Trout House

The **Trout Mansion** is a reputed haunted house located at 1325 Wyckoff Road (Route 33) in the former community of Wyckoff, now part of Ashford Falls, New York, sixty miles north of Albany on Interstate 87 in the Northeast end of the Adirondack Mountains. Several resources in paranormal research erroneously list the address as 1333 Wyckoff Road.

Built in or around 1912 by Johnathan Trout in the former community of Wyckoff, the Tudor-style fourteen room stone and brick structure was designed with a turret, cupola and veranda. A huge circular mahogany staircase rose up through the middle of the structure; it featured the first indoor bathroom in the area constructed in marble with both hot and cold running water. The mansion was furnished with many fine antiques and beds imported from Europe with hardwood floors throughout, heavy crystal chandeliers and black walnut woodwork.

From around 1912 to 1934, Trout lived here with his wife, June Trout, and their three daughters Elizabeth ("Lizzie"), Carolyn ("Carrie") and Deirdre ("Dee") Trout, who all became quite popular in the area. Jonathan was a preacher, and his wife, June, handled their open church gatherings with their daughters singing Biblical songs to the throngs of people who came to visit. People also hired the three girls to sing at family outings, state fairs and city gatherings. However, in the years after his wife’s passing, Trout became heavily involved in the Spiritualist Movement of the 1890s and 1930s and often went around holding séances and ceremonies to contact the spirits of deceased loved ones.

Unfortunately, after Jonathan Trout passed in 1929, the triplets were quickly left to their own devices, such as carrying on with young men, sharing each other's boyfriends, throwing wild parties and going on expensive shopping sprees in New York City. Their activity almost definitely tainted their reputations and singing engagements soon fell far and few between. Within a few years, they were left almost entirely bankrupt, having spent almost the modern equivalent of two million dollars within three years. In that time, the house became filled with trash with the girls sleeping in the foyer around a burning metal drum for heat. Newspapers covered once grand windows to keep out the heat, the staircase was covered with debris and stacks of soiled books, stray cats roamed through the house, dead birds littered the upstairs, once beautiful dresses were used to plug leaking pipes, large metal barrels caught water leaking through the roof and most of the furniture had been sold off to buy food. Furthermore, at thirty-four years old and wracked by their hard-partying, the sisters were no longer the young angels they once were. Unsubstantiated rumors about them were numerous. Lizzie was speculated to be an alcoholic, Carrie was carrying on with several young men, having had three abortions in one year, and Dee, reported the worst and most incorrigible of the three, was considered a chronic shoplifter fluent in profanity while carrying on with the son of the mayor. They disappeared on June 11, 1934 after the disappearance of a youth named William Davies. Dee was known to had an "unclean obsession" with young boys,

After the house was left abandoned, numerous unverified and unsubstantiated stories and urban legends started coming from the house. Locals claimed that they heard the voices of the Trout Sisters singing from the empty house, and through the Forties and Fifties, local teenagers used the house in non-stop hazing rituals. Bradley Larabee visited the place as an urban explorer, and Ben Waverly and Jason Pryde often came out on dares. On October 31, 1985, Tricia Creekmore, Monica Baldwin, Russell Coleman and several local young adults attended a party in the derelict structure and said their heard voices, laughter and footsteps among poltergeist activity. Tricia’s father, Mayor Lionel Creekmore told stories he had heard from the house for several Halloweens to the local children, and in 1990, the paranormal documentary, True and Real Ghost Stories of the Supernatural interviewed several witnesses connected to the activity there.

In 2004, Melissa Strickland explored and researched the legends of the house in connection to the legend of Lucy Rose, coming into contact with Sara Capture, a female drifter living in the house. Two years later, she returned to investigate claims of a spectral woman in white wandering near the house seen by motorists.