In 1932, a 94 year old woman died in New York City. Her death made national headlines because
the woman, Ida Mayfield Wood, who had been a recluse for the last 24 years of her life,
had once been described as the Grand Dame of New York's glittering 1870s.
But her death represented more than the passing of a famous socialite, it represented the beginning
of a startling mystery with twists and turns that were more strange than anyone imagined they
could be. The mystery of Ida Mayfield Wood is history that deserves to be remembered.
A year before she died, Ida Wood had to do something she hadn't done in more than two
decades…contact the outside world. In 1931 she opened the door to her hotel room, room 522 in
The Herald Square hotel and called for a maid. No maid in years had been able to get into room 552,
and clean linens were passed through a barely cracked door. “My sister is sick. Get a doctor,
I think she's going to die.” Dr Hal Babcock from a hotel nearby responded, what he found
was shocking. First there was the 93 year old Ida Wood, wraith-like with matted white hair.
“How much are you going to charge?” she demanded to the Doctor, who told her that he wouldn't
charge anything if she couldn't afford it. “Oh I'll pay you.” Ida responded, “but I warn you,
not more than three dollars.” No one besides Ida and her sisters have been in the room since 1907.
The two-room suite was a disaster, full to the brim of boxes, rubbish and dust. Rolled
up carpets, barrels, newspapers and more were stacked haphazardly in every available space.
A makeshift sofa made of dirty blankets and sheets sat in one corner. Ids’s sister Mary lay emaciated
on a cot in the second room already comatose. Dr Babcock guessed she weighed only 75 pounds.
Her abdomen was terribly swollen and the doctor guessed she was dying of
cancer. Within a few minutes she was dead. “Oh dear” Ida said, “Now she’ll have to be buried,
and that will cost money.” That night was the first time the hotel manager had ever seen Ida
or her sister Mary. In 1928 he had seen Emma, Ida's daughter, when she had been taken out of
the hotel. She later died at a hospital. The Mayfields had always paid their hotel bill in
cash although only reluctantly. The only employee in the hotel who had ever been inside the room in
decades was William Henry Grant, the night elevator operator who brought food. Always
the same list, bacon, eggs, coffee, crackers, butter, evaporated milk and fish every few days.
Every time she gave him money Ida would tell Grant that it was the last money she had in the world.
But now she had to deal with real problems, and she was no longer particularly capable of it.
She refused to listen when the Undertaker arrived, rocking in her chair with her head bowed.
She finally suggested they contact Judge Morgan O'Brien, a former Justice of the New York Supreme
Court and O'Brien was retired, but his son, a lawyer, stepped in to handle the situation.
After decades of seclusion Ida Wood was about to be dragged back into the limelight and her
long-held secrets would soon be revealed. Ida was stooped like a question mark, in poor health and
beginning to lose her mind. The law firm arranged for 24-Hour guards in the hotel room and doctors
to judge her health. They determined she suffered from a paranoid state of mind in
the condition of senile deterioration, and she was declared incompetent by the New York Court.
The court appointed her nephew by marriage Otis Wood to be her guardian.
Hidden about her hotel room Ida had hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonds and claimed that she
had 385,000 in cash. She wouldn't let anyone take it from the room despite, as the law firm claimed,
her deafness, blindness and weakness. Meanwhile, knowledge that Ida was still alive was spreading
as lawyers searched for her next of kin. Nephews and grand-nephews along with children from her
husband Ben's earlier marriages were already circling. Newspapers were already reporting,
Rich Recluse Found in Dingy Suite. They started digging up her past and the Herald Tribune
described her as, “A bell from New Orleans who swept across the social horizon of New
York in the 1860s and 70s with bright plumage and a fragile beauty.” She danced with the late King
Edward VII in 1860. On October 6 1931, Otis had her moved to an identical set of rooms directly
below hers, she fought the whole way claiming they're only doing it to steal her money.
Searching through the room afterwards they found 247,000 in cash, later a nurse discovered that Ida
had tied a bag around her waist which held another 500,000 dollars in ten thousand dollar bills.
Diamond necklaces and rings were found including one in a cracker tin.
Hundreds of people would turn up claiming to be her nearest relatives, Mayfields from Louisiana
and across the country, Crawfords who claimed to be related to her maternal grandfather. Every
word she said was recorded by nurses but she spoke at length, and told conflicting stories.
She had a five dollar bill that she kept like a teddy bear and she wouldn't part with.
She fought against every attempt to care for her, and one nurse remarked that “The 94 year old woman
had powerful hands. She could have broken your wrist easily.” she said. In March 1932,
she developed pneumonia and on March 12th she had a heart attack. She died that afternoon.
Her death certificate recorded the facts as they knew them. Father, Thomas Henry Mayfield,
mother Ann Mary Crawford. Little did anyone know how wrong that was. It would take some
time to untangle the messy facts of Ida Wood's life, but eventually painstaking
detective work would prove that almost nothing anyone knew about her was true.
Ida Wood was born Ellen Walsh in Oldham, Manchester England in 1838, the daughter of Thomas
Walsh and Ann Crawford. Her father immigrated to Massachusetts and then to San Francisco in 1867.
When she appeared in New York City in 1857 at age 19 she was poor but pretty, and looking
for a way up in the world. She quickly identified Benjamin Wood, a married newspaper magnet and sent
him a daring letter. “Having heard of you often, I ventured to address you from hearing a young lady,
one of your former loves, speak of you. She says you are ‘fond of new faces.’ I fancy that
I am new in the city and affairs de coeur that I might contract an agreeable intimacy with you.
