Albert Charles Houghton, president of the Arnold Print Works and the first mayor of North Adams, Massachusetts, built this house in the 1890s, his third home in the town and the most extravagant. It is Neoclassical Revival with strong Greek features, roofed in Spanish tile, its clapboards made thinner toward the bottom to make the house look taller, with a formal garden behind where the family held parties to raise money for the North Adams Hospital. The Houghtons moved in around 1900: Albert, his wife Cordelia and their youngest surviving daughter, Mary, then 23, who later resolved never to marry so she could care for her ailing father.
In the spring of 1914 the family bought its first car, a seven-passenger Pierce-Arrow, and sent their longtime coachman, John Widders, to learn to drive it. On 1 August Albert and Mary set out for a pleasure drive to Bennington, Vermont, with Dr. Robert Hutton and his wife Sybil, Mary's childhood friend. In Pownal, on a road under repair, Widders steered around a team of horses at about 12 miles an hour; the left shoulder gave way and the car went down a steep embankment, rolling over three times. Sybil Hutton was killed almost at once. Mary died that afternoon at the North Adams Hospital. Albert, who had only minor injuries, was taken home and died ten days later, of a broken heart, people said. Vermont's investigator cleared Widders and blamed the soft shoulder, but the chauffeur blamed himself and shot himself with a horse pistol in the cellar of the Houghton barn.
The surviving daughters sold the house to the Lafayette-Greylock Freemasons in 1926, and the Masons built their lodge where the garden had been. In time they opened the mansion to paranormal enthusiasts, $80 a night with three rules: no alcohol, no drugs and no Ouija boards. Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures both investigated. Visitors have told of a lantern-like light floating up the stairs, footsteps overhead in empty rooms, a girl's giggle, a 40-degree gust of air in midsummer, and a deep sadness in Mary's room, and the Masons themselves told of answering knocks in their meeting room. A rusting barber's chair in the basement, the story goes, once served in a long-abandoned initiation rite.
Unable to keep the building up to code, the Masons sold it in 2017 to a hotel developer for a reported $160,000, and it has been closed to the public since, its kitchen lent out for a while to local restaurants.
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