Unveiling the Ghost Who Haunted Joan Rivers: Mrs. Spencer

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I expect a citation and all of your article corrections out there. You hear me, New York Post?

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Hello, welcome to Citegeist, the paranormal podcast that puts the "ah" in bibliography. I'm your host, Joshua Spellman. And yes, I'm going to acknowledge this outfit in a moment. But first on this podcast, we seek to find the truth among our favorite tall tales. In each episode, I'll recant a ghost story, as it's typically told. And afterward, we'll dive into the archive and have a ghoulish gossip sesh to learn what really happened. Today, we have a very special treat and I'm not just talking about me in this robe, but this robe has a very special connection to today's case. Today's episode honestly reminded me of why I loved doing this podcast in the first place and how there is no greater high than a research breakthrough. I imagine it's how runners feel, but honestly, I wouldn't know. If God wanted me to exercise, he'd put diamonds on the floor. With some cases, it's about simply researching and verifying existing history, like we did in the Iroquois fire case. And then others, like this one, is about trying to find the identity of a mystery person, which can be difficult sometimes based on how our society is set up. But we'll cover that in the gossip sesh. Today, we're diving to high society in the Gilded Age and attempting to uncover the true identity of Mrs. Spencer, the ghost who tormented Joan Rivers in her seventh floor penthouse apartment at one East 62nd street. This robe actually belonged to Joan Rivers herself. You can briefly see her wearing it backstage in her documentary, A Piece of Work, where not only can you get an intimate look at Joan, the legend herself, but you also get a very nice look at her haunted apartment. Before we begin, let me slip into something more comfortable. For you, not for me. I'm incredibly cozy right now.

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All right. Now that I'm suited up, come with me to New York's Upper East Side, and we'll see if Joan Rivers' ghost was a true terror or nothing but another joke.

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Famed comedian Joan Rivers always thought ghosts were funny business.

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That is, until she came face to face with one. 1987 was a rough year for Joan.

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After being the first woman to host a late night talk show, she was fired. And shortly thereafter, her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, died by suicide. Her relationship with her daughter, Melissa, became strained. And to make matters worse, she was facing financial hardship due to her unemployment and a string of bad investments.

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Depressed, broke, and feeling alone, Joan was desperate for sanctuary.

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She had decided it was time to leave LA and move back to New York City.

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Searching for a home was proving futile until she was tipped off by a friend. There was a penthouse apartment just off of Fifth Avenue, steps from Central Park, complete with a ballroom and library that had been on the market for quite some time.

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It sounded too good to be true. Surely it was out of her price range. The apartment wasn't disrepair due to years of neglect. The opulent ballroom, clearly beautiful in its day, was in the worst condition of all. Most buyers would have run at the site of the place, as clearly many had. But Joan Rivers fell in love. And the price was too good to pass up. At a time when Joan's life was falling apart, she found a place that met her where she was. Joan immediately began pouring all of her time, attention, and money into making this home a safe, quiet respite. While she was rebuilding and repairing her home, she was also working on reconstructing her life. Filled with anticipation, Joan, accompanied by her little Yorkie spike, would often visit the apartment at night after all the workers had left for the day to soak it all in.

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Joan had fallen head over heels with the place, and she was putting in extraordinary work into the restoration, even hiring professional conservators to ensure that every detail was period perfect and masterfully constructed.

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On a sweltering August night, when returning to the city on Labor Day weekend, Joan decided to swing by the apartment with Spike on a whim. But this night would be different, in the start of a newfound misery.

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Stepping off the elevator, something immediately felt off.

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The apartment was freezing cold, despite the fact it was the hottest time of the year and on the uppermost floor of the building, no less.

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Even stranger was that Spike, who often joyfully bounced around the apartment, refused to cross the threshold, no matter how much Joan called for him.

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Ignoring these warning signs and leaving Spike at the door, Joan began to walk around the apartment and Spike began to bark and howl after her, but he still refused to cross the line. When Joan reached the ballroom, she noticed lewd drawings and strange markings all over the walls. Were these left by the workers?