I believe that I'm not extremely bad looking, nor disagreeable. Perhaps not quite as handsome as the
lady with you at present, but I know a little more and there's an old saying, ‘Knowledge is power’.”
The message apparently intrigued the 37 year old Wood who met her and found her suitable.
She became his mistress and 10 years later his third wife. On Valentine's Day 1857 Wood wrote
Ida an acrostic love poem which called her, “Ida with the lovely eyes.” As his mistress she entered
the top of New York Society, she met Prince Albert Edward, later King Edward VII, when he visited New
York in 1860 in an extremely exclusive event, and Abraham Lincoln as he traveled to Washington as
President-Elect. She met several more presidents including Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison,
as well as the French Empress Eugenie. Though she claimed to be the daughter of
a sugar planter Henry Mayfield she never seemed to have spoken with a Louisiana accent and for a
time before they were married she went by the name Mrs Harvey, though it isn't clear why.
Ida seems always to have been best at saving money while Ben was an incorrigible gambler. He even bet
his newspaper on a single hand in a game of cards, a hand he fortunately won. He
would often sign letters apologizing to Ida ‘Unfortunately for you, your husband Ben’.
According to popular stories Ida would sometimes wait outside the club while he gambled so that
if he won she could demand a share. She wouldn't bother him about the gambling, she told him, as
long as he gave her half his winnings and covered his own losses. They had a daughter together,
Emma, who was born before they were married. Ida had a sister Mary took on the Mayfield name just
like Ida. However, like so many things it turns out that Emma was not only not Ben's daughter, she
wasn't even Ida's daughter. According to a letter found in her effects Ben had adopted and treated
Emma as his daughter, but she was actually Ida's sister. A fact apparently kept from Emma. Life was
hardly without its storms, in addition to gambling Ben was an ardent secessionist and his paper the
New York Daily News championed the cause. Her brother-in-law Fernando Wood, Mayor of New York
City had declared that New York should become a Sovereign Free City and secede like the South.
The meeting with Lincoln, who Fernando refused to refer to as Mr President, was likely frosty.
Ben was elected to New York's Third District in 1861 and the Daily News became so viciously
anti-union that Lincoln's Administration barred it from being carried by the post office. They even
seized copies of the paper sent out to the city on trains. Indeed The Daily News helped to stir up
the New York City draft riots. And after the war the paper was incredibly successful and for a time
advertised as having the largest circulation of any Daily Newspaper in the United States.
When Benjamin died in 1900, Ida became the New York Daily News's editor. She fared
badly alienating the staff and firing most of the reporters and editors, she still managed to sell
the paper in 1901 for 340,000 in thousand dollar bills. Between 1901 and 1907, Mary, Emma and Ida
traveled the world. They took soap from hotels they visited and entire boxes of the collected
soap were found after her death. Ida seemed to develop a horrible fear of dying in poverty,
and in 1907, hearing unsettling news about the Panic of 1907 she rushed to the bank to save her
money from a collapsing economy. She arrived at the bank and demanded the money, nearly a million
dollars in cash, be withdrawn immediately. The sum was so large that the bank refused to obey,
reassuring her that the money was safe and that she couldn't just walk away with such a large
sum in cash, but she threatened them telling them she would tell every newspaper that the bank would
not, or could not cover its liabilities. She walked out with a bag full of cash. From then
on the money remained in a safety deposit box which was occasionally opened, always by Mary.
She seemed to have already been growing paranoid and in late 1907, she moved with her sisters to
The Herald Square hotel. To trick anyone following her she registered as a resident of Philadelphia.
While her sisters occasionally left the room, especially Mary, Ida herself happily spiraled
into the life of a recluse. Emma died in 1928, Mary in 1931, and finally Ida herself in 1932.
Ida's will left everything to Mary and Emma and the legal battle regarding her money would drag
on after. The will was not probated and instead the state took over, appointing Joseph A Cox,
the public administrator to administer the will and determine the nearest kin.
Cox had the unenviable job of digging through decades of correspondence and papers, as well
as hundreds of letters from people claiming to be Ida’s kin all over the country. Ultimately 1,100
people would make a claim on Ida's fortune and one would even produce a forged will.
Discovering Ida's identity was no easy task. Cox tracked records and letters, and poured over the
extensive notes nurses had taken during Ida's last months. Persistence and copious notes taken
by Ida among her possessions left clues, which firmly connected Ellen Walsh and Ida Mayfield.
Through her conversation with nurses Cox tracked down her father who had died in San Francisco.
They found a monument in New York City where Ida had buried her mother and a brother. Cox
discovered that around 1865 the remaining family, Ida’s mother and siblings Emma,
Mary and Michael went to New York to join Ida and all of them had changed their names to Mayfield.
Ultimately the big break actually came from an employee in a firm representing
Otis Wood, a former newspaperman, he had the idea of running a large ad, including pictures,
in the Boston Globe seeking information to which he added the apparently made-up claim
that Ida had promised her money to her uncle's children. Cox used that information to track
more hints in England and Ireland and eventually succeeded in identifying 10 relatives in England,
Ireland and the United States who would receive her inheritance.
There's still questions that haven't been answered,
for example what is her connection to or how did she even know about Henry Mayfield?
And of course there's that note of tragedy that her paranoia meant that she spent the
last decades of her life as a recluse, she didn't even leave to attend Emma or Mary's funerals.
Of course no one else did either. But maybe that's the way that she wanted it. If she
hadn't been forced to call a doctor to tend to her ailing sister, maybe she would have just passed
away in anonymity, and all those secrets that she kept for so long would have stayed buried.
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