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 something I've believed since the earliest days of TAPS, and it's exactly why we spent serious time walking through The 1890 House Museum in Cortland, New York before we ever set up a single piece of equipment. Built during the Gilded Age and once home to industrialist Chester F. Wickwire, this stone mansion stopped me in my tracks the moment I laid eyes on it — and that doesn't happen often.

I've walked into a lot of historic buildings over the years. After decades of investigating, you develop a sense for a place the moment you step through the door. The 1890 House is something different. From the massive stone exterior to the tower rising above the roofline, this isn't a house that tries to impress you — it simply does. Chester F. Wickwire built this mansion at the height of his success, and every room inside reflects that. The detailed woodwork, the elaborate architectural flourishes, the sheer scale of it — you realize pretty quickly that whoever lived here wanted the world to know they had made it.

But here's the thing about beautiful old houses: beauty and history come packaged together, and history means people. People who lived here, worked here, raised families here, and in some cases, died here. That's why this tour episode matters to me. I'm a skeptic first. I go into every location looking for rational, explainable reasons for whatever has been reported. And the single best tool I have for doing that isn't any piece of electronic equipment — it's knowledge. Understanding the Wickwire family, the people who served in this house, the timeline of who occupied these rooms and what their lives looked like gives me a foundation. When something happens during an investigation, I need context to evaluate it properly. Was that sound structural? Is there a draft that could explain what someone felt? Does the reported activity cluster in a specific room, and if so, what happened in that room? You can't answer those questions without doing your homework first.

Walking through The 1890 House, room by room, I was struck by how well preserved it is. The museum has done an exceptional job maintaining the integrity of the original space. You're not looking at a recreation — you're standing inside something genuine. The woodwork alone tells a story of craftsmanship that simply doesn't exist the same way anymore. And as we moved through the different rooms and learned more about the Wickwire family from the people who know this building best, I kept noting details that I knew would become relevant once the lights went out. The layout of the rooms, the way sound travels through the space, the age of the structure and what that means for settling and ambient noise — all of it gets filed away.

That's the work that happens before the investigation, and it's just as important as anything that happens during it. I've seen too many groups rush into a location, start throwing out claims, and completely miss obvious explanations because they never took the time to understand where they were. At TAPS, we don't do that. The tour comes first. The history comes first. The people who lived in a place deserve that respect, and frankly, so does the truth. If something genuinely unexplained is happening at The 1890 House, I want to find it. But I'm not going to call something paranormal just because a building is old and beautiful and has the kind of atmosphere that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. That's atmosphere. That's history. The investigation is where we find out if it's anything more than that.

The 1890 House is one of the most architecturally stunning locations I've had the chance to explore, and the history inside its walls runs deep. Whether that history has left anything behind is exactly what we're going to find out when the investigation begins — stay tuned, because this one has my full attention.