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Vandals? She couldn't be sure, but she felt uneasy. Off-put, Joan quickly hurried back to Spike and called for the elevator.

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On the way down to the lobby, she told the attendant about what she had just experienced and he simply replied, "Oh, I guess Mrs. Spencer is back." Joan was confused. Who was Mrs. Spencer and what was she doing in her apartment?

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The attendant went on to tell Joan that Mrs. Spencer was a niece of J.P. Morgan and originally the entire building belonged to her.

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She lived there her entire life and as she got older, she would move higher and higher up, renting out the floors below her as she went.

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Eventually, she ended up in the top unit, the two-story penthouse with the ballroom where she had died seven and a half years prior. She now visits the building and torments the tenants. The elevator attendant went on to say how one tenant had a gorgeous chandelier with cherubs holding light bulbs. And one night when they came home and walked into their unit, all the cherub heads had been ripped off the chandelier and arranged in a circle on the ground.

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After that night, everything changed at the apartment. What was once love and excitement turned to fear and dread. The vibes were off.

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It was always cold no matter what you did with the thermostat. And the workers refused to stay after the sun went down and poor Spike still would not come in. On the rare occasion that Joan would force him to come in, he would immediately run to the door and desperately bark and claw to get out. Joan was at her wit's end. She had no money and she sank what little she had into the place. And it would be impossible for her to move now. Desperate for help, she called the NYU Parapsychology department who said they could do nothing for her. But the woman on the line feeling bad, trying to console a crying Joan on the other end, confided to her. Now, I shouldn't tell you this and proceeded to give Joan the contact information for a voodoo priestess in New Orleans. Joan didn't even hesitate. And while she didn't believe in this stuff, whatever was happening was ruining her life and she would try anything at this point.

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She called the priestess that very night, tears streaming down her face, begging for her help.

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The priestess patiently listened and agreed to try and rid the house of whatever was plaguing Joan. Not long after their phone call, the priestess flew up to New York and conducted a ceremony with Joan while Spike waited outside the apartment door. The priestess told Joan that Mrs. Spencer felt like she still owned the house and she was furious at what was being done to it and disliked the tenants who were living there.

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After almost two hours of ceremony, complete with drums, chanting, and various ritual practices, the priestess declared Mrs. Spencer had departed. And just as she said so, the apartment immediately warmed and Spike, who was waiting outside, burst into the room on his own, tail wagging for the first time in nearly half a year.

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By this time, it was nearly 2.30 in the morning, but Joan and the priestess decided to visit other units in the building to ask if they wanted their homes cleared as well. Despite it being the dead of night and such a ludicrous request, not a single tenant said no, not a single one. Every tenant had some kind of story of being tormented by the spirit of Mrs. Spencer. The priestess cleared the entire building from top to bottom and things finally started looking up. Eventually, construction concluded and Joan moved in. But much to her chagrin, the hauntings began again, even more intense than before. Feeling defeated, Joan cried and pleaded with the air, pleaded with Mrs. Spencer for her to stop, even trying to commiserate with the ghost, letting her know that she too was a widow.

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Despite her desperate pleas and apologies, nothing changed.

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That is until one night when Joan was in the basement with the handyman and she noticed a portrait tucked away in a corner covered in dust, lying in a pile of leftover construction materials. She walked over to it, picked it up and immediately had a feeling it was of Mrs. Spencer, which the doorman later confirmed when she brought it upstairs.

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Joan took the time to personally clean up the portrait as best as she could and hung it in the lobby of the building. Not long after doing so, Joan got an unexpected phone call from the priestess.

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The priestess said she received a visitation from Mrs. Spencer, who was incredibly grateful that her portrait had been found and hung in the lobby. It made her feel like she had some ownership of the building again and that she wouldn't be forgotten to the sands of time.

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To top it off, she was even pleased with the work Joan had done in the ballroom and adored that Joan kept flowers there. Mrs. Spencer made the request that Joan would always keep flowers in the ballroom, to which Joan happily agreed. Flowers were a small price for peace.

