House Lust: Seaview Terrace, a Newport Castle with a Whispering Gallery, is on the Market

Built by a whiskey baron, the famed mansion is a favorite for paranormal investigators.

This castle-like estate on Ruggles Avenue has donned many names: Seaview Terrace, Burnham-by-the-Sea, Carey Mansion. (For fans of “Dark Shadows,” the horror soap opera that use its facade as an exterior set, it will always be Collinwood Mansion.)

But before all that, it was known as Aladdin’s Palace and it occupied a city block in Washington D.C. Its whiskey baron owner, Edson Bradley, bought and renovated the palatial mansion with hopes of avoiding Prohibition in the nation’s capital. But D.C. went dry and, like a genie summoned from its bottle, Bradley had a fleet of workers dismantle whole rooms from the house, transport them 400 miles and tack them onto an existing mansion in Newport. (Those rooms, it should be noted, had been imported from France and installed in D.C. just twenty years earlier.) The Frankensteinian task of adding onto one mansion with pieces of another — while also melding Jacobean, French Renaissance and Elizabethan Revival influences to a cohesive Chateauesque whole — earned its architect a president’s medal from the American League of Architects, per Seaview CARES,and a nod in Ripley’s Believe it or Not.

“There’s so much history here,” says Vin Fraioli of Edge Realty RI, which listed the property late last month. He mentions the mansion — the largest privately owned estate in Newport — was used by the U.S. Army during World War II and, for a spell, it also housed a girls’ boarding school. In the 1970s, it was purchased by the Carey family, who leased the mansion’s performance hall and stables to Salve Regina University. The family resumed occupancy in 2009 and, now, Seaview Terrace is on the market for its next steward.

Here’s your House Lust:

For more information on Seaview Terrace, contact Edge Realty RI at 401-515-4343 or visit edgerealtyri.com.