Tour guide continues Seaman saga

Robin Lucas does her homework to enhance her Beacon walking tours, which center on ghosts.

Her tales reveal horrors that took place at the Matteawan State Hospital, ostensibly for insane criminals, and belie the notion that the facility offered "moral treatment," in vogue through the 1950s, with a gentle experience for patients in a stress-free, routine environment.

Building on her first video, The Abraham Seaman Tragedy, Lucas returns with two sequels that feature a cadre of then-famous inmates. Part 3 intimates that Nellie Seaman, committed in 1907 without trial for allegedly shooting her husband, exacted revenge in 1913 by conjuring a storm to torment her enemies.

Lucas also released a video about the city's Omnibus War in 1876, which features characters from the Seaman saga and chronicles a period of "mob law" and "roisterous" drunks as two horse-drawn carriage companies competed for business. The videos include revealing photos, zippy narratives and contemporary newspaper accounts.

"I want people to hit the stop button and read a little, although what appeared in print muddies the water because a lot of it was hearsay and twisted into a point of view," she says. "The facts were there to be manipulated."

A prevalent theme in the Seaman series is the railroading of women into the Matteawan hospital to "shut them up and put them away," says Lucas.

In 1908, Jennie Blunt wounded lawyer Charles Sanford in Brooklyn for drugging and raping her, she said. A New York Times headline read: "Shot at His Desk by a Crazy Woman." The authorities declared her insane and she ended up at Matteawan.

"There were all these accusations of wealthy men committing sexual crimes and getting away with it," says Lucas. "Just like the Jeffrey Epstein and Diddy cases, so far, no list has ever been made public."

Though Matteawan guards sometimes abused their power, the job could be dangerous: In 1906, killer Lizzie Halliday (known as "the worst woman in the world") stabbed nurse Nellie Wicks 200 times with a pair of scissors.

Inmate Dora Schram, who served alongside Seaman and was released in 1911, claimed that the "actively unkind" nurses acted like "savages," which led patients to "hit back whenever possible," making everyone in the prison "all crazy together."

For Lucas, who contends that her historic home in Beacon is haunted, the videos augment her walking tours, "otherwise we would be standing outside for four hours," she says.

"In my ghost tour, you have to suspend some disbelief, but I found facts surrounding all of this, put it together and laid it out, like, 'Look what happened, what do you think?' "

For more information on Beacon Walking Tours, see beaconwalkingtours.com or call 845-440-5300. Lucas' videos are posted at youtube.com/@BWT7773.