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So for the remainder of Joan's time in that apartment, Joan always kept flowers in the ballroom, but that didn't mean Mrs. Spencer had left. No, she was always there. She always would be. Joan's dogs would wake her up almost every single night around 3 AM, barking at an unseen presence in the room. But not one angry and vindictive as before.

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But one that was calm and serene.

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Joan would always acknowledge his presence with a calm, "Hi, Mrs. Spencer," before going back to sleep. Mrs. Spencer, who was once an adversary, became a fierce protector and ghostly ally to Joan.

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After hanging her portrait, not only did the hauntings turn around, but so did Joan River's life. Joan felt, in part, this was due to Mrs. Spencer trying to return the favor. As Joan helped her, Mrs. Spencer did what she could in return from the other side, and they peacefully shared the penthouse, kindred spirits in many ways.

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After Joan's tragic, untimely death in 2014, the apartment was listed for sale. It didn't immediately sell, but it was eventually bought by a Saudi prince. To the dismay of many, the prince immediately gutted the home. He stripped it bare of all the love and painstaking work that Joan had put into it. And it should come as no surprise that it's on the market again.

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Perhaps this prince endured not only the wrath of one ghost, but of two, of Mrs. Spencer and the iconic Joan Rivers. (Music)

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Can we talk? But really, can we talk? That was supposed to be a cheeky nod to Joan, but I need to let you know, this is the fourth time I'm recording this podcast. I think it's haunted. I know that this podcast is about debunking ghosts and all that, but too many things have gone wrong, from my camera focusing on things in the background that don't exist, to audio stopping recording, to post-production fun, like audio files being corrupted and video clips just ending and starting again. So, um, I'm a little frustrated. Um, and I'm hoping we get through this one without any grievous errors. Anyway, potentially cursed episode aside, we have some work to do. A gorgeous Upper East Side apartment and a ghost that's a member of an extraordinarily well-documented family. This episode should be a breeze. We should be in and out of the archive in what, five minutes tops?

