Status: Ruins/state park

If you have a fascination with castles or even ruins that resemble castles, the Van Slyke mansion is for you. This crumbling stone palace sits overlooking Ramapo Lake and is just gorgeous to see any time of year.

Like any old mansion, the Van Slyke mansion has its history. In 1906, a nurse named Ruth A. Coles married the man she was taking care of, who just happened to be Charles E. Halliwell, a captain of industry in New York. It was only a year later that he died and left her one and a half million dollars. Then in 1909, she married William Porter, a stockbroker and close friend of her former husband. Porter was building a mansion on Fox Mountain overlooking Le Grande Lake, which would be called “Foxcroft”. He later died in a car accident. Then Cole married her third husband, Warren C. Van Slyke. Van Slyke was an attorney and assistant to the chief of naval intelligence in World War I. The mansion wasn’t lived in year round until Van Slyke’s death when his wife made it her permanent home until her death in 1940. Foxcroft was left to her family, who sold it immediately. It stood vacant after it was involved in a bitter divorce. Then in 1959, vandals burned it, leaving it in the condition it’s in today.

When I visited the ruins, it was in the springtime when the lilacs were just starting to bloom. It definitely made for gorgeous pictures. This castle reminded me very much of the Untermeyer mansion, but definitely took much more effort to get to.

One can wander around the ruins and see the amazing stone walls, chimneys, and fireplaces and just imagine what it must have looked like when it was intact. My father, when he was a child, was lucky enough to have seen the mansion before it was burned. Like many other abandoned structures today, it was fillled with many belongings of the former owners and sometimes was a squatting place for the homeless. It was the ideal place for him to take his friends for a good scare.

The castle is about a mile hike up a mountain to the ruins, but in my opinion, it’s worth every step. The ruins are magnificent as is the view from the nose of the mountain. And the best part about it? It’s totally legal to visit. It’s in Ramapo Park in Oakland, NJ on Skyline Drive.

For more history and pictures of what the house looked like while it was intact, please visit this site.

- Ember, 2004