millicent and Martin T. Carey, and Salve Regina University leased the main house and called it the Carey Mansion until the lease ended in 2009.
For a generation of television fans, though, the house has another name entirely. From 1966 to 1971 its exterior stood in for Collinwood, the brooding family mansion of the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows.
Fire and Privacy
The mansion remains privately owned by the Carey family. A fire on February 28, 2024, destroyed parts of the house.
The Ghost of Julia Bradley
A Wife Who Would Not Leave
According to Discover Newport, the city's tourism bureau, the mansion "has a bit of a haunted history of its own." The lore centers on Julia Bradley. She lived in the finished house for only a few years before her death, and it is believed she felt such a great attachment to the house that she never left it.
Trouble at the School
The stories gathered force during the Burnham-by-the-Sea years, when the house was full of students and staff. They reported smoke detectors going off for no reason, bottles flying off desks, and radios switching on and off by themselves. Among those who told the stories, the explanation was usually the same: Mrs. Bradley was still keeping an eye on her house.
A Haunted House on Screen and Off
It is hard to separate Seaview Terrace from Collinwood, the fictional mansion of vampires and curses its facade represented on television. But the stories about Julia Bradley belong to the real house and the real people who lived and worked in it, told long after the cameras left.
Seen from the Street
Seaview Terrace is best appreciated the way most people have always seen it: from the road, its towers rising above the trees near the sea. It is a home, not a museum, and the family who lives there deserves the same privacy any household would.
But if you pass it at dusk and catch a light in an upper window, you will understand why Newport has never quite stopped telling stories about the woman who loved this house too much to leave it.