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I think you can judge by the runtime. This wasn't so cut and dry. Really, to do any research, we need a name. And while we have a surname, it's not really enough to go on. But what we have going for us is we have two major figures involved in the story, Joan Rivers and JP Morgan. So a quick Google search is honestly a great place to start. I got tons of hits on Mrs. Spencer, but they were pretty much all articles regurgitating Joan's tail and presenting it all as verifiable fact. But then I saw it, a brazenly titled page in big bold caps. JP Morgan's niece, Mrs. Spencer, sounds like a great first stop to learn all about her. Oh, how wrong I was. It was a great first stop. Don't get me wrong, but not for the reasons you would think. And not for the reasons I would want. No, this page wasn't about Mrs. Spencer. It was a page selling Mrs. Spencer. Yeah, this website was claiming to be selling her ghost at the low, low price of only $38 USD plus shipping and handling. Clearly this must be real and the provenance fully legitimate and it will lead us directly to our Mrs. Spencer. Listen, I was keeping an open mind, but you can judge for yourself. Here are some highlights from the listing. The seller claims that after Joan's death, the Bellman asked them to look at the painting. Sure. Why not? The seller goes on to say that Mrs. Spencer helped Joan Rivers cross over and get settled in at her new life as a spirit on the other side. And they continue. And mind you, this is written very stiltedly. So if it sounds like I'm struggling, it's because I am. I gazed at the framed oil and was told I can't have her because she now belonged to the Rivers family. So I said to the guy, what do you want me to do? So while I stood there, I was trying to figure out what to do out of the blue. This pin from the 1800s fell. Now I'm not sure when Mrs. Spencer died or even when she lived, but what I do know is when something round falls out of the sky, like that, it is a sign of angelic power. This is white light. Just as Joan Rivers said, she was, I now have Mrs. Spencer in my possession. What does she do for you? Well, first of all, she is used to extreme wealth. So she will bring that to you. You see in her day, it would have been a lower class not to be as she is. She is loving and not stuck up, but she is classy. Anyone can have her. Except maybe a classless asshole or someone like that. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're telling me that I can get extreme wealth for the small investment of 38 bucks plus shipping and handling. I'm intrigued. I had my doubts, but I'm intrigued. I'll bookmark that listing for later. It's not the best first research stop. For starters, they didn't even know when she died or lived. Like listen, I try and give everyone the benefit of the doubt and not be condescending with people's beliefs, but this was too good not to share and poke a little fun at moving on. Google was only giving results that affirm Joan's story and hardly any articles pressed against it or attempted to identify who Mrs. Spencer really was. Though one or two articles did mention that JP Morgan had no nieces with the surname of Spencer. Sales of the property and its units were too old for systems like Acris or the automated city register information system. And I was only able to find the sale to Joan Rosenberg, AKA Joan Rivers, the sale to her estate and the eventual sale to the Saudi prints in that database. So next I tried searching the address in newspapers to see if I could find records of even older sales or even personal ads or directories, but having a house with a street number of one and really bad OCR on these newspapers, it was making finding things a little tricky. The next logical stop was the Morgan family tree. Looking at JP Morgan, Jr's nieces and nephews, none of them had the surname of Spencer. However, I did notice that several members of his family had the middle name of Spencer. And it was a surname a couple of generations up in the family tree. Unfortunately, all the immediate nieces and grand nieces didn't match our story as they all died after Joan moved into the apartment or lived and died elsewhere in the country. I soon moved on to cousins and nieces on JP Morgan Jr's wife's side of the family with no luck there either. So that was a complete dead end. If there were no relatives with the surname Spencer, then maybe we throw that bit of the story out completely. Maybe Mrs. Spencer wasn't a relative of JP Morgan at all and was just a wealthy heiress. It's not much to go on, but it's better than nothing. Next, it was time to look into the history of the building. Maybe the answer was staring me right in the face. The building at 1E62nd Street was commissioned in 1903 by John R. Drexel tearing down two existing brownstones to make room for his palatial estate. Well, not his palatial estate necessarily. It turns out he constructed the house as a gift for his wife, Alice, which I don't know what he did wrong, but good for Alice. And on March 31st, 1903, the son announced that plans were filed yesterday for a new city home to be built for Mrs. Alice Troth Drexel. The second floor will contain a private ballroom and two salons in addition to a dining hall and a library. Now, in looking into this, I did see something interesting and that was, while not a JP Morgan relative, John Drexel's father, Anthony Drexel, was the co-founder of the JP Morgan Company, which was originally named Drexel Morgan and Company. So that seems like a promising detail. Except that the Drexels didn't live at the house very long. And in 1929, the building was bought by 65-year-old millionaire James Blanchard Clews, who actually grew up and died and is buried not far from where I live. James Blanchard Clews only lived in the house for five years before dying in the home in 1934. In 1938, his heirs converted the home into high-end rentals and the Clues family eventually sold the property to real estate company Web and Knapp in 1941.

