A New York hotel room was forced open in the spring of 1931, 24 years after its door had last been seen. Inside, in two dark rooms stinking of dust and cigars, lived a tiny, deaf 93-year-old woman surviving on crackers and evaporated milk, with $500,000 in banknotes pinned inside her clothing against her skin. She gave her name as Ida Mayfield, daughter of a Louisiana sugar planter. Every word of it, it would later emerge, was a lie she had maintained for 75 years.
Described by investigators as one of the most successful liars of her age, the woman at the center of the sealed room was born Ellen Walsh around January 14, 1838, into an Irish immigrant family in Massachusetts. Her father, Thomas Walsh, was an itinerant peddler who carried his goods door to door, and his family of as many as eleven children lived in deep poverty. There was no plantation, no sugar fortune, and no fine southern house. There was only a peddler’s cart and a crowded room.
Watching it all, according to later historical accounts, was a girl with a determined and calculating eye. In her teenage years, Ellen Walsh decided she would no longer be Ellen Walsh. She adopted the name Ida Mayfield, creating an elaborate fictional past in which her father was a wealthy Louisiana sugar planter and her mother a descendant of Scottish earls. At the time, being Irish in America meant closed doors for Catholics and the poor, and her invented identity was a deliberate escape from those barriers.
In 1857, at age 19, she arrived in New York. On May 28 of that same year, she wrote to a married man she had never met, Benjamin Wood, brother of New York mayor Fernando Wood. In the surviving letter, she introduced herself as new to the city and to affairs of the heart, adding that while she might not be as handsome as the lady currently with him, she knew a little more, and that knowledge was power. She proposed an intimate arrangement of as long duration as he saw fit.
Wood responded. She became his mistress, and in 1867, after his first wife died, she married him, becoming sister-in-law to a former mayor and wife to a member of Congress and owner of the New York Daily News. During her years as a society figure, she claimed to have danced with the future King Edward VII during his 1860 American visit and to have met Abraham Lincoln. These claims, as with much of her history, could never be fully verified, and historians note she polished her past heavily over time.
Benjamin Wood was a serious gambler, known for frequenting New York’s gaming houses, where fortunes changed hands nightly. He could lose considerable sums in a single sitting. In an arrangement remembered years later, Ida agreed to take half of everything he won, while his losses remained entirely his own. According to some accounts, she even charged him for the hours she spent waiting outside his clubs in her carriage.
During the marriage, she steadily moved the couple’s assets into her own name. When Benjamin died in 1900, newspapers noted he left very little personal property, because almost everything was hers. Ida did not stop there. She created an invented family to support her story.
A girl named Emma, introduced to society as her daughter, was in fact almost certainly her sister, as was the woman she presented as her sister Mary. Investigators later determined through parish records that both women were her actual sisters from the same Irish family, reassigned roles within her fictional world to fit the story she had created. Benjamin Wood reportedly came to own the New York Daily News through a card game, a legend Ida never corrected, as it served her public image. In 1901, after her husband’s death, she sold the paper for between $250,000 and $300,000.
In 1907, during the great financial panic that swept the American banking system, Ida withdrew nearly her entire fortune, approaching one million dollars, from her bank, carrying it out in a netted bag. From that point forward, she kept her wealth in cash so that no institution could ever take it from her. She took rooms at the Herald Square Hotel, a modest two-room suite on the fifth floor, where she lived with her sister Mary and the woman she called her daughter Emma. For 24 years, the door to that suite remained shut.
Curtains stayed drawn, air went stale, and cleaning was not permitted. Maids were turned away year after year, and a hotel manager reportedly said that in seven years of running the hotel, he never once laid eyes on the woman in that suite. She lived on almost nothing: crackers, evaporated milk, coffee, bacon, eggs, and occasionally raw fish. She interrogated the cost of any food brought to her and sent expensive items back.
She tipped errand boys in dimes. In the room and stored elsewhere were 54 trunks containing unworn Paris gowns, rare lace from Ireland, Venice, and Spain, jewelry, watches, tiaras, gold certificates from the 1860s, a letter from Charles Dickens to Benjamin Wood, and a gold-headed walking stick she claimed had belonged to a president. Found among her possessions was a diamond necklace valued at around $40,000, hidden inside a box of stale crackers. She also held around $175,000 in railroad stock whose dividends she had not collected in over a dozen years, because collecting them would have required contact with the outside world.
Her sister Emma died in 1928. Mary and Ida remained in the sealed suite. By then Ida, nearly deaf and barely five feet tall, weighed around 70 pounds, and she kept large sums of money on her person day and night, folded into an oilcloth pocket sewn inside her clothing. On a morning in March 1931, Ida finally opened her door and called out for help.
Her sister Mary was dying. According to accounts, she cried out for a doctor. The hotel staff entered the rooms for the first time in more than two decades. Mary died soon after.
When officials and then the courts investigated, they found the full extent of the hidden fortune. In a shoebox was $247,200 in cash. Against Ida’s skin was another $500,000 in $10,000 notes. There was the railroad stock, the diamond necklace in the cracker box, and the 54 trunks.
Ida was declared incompetent to manage her own affairs in the autumn of 1931. The cost of her care ran to over $3,000 a month. She resisted being moved, wept when she was relocated, and at one point cried out that she was a prisoner. Asked about the finding of incompetence, she protested that she had made money and kept it, a statement that captured her entire worldview.
She died on March 12, 1932, of bronchial pneumonia, at age 94. More than 1,100 people came forward after her death, each claiming to be her relative and each seeking a share of the fortune. The investigation into her true identity was led by attorneys Edward Corkran and Joseph Cox, who worked backward through baptismal records, marriage records, and parish registers. Among the papers in her suite, they found a handwritten family tree in Ida’s own hand, listing the very family she had denied for decades.
The investigation established that Ida Mayfield had never existed. Her true identity was Ellen Walsh, daughter of Thomas Walsh the peddler. In 1937, the court ruled that the fortune belonged to the true family of Ellen Walsh. Of the more than 1,100 claimants, only about 10 genuine relatives were recognized, descendants of the Walsh line living in Ireland, England, and the United States.
The fortune, roughly a million dollars, was divided among them. Each received around $87,000. Ida Wood had spent her lifetime building a wall against the poverty of her childhood.
In the end, the wall became her prison, and the fortune she had guarded was inherited by strangers she had never met, under the name she had devoted her life to erasing.