In 1907, one of Manhattan’s wealthiest and most celebrated socialites checked into a two-room suite at the Herald Square Hotel and simply never left. For the next twenty-four years, Ida Wood lived behind those doors, hidden from the world she had once commanded. Only after her death would the full strangeness of her life, and the elaborate lies that sustained it, come to light. She was not, as she had long claimed, Ida Mayfield Wood of Louisiana.
She was born Ellen Walsh in England on January 14, 1838, the daughter of Thomas Walsh, an Irish peddler, and Ann Crawford. Her father was among the hundreds of thousands of Irish who fled the island during the famine years of the 1840s, escaping conditions of desperate poverty. The family moved first to England, then to the United States in the early 1850s, settling in Boston before scattering across the country. Thomas Walsh eventually died in California in the mid-1860s.
Those years were marked by intense anti-Irish sentiment in America. Irish immigrants faced widespread xenophobia, and many establishments openly posted signs excluding them. Determined to escape that stigma, young Ellen Walsh reinvented herself. She adopted the name Ida Mayfield and invented a new ancestry, claiming her father had been a wealthy Louisiana sugar plantation owner.
For the rest of her life, she guarded this fabricated past fiercely. Ida arrived in New York and soon became interested in Benjamin Wood, editor of the New York Daily News. The paper had been founded in 1855 by Gideon Tucker, then sold to Fernando Wood, a wealthy merchant and two-term mayor of New York. Fernando installed his brother Benjamin as editor.
Under Benjamin’s guidance, the paper took a controversial editorial line, arguing in favor of slavery in the Southern states and defending their right to secede. When the Civil War erupted in 1861, the Union government shut the paper down, though it was reestablished near the war’s end. Ida began writing unsolicited letters to Benjamin. Her interest was enough to capture his, and they soon met and began a relationship, despite the fact that he was married.
When Benjamin’s wife died in 1867, he and Ida married. Her rise from mistress to wife catapulted her into the highest circles of New York society. Benjamin was not only a newspaper editor but a three-term congressman and a two-term U. S.
senator from New York. During the Gilded Age, the Woods moved among figures like President Abraham Lincoln, the Prince of Wales, and the extended family of President Ulysses S. Grant. Their marriage carried another peculiar deception.
For decades, the couple claimed to have a daughter named Emma, born before their wedding. In truth, Emma was Ida’s younger sister. The reason for the lie is unclear, but it was almost certainly tied to Ida’s lifelong effort to conceal her Irish origins. Benjamin knew the truth about his third wife’s background and agreed to maintain the fiction.
As Benjamin aged, he became a compulsive gambler, often wagering enormous sums on cards and other games of chance. At one point he was believed to have bet the New York Daily News itself on a hand of cards, winning and retaining control by luck. Faced with his reckless behavior, Ida gradually took charge of the family finances through the 1880s and 1890s, determined to prevent her husband from gambling everything away. By the late nineteenth century, she had become a very wealthy woman in her own right.
Benjamin Wood died on February 21, 1900. Despite his earlier pro-Southern politics, he had been rehabilitated in later years, serving as a presidential elector for New York in the 1880s. At his death, he left Ida a fortune of roughly two million dollars, a sum equivalent to more than seventy-five million today. Ida never remarried.
She briefly took over the Daily News, serving as editor in 1900 and 1901, but found the effort exhausting in a business world that offered women little respect. In 1901 she sold the paper for more than a quarter of a million dollars, adding further to her wealth. For the next six years, Ida lived quietly. Then, in 1907, something changed.
She began withdrawing massive sums from her bank accounts, pulling out about one million dollars, roughly forty percent of her wealth. Along with her sister Mary and the woman she called her daughter Emma, she rented rooms 551 and 552 at the Herald Square Hotel. For reasons that remain unclear, the three women decided to stay there for a quarter of a century. The Herald Square Hotel was respectable, but the rooms were small for three women living out their later years.
They refused to allow cleaning staff inside, interacting with maids only at the door, receiving deliveries, handing out trash, and exchanging linens. Hotel managers were content to leave their eccentric, wealthy tenants alone. And so the women vanished from public life. As the years passed, they were forgotten completely.
Emma died in 1928 at a New York hospital, aged seventy-one. Her birth was then recorded as 1857, around the time a nineteen-year-old Ida had first grown interested in Benjamin Wood. In May 1931, Mary also fell ill. The ninety-three-year-old Ida finally called for medical help from hotel staff, but it was too late.
When doctors entered the suite, they found Mary dead on the couch. The rooms themselves were in dreadful condition, filled with years of hoarding and squalor. In the weeks that followed, authorities tried to understand what had happened to one of New York’s richest women, who had vanished in 1907 and reappeared twenty-four years later as a recluse. By then, Ida was not lucid enough to explain why the three women had locked themselves away, and she was declared psychologically incompetent.
The best explanation investigators could piece together centered on the Panic of 1907, a severe banking crisis that swept the country that year. Ida had apparently decided her money was no longer safe in the banks and withdrew as much as she could. Why she and her sisters then chose to shut themselves inside a hotel room remained a mystery. But Ida had spent her entire life running from society in one way or another, first changing her name and identity, and finally, in 1907, removing herself from the world entirely.
After Mary’s death, Ida was moved to another suite downstairs against her objections. Her old rooms, rotting and decaying, were gutted and renovated. Staff soon discovered long-forgotten trunks containing her possessions and cash, locked away since 1907. Ida herself died not long after her sister, on March 12, 1932, at the age of ninety-four, from bronchial pneumonia.
Her death created a new problem: she had left no will. Her large fortune sat unclaimed, and dozens, then scores, then hundreds of people came forward to claim it. When the legal case finally opened in 1937, eleven hundred and three people asserted they were Ida’s rightful heirs, and six hundred and sixteen of them appeared with legal counsel. At the heart of the circus was her fabricated past.
Because she had invented most of her life story, hundreds could plausibly claim kinship. People arrived in court claiming to be relatives from Louisiana, where her invented father supposedly owned a plantation, while others came from Ireland, England, Massachusetts, and even California. The court gradually narrowed the field to twenty-two applicants with credible evidence of relation. In March 1939, two years after the case began and seven years after Ida’s death, a final ruling divided her fortune among ten individuals.
All were first cousins of Ida, grandchildren of her aunts and uncles. Despite her lifelong effort to obscure her past through invented identity and fabricated history, her money eventually found its way to her true heirs, discovered only through the patient investigative work of the New York judiciary.