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So once again, not much to go on here. Aside from census records, which are done every 10 years, it's difficult to know who rented an apartment. Most tenants are transient by nature and rental contracts and leases are private records. Even if you could find them in an archive, those records would probably be restricted. We do know of one tenant who lived in this building, which was Ernest Hemingway. He rented one of the units when he lived in New York. But to have any hopes of finding obscure tenants of this building, we'd have to do some digging and have a lot of luck. While census records couldn't give us every tenant, they could give us some, especially those who lived there long term. According to the story, Mrs. Spencer lived there her entire life. But there's one catch. With census records, you can't search by address. You typically need a name to find any census record. And even with a surname like Spencer, we can't just pop in an address and hope to find it. You actually have to search the whole entire city. And since we only had the surname Spencer, which is a fairly common name, you wouldn't be surprised to know that there were a lot of Spencer's living New York City in the 20th century. And it's impossible to comb through all of them. However, little trick, while you can't search by address, there is a tedious way to find the census records for any given neighborhood. If you can figure out the census enumeration number, which splits a city into districts, then you can page through all the records for that given enumeration number or district slash neighborhood. The only annoying thing is that this number changes every census. And I had to go looking through old districting maps, but I was able to find the enumeration numbers for the 1930s and the 1940s. And it was at that time that I found a tool that you could use and I found the one for the 1950s pretty easily. So I started there at the 1950s and nothing. It seems like a lot of people weren't home for that year. I moved back to the 1940 census next and bingo. There were actually three Spencers living at one East 62nd Street in different units. One was Edith Spencer and her sister Geraldine. They were both single women with the same surname. So I didn't suspect that this would be our Mrs. Spencer, but I figured it was possible that one of the sisters was actually the sister-in-law to the widow, which seemed possible because they weren't both U.S. citizens. Edith, who was the head of the house, was from England and her sister was from Pennsylvania. So I putzed around and found the immigration records for Edith, who listed her sister Geraldine as her relative in the U.S. There was some complicated family situation and they were raised in different countries, but yeah, they were actually sisters. In addition to Edith's immigration records, I found a lot, I mean, a lot of advertisements bearing her name. Maybe Edith Spencer was someone special. In dozens upon dozens of newspapers, in big bold font blared, "Have you seen Edith Spencer?" What? Was she murdered? Was she kidnapped? No. These were advertisements for a midnight show on 63rd Street called Shuffle Along, starring Edith Spencer.

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Now, was this the same Edith Spencer? I wouldn't doubt that Edith would be renting an apartment around the venue where she worked. However, the census didn't list that the Edith at the apartment was a performer for her job. But the handwriting was so scrawled, I really couldn't figure out what she did. For all I knew, what was written there could have been a very specific title for what she did as an entertainer. A dancer, a pianist, an opera singer? I don't know, but regardless of what she did, she was making a pretty penny as a single woman. In fact, she was making even more than some of the men that lived in that building. Maybe she got this money from a rich uncle like JP Morgan, or maybe she got this money from performing in a saucy midnight show.

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It turns out that Edith Spencer was a famous vaudeville act in the 1920s through the 1930s, so there's actually plenty of documentation on her. But there was one dead giveaway that the performer on 63rd Street and in the advertisements was not the same Edith Spencer who was living at 62nd Street. And that was that Edith Spencer, the performer, was a black woman and in the census it listed our Edith Spencer at 62nd as white. Plus the advertisements were for 20 years prior, which I left out. But Edith Spencer, the vaudevillian, had a storied career and she was absolutely stunning. She performed on Broadway in productions of Rarin to Go, Runnin' Wild, and she took up the role in Shuffle Along to replace Florence Mills. Rarin to Go, Runnin' Wild, Shuffling Along. This woman loved to run. She must have loved that runner's high. Again, I wouldn't know. Do you like that callback to the very beginning of the episode that you probably don't remember because I was yapping so much?

