Inside The 1890 House: Touring Cortland's Gilded Age Mansion Before the Lights Go Out

Before you can investigate a location, you have to understand it. That's always been my approach with TAPS — walk the halls in the daylight, learn the history, talk to the people who know the building best, and then decide what questions you actually need to be asking once the lights go out. The 1890 House in Cortland, New York gave us a lot of questions.

I've walked into hundreds of historic buildings over the years, and I'll be honest with you — most of them start to blur together after a while. Stone walls, creaking floors, dusty portraits staring down at you from the landing. You've seen it, you know the feeling. But the moment we pulled up to The 1890 House, I knew this one was different. The sheer scale of the stone exterior stops you in your tracks. The tower alone tells you that whoever built this place wanted the world to know they had arrived. That man was Chester F. Wickwire, and once you start learning about him and his family, the building starts to make a lot more sense.

Chester Wickwire made his fortune during the Gilded Age — that period in American history when industrial wealth was being built at a pace the country had never seen before and hasn't really seen since. He wasn't just wealthy in a comfortable sense; he was the kind of industrialist who commissioned a stone mansion with hand-carved woodwork, elaborate room after elaborate room, and architectural details that craftsmen today would struggle to replicate. Walking through this house on the tour, what struck me wasn't just how impressive it all looked — it was how much of the original detail has survived. The woodwork, the finishes, the character of each room — it's remarkably intact. And that matters to me from an investigation standpoint, because the more original a building remains, the more connected it is to the people and the events that shaped it.

This episode is the tour. We wanted to take our time moving through each space, learning about the Wickwire family — who they were, how they lived, who else walked these halls alongside them. That's the part that often gets skipped in paranormal programming, and it's the part I've always believed matters most. If something unexplained is happening inside a building, history is almost always part of the answer — whether that answer turns out to be paranormal or not. A cold spot in a particular room means something very different once you know what happened in that room. A sound at a specific hour of the night becomes more significant when you understand the daily rhythms of the people who once lived there. Context isn't just background noise. It's evidence.

I go into every location as a skeptic. That hasn't changed since the early days of TAPS and it never will. My job isn't to confirm a haunting — it's to find every possible natural, logical, structural explanation first. Old buildings like The 1890 House are full of them. Stone construction behaves in specific ways as temperatures shift. Older plumbing and heating systems create sounds that travel through walls in unpredictable patterns. Windows and doors that have settled over more than a century can move, rattle, and seal imperfectly. I need to know all of that before I can say with any confidence that something is genuinely unexplained. That's why the tour matters. That's why the history matters. And that's exactly why we're sharing it with you before we share the investigation.

The 1890 House is a remarkable building with a deep history, and it deserves to be approached with the same care and respect that went into building it. We've done the homework. Now it's time to go back after dark and see what, if anything, can't be explained. The investigation is coming — make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it.