Amstel House

The Amstel House stands in the heart of Old New Castle, the colonial river town that served as Delaware’s capital in the eighteenth century. Sources agree that it was built in the 1730s and associated with Dr. John Finney, and it is often called the Dr. John Finney House; the New Castle Historical Society dates his purchase to 1738, while the National Register nomination gives an earlier year. Its five-bay Georgian front makes it, in the words of one history site, the only early Georgian house left in the town. After Finney’s death in 1774 the property passed to his daughter, who rented it to the attorney Nicholas Van Dyke, later Delaware’s seventh governor.

The house’s best-known historical moment came on 24 April 1784, when Van Dyke’s daughter Ann married Kensey Johns there. A state historical marker and the Historical Society both say George Washington attended the wedding. The couple stayed in the house until they built a new home nearby in 1790, and their daughter Fidelia was born there in 1785. A group of citizens bought the house in 1931 and formed the New Castle Historical Society, which has run it as a museum, and the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

The ghost tradition centres on a woman in blue. Local writers and tour guides say she has been seen in an upper bedroom window, usually reported by passers-by in the street. Her identity is unknown: some tellings call her the Lady in Blue, others the Woman in Blue, and no documented resident has been matched to the story. The Historical Society says the house has been talked of as haunted for almost a century, which would put the earliest stories in the 1920s or 1930s, around the time the building passed from private hands into preservation.

Today the legend is part of the Historical Society’s Hauntings in History walking tour, which departs from the Arsenal at the town’s visitor centre and takes in the house along with tales of crime, punishment and Victorian death customs. Executive director Mike Connolly has told reporters that the tour’s stories come from homeowners and business owners and are kept as local folklore; he also described paintings and mirrors found on the floor, neatly placed against walls with their hooks intact. Nearby, staff at Jessop’s Tavern tell a lighter tale of glasses flying off shelves and Prosecco bottles needing replacing. None of these accounts has been verified, and the real value of the stories is that they keep one of Delaware’s best-preserved colonial streets in conversation.

A woman in blue seen at an upstairs window by people outside; paintings and mirrors found on the floor, placed neatly with hooks intact (stories reported to the Historical Society); the general sense of a presence in the museum.

An upper-floor bedroom window facing the street is the usual place for the Woman in Blue; sightings are said to come mostly from passers-by outside.

The house is a stop on the New Castle Historical Society’s Hauntings in History tour, one of Delaware’s best-known ghost walks, held in the weeks around Halloween on cobbled streets laid out in the Dutch period.