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Anyway, Edith's career took her all around the globe. She became friends with Lottie G and they formed an act together. Eventually, Alec Ruddy Anderson was added into the mix and as a trio they toured Hong Kong and Shanghai and billed themselves as the Harmony Trio, the Creole Beauties, and the Three Dark Sisters. Hey, it was a different time and these women had to get that bag and if they had a plan of stereotypes to do so, no judgment from me. It seems that they were incredibly successful. Eventually Edith got married, quit show business, moved to the Philippines, divorced, and then moved to Los Angeles where she became a real estate agent. So obviously neither Edith Spencer was our gal. On to the next. That same 1940 census listed another Spencer woman further down on the list, Natalie C. Spencer. She was listed as head of household making zero dollars in income but paying 483 dollars in rent, which is today's equivalent of 9,213 dollars. Okay, and the icing on this diva cake was that listed in her residence was a chauffeur and a chambermaid. Now that is era's behavior if I've ever seen it and I actually have in New York when I live there. Also in a penthouse, well, rooftop pool, we don't have time for that story. But what now? Just because there was a Mrs. Spencer doesn't mean it was the Mrs. Spencer. While we verified just now that she lived there, we would have to now prove that she lived there long term and that she had some bigger stake in the building. Sure, she paid a lot in rent, but she didn't own the place. It belonged to this real estate company. Also, was she actually an heiress? How did she get this money? So many questions. But one thing that we do have going for us is that somehow today the apartments are known as a Spencer condominiums. So it's likely that there was a wealthy Spencer who lived there at one point and based off of Joan's story, she died there in the early 1980s or late 1970s. We're gonna have to find out. But another thing you'll find with historic research is that researching women in particular is incredibly difficult because, well, unfortunately, we live in a patriarchal society and up until as recently as the 1980s, you'd be hard pressed to see a woman's first name given in a newspaper. They were always listed as Mrs. John Smith or Mrs. Harry Truman, even if they were widowed or divorced. To top it off, women's names change over time. Obviously, women have maiden names and then they may marry and their name changes. And if they divorce, their name changes again. And then if they remarry, their name changes again. Or if they end up widows, their name may go back to their maiden name. But then if they get married again, it changes again. Or maybe they'll just keep their husband's name after their widowed. To confuse things further, sometimes they'll adopt their maiden name as their middle name. So the same woman may go by three or four different names, depending on where she was in her life. And don't even get me started on finding women of color because we will be here all day. But I digress. Next, I wanted to see why Natalie Spencer was so wealthy. Was she an heiress? A widow? A self-made woman? I searched and I found that Natalie C. Peabody, or Peabody if you're nasty, married a vine and Spencer in 1927. Doing more research, Natalie C. Peabody was actually married before. She married George Russell Peabody in 1909. And here she is on her wedding day on the front page of the news. And it tickles me that her picture is directly next to an article about J.P. Morgan's library. Just a little, a little slap in our face. There was also a 1927 article from the Times that left me quite chuffed. Titled "Easy Divorce" about women in New York who were going to Mexico for quick and dirty divorces. And our Natalie was one of them. She got a divorce in 1927. Obviously, it appears Natalie wasn't down and out for very long. I found an article that same year in the New York Times announcing her marriage to Vivian Spencer. And no, Natalie did not have the first legalized lesbian marriage. Though that would be very iconic. But I do love the name Vivian for a guy, not Vine and Spencer, as the last article had said. Another downside to digital research is OCR, or optical character recognition, especially when it's of microfilm. It's usually gibberish or completely wrong. And the manual transcription of handwriting isn't always accurate either. This was definitely the case for most of Vivian's records. Heck, even Natalie's name was messed up in the transcription of the wedding announcement. Look at it. What is that? This is why even online you should always read a physical copy or a scan of a document for 100% accuracy and not rely on handwriting or OCR transcriptions. To give another example, the 1940 census that I found Natalie in listed her as living in Nebraska, New York instead of New York, New York. And that was a human transcription. To be fair, this situation got extra confusing because Vivian is typically a woman's name. Like, let's break gender norms in the turn of the 20th century. So who was Vivian Spencer?

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Vivian Spencer was a lawyer for a railroad, but he wasn't just any lawyer. He was the son of Samuel Spencer, the rich president of the Southern Railway who was tragically killed in a wreck in 1906.

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All of Samuel Spencer's children had jobs and stakes in the railroad, and it turns out that Samuel's wife, Vivian's mother, was named Vivian. So that's where he got the name. Odd? But I'm really here for it. We let's pass more women's names down in the family to guys. Like, we don't need James John Paul III. Like, we need more Vivians. Anyways, Vivian Spencer, the man, like Natalie, was actually married previously. And from what I gather, Vivian probably never lived at 62nd Street as travel records have them living elsewhere in the city. And sadly, or fortunately, I don't know their business or their personal lives, Vivian and Natalie's relationship did not last long as Vivian died five years after they were married in 1932. I presume that Natalie rented the apartment on 62nd Street sometime after his death. Now, we clearly have Natalie Spencer linked the apartment, but we still don't have any evidence that she was anything other than a renter, and we have nothing proving that she lived there long-term since she wasn't in the 1950 census, which unfortunately is the last publicly available census. Now, yes, she didn't have to die in the house for her to haunt it, but Joan's story has Mrs. Spencer dying in the apartment in the late 1970s or early 80s. And at this point, there was nothing showing that Natalie Spencer had been there after the 1940s. It's definitely possible that the Mrs. Spencer that died in Joan's apartment was a different Mrs. Spencer. And the next thing I came across made my heart sink.

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I found Natalie's death record. Not only did she die in 1983, which doesn't line up with the date that Joan provided, with a zip code given for her residence at the time of her death, it didn't match the Spencer condominiums. Joan had mentioned that Mrs. Spencer died in the ballroom, and I'm beginning to doubt that Natalie is our girl.

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Regardless, though, something funny did strike me at this moment, because regardless if this is the same Mrs. Spencer, the fact that the Mrs. Spencer that haunted Joan Rivers died so close to her moving in adds an interesting layer to the myth and the lore. She would have known who Joan Rivers was. What if Mrs. Spencer just wasn't a fan of Joan Rivers' comedy? She was polarizing. I know if Matt Rife moved into my house after I died, I would torture the hell out of him.

[01:32:14;29 - 01:33:13;15]
But there isn't time to think about that. We have research to do. I spent hours combing through newspaper databases before somehow ending up on the University of Tel Aviv's website, which is completely in Hebrew, by the way. Apparently, they have a rich database of Hebrew newspapers, including some from the US, and this is where I found something hiding in one of these papers. One of the only articles in English on the page inside of the November 6, 1944 issue of "The Day." What I found was articles of incorporation for an LLC funding the play "Bonanza," and there was a long list of names. And a Natalie C. Spencer was there with her address still listed as 1 East 62nd Street. Great! Now we know that Natalie lived there in 1940 and 1944. So now to check off 1, 2, 3, 4 more decades. With further digging, it appeared that Natalie had created a self-named nonprofit in 1956,

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but no address was attached.

[01:33:17;09 - 01:34:10;18]
I also found her name in the 1972 annual report for the Tennessee Railroad Commission, showing that she was still receiving payments from the Spencer's railway endeavors, but there was still no lead on where she lived. I also saw her name pop up in a few stories about NYU. Searching directly for Natalie Spencer and NYU, I found out that there's now a faculty position named after her, the Natalie Clews Spencer Professor of the Sciences, and it appears that she was once a trustee, but there wasn't much more on her. By this time, it was midnight on a work night and I hadn't moved in seven hours, so I decided to call it quits and go to bed. After a restless night's sleep, I turned to Joan's robe, which I keep packed away in my closet, and I said, "Listen, Joan, can we talk? Please help me find that last thread that ties everything together before I go into work today, because if I do not find it, I will go insane."

[01:34:11;23 - 01:34:15;16]
So I walked my dog, poured myself some cold brew,

[01:34:16;16 - 01:34:25;10]
dragged out the trusty old laptop, and I spent one hour looking through old phone books and another hour trying to find her obituary with no luck.

[01:34:26;11 - 01:35:30;22]
Finally, before calling it quits and clocking into work, I decided to try and access one more newspaper database. I had to pay for it, but I could cancel after a free trial, so why not? What could it hurt? I popped in my credit card info and I started searching. And I had no luck at first, but I had a hint of inspiration. So many things about this story has been wrong. So I moved the date slider past 1983 and into 1990. I started my search again and dear god, when I tell you I slapped my hands together and yelled at my computer like a straight man watching a sports game when I saw that search result come up. NYU building sold in big bold letters, and beneath it was a brief blurb. 1 East 62nd Street, a seven-story residential property located just east of 5th Ave on a plot 42 by 100, was recently sold by New York University to Bernard Goldberg for $4,550,000.

[01:35:31;27 - 01:36:11;12]
The article went on to say that a consultant to NYU in the transaction stated that the property was bequeathed to the university by the late Mrs. Natalie Spencer, who resided at the duplex penthouse for many years. Mrs. Spencer chose to present the university with this gift because she had been a patient for many years at the Howard Rusk Institute. I truly couldn't have asked for anything better. This was it. This was the last threat. Not only did this prove that she lived there for ages, this ties her directly to the penthouse suite, and it shows that somehow she regained ownership of the building and lived there until her death. Was she a JP Morgan niece?

[01:36:12;20 - 01:36:23;01]
No. That part was wrong and threw this whole investigation off. But it does turn out she was an heiress of a different ilk.

[01:36:24;06 - 01:36:29;17]
If you've been paying attention amongst all my yapping, you may have caught the clue.

[01:36:30;23 - 01:36:32;00]
or clues.

[01:36:33;17 - 01:36:34;18]
Natalie C. Spencer?

[01:36:35;24 - 01:36:38;18]
How about Natalie Clews Spencer?

[01:36:39;25 - 01:37:11;02]
If you remember, James Blanchard Clews briefly owned the house at E-62nd Street before dying in it and having the property split into apartments and sold off to a real estate company. Natalie must have bought it back at some point, but without going down to New York myself, I won't be able to say this for certain. So how does Natalie fit into the picture? Natalie was not one of James's children, and at first glance it appeared that his brother John had no children at all. But it turns out that he did. He had one daughter.

[01:37:12;08 - 01:37:29;02]
Natalie. Making our Natalie Clews Spencer? Not an heiress niece to JP Morgan, but an heiress niece to James Blanchard Clews. A different Gilded Age millionaire. Could this mystery have been solved simply by DMing Melissa Rivers? Maybe.

[01:37:30;04 - 01:37:41;02]
And you might also just be thinking, could this entire episode have just been a tweet? Sure. But I like to think that the fun of this podcast is coming on me. That's not what I meant to say.

[01:37:42;11 - 01:38:32;11]
I like to think that the fun of this podcast is coming with me on the research journey, but maybe I'm wrong. To be truthful, if I had read a little more closely in my research, I would have put the pieces together a little bit sooner. But research isn't linear, and trust me, the path that I took you down was very easy compared to mine, and I obviously played some things up for the dramatics and intentionally buried the lead. I knew that Natalie's name was Natalie Clews Spencer from the first marriage announcement I found, but James Blanchard Clews was only mentioned in a single source about the building, and he was mentioned so briefly since he barely owned it, that by the time I found Natalie's name, I was so focused on Spencer that the surname Clues had completely escaped my memory.

[01:38:33;24 - 01:38:51;26]
Ironically, Joan Rivers' ghost story obscured Mrs. Spencer's identity, despite the fact it was Joan's mission to ensure that Mrs. Spencer wasn't forgotten. And so, just like Joan hung Mrs. Spencer's portrait in the lobby to ensure that she'd always be remembered, I want this podcast to do the same.

[01:38:52;29 - 01:40:08;03]
I want people to remember who Mrs. Spencer really was. Natalie Clews Spencer, a generous soul, heiress niece not to J.P. Morgan, but to James Blanchard Clews, and the ghost that tormented, and later protected, the icon, Joan Rivers. And I expect a citation in all of your article corrections out there, you hear me New York Post? I expect that citation, zeitgeist, hosted by Joshua Spellman. And to all of you, right now, listening or watching, thank you so much. Just thank you so much for watching and enduring me. Please hit that subscribe button to be notified when a new episode drops. I'm going to be back in 2026 every other Wednesday to bust ghosts and issue citations. If you're on a podcast platform that enables it, please leave a review. Any little bit helps. And if you're on YouTube, please leave a comment. I'd love to hear feedback, your thoughts, and hopefully you'll have a good comment because my fragile librarian psyche can't handle hate comments. And if you leave a mean comment, I'm going to buy the ghost of Mrs. Spencer, and I'm going to send her to get you. I have $38 to burn, as long as that shipping doesn't get me.

[01:40:09;08 - 01:40:19;28]
And for everyone else who's not a meanie, thank you for listening. Until next time, stay spooky, always cite your sources, and I'll see you in the stacks.