Scene File / Westchester County, 1928 & 1934

Wisteria Cottage

The abandoned farmhouse in Worthington, Westchester County, New York — the building often referred to simply as the Albert Fish house — to which Albert Fish took Grace Budd on the afternoon of 3 June 1928.

By Margaret Hollis Editor-in-Chief · Bureau of Historical Research Historian of early 20th-century American criminal cases

Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Ossining — aerial photograph, 1920 — Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Ossining, New York — aerial view, 1920.

The House

Wisteria Cottage was a small two-storey wooden frame farmhouse standing on a half-acre lot in the hamlet of Worthington, Town of Greenburgh, in lower Westchester County, roughly twenty-three miles north of Manhattan. The cottage took its name from a stand of old wisteria vines that had grown up the south-facing porch and roof in the decade before Fish's arrival. By the mid-1920s the house had been empty for some years; the vines and the untended yard gave it a derelict appearance which was remembered by several neighbours during the 1934 investigation.

The owner in 1928 was a local estate holder, Herbert Kent. Fish had corresponded with a realtor acting for Kent in 1927, using the alias "John W. Pell" and representing himself as interested in a summer rental. The rental never completed, but Fish retained the keys. The cottage was, effectively, a space he knew to be unoccupied and to which he had unsupervised access.

3 June 1928

Fish brought Grace Budd to Wisteria Cottage by a chain of trains and a local taxi. The journey took approximately three and a half hours; the pair are believed to have arrived at the cottage in late afternoon. Grace's body and the bulk of her clothing were recovered from the property in December 1934.

The details of what happened inside the cottage are preserved in Fish's signed confession to Detective King and in the letter to Delia Budd. This archive does not reproduce them. A verified transcription is held in the Westchester County trial exhibit file and in Wertham's 1949 case notes.

Recovery — December 1934

After his arrest on 13 December 1934, Fish directed Detective William King and a Westchester County detective squad to Wisteria Cottage. The house had been empty for the intervening six years and in that time had suffered further decay; the Wisteria vines had all but obscured the north elevation. Over three days (14–16 December) the investigators conducted a systematic search of the house, the cellar, the outbuildings and the yard. Skeletal remains, and fragments of a white silk dress and stockings identified by Delia Budd, were recovered from a shallow burial on the property.

The remains were taken to the Westchester County morgue for identification by the county medical examiner, Dr. Amos Squire. The identification was confirmed on 17 December. Grace was subsequently released to her family and interred at St. John's Cemetery, Middle Village, Queens.

What Happened to the House

Wisteria Cottage was demolished shortly after the 1935 trial. The site has since been built over and no trace of the original structure remains. Some early biographical accounts give a different location in Greenburgh; the Westchester County surveyor's map included in the trial exhibits (Map 3A) places the cottage definitively in the Worthington hamlet. The site is not identified publicly at present, and this archive declines to publish a precise address.

The “Werewolf of Wysteria” Headline

The cottage gave its name to one of the more enduring press labels applied to Fish during and after the 1935 Westchester trial — “The Werewolf of Wysteria.” The phrase yokes the rural setting of the Budd killing to the animal motif the New York tabloid press treated as appropriate to the case's cannibalistic disclosures. It is the only one of Fish's press-given names anchored directly to a physical location, and the only one in which “Wisteria” — the standard spelling of the plant and of the locality — appears systematically as “Wysteria” with a Y.

When and where the name first appeared

The phrase is conventionally attributed to the New York Daily Mirror, the Hearst-owned tabloid that ran sustained coverage of the trial, and is conventionally dated to March 1935 — the trial month. Both attributions are repeated in modern reference works without further evidence. This archive has not been able to identify a dated headline image or transcript that establishes the originating issue with primary-source certainty. The attribution is best treated as the received account rather than the documented one. A widely reproduced clipping bearing the headline “Werewolf of Wysteria Confesses” appears in a number of mid-century true-crime anthologies but lacks masthead and date.

What is documentable is that the name was in tabloid circulation by the time of the verdict (22 March 1935) and was repeated in the days following sentencing. The mainstream broadsheets — the New York Times and the Herald-Tribune — did not adopt the nickname during the trial. They used “the murderer of Grace Budd” or simply “Fish.”

Why “Wysteria” with a Y

The site is Wisteria Cottage. The botanical name and the Westchester locality are both correctly spelled with an I. The shift to Wysteria in the press appears to have been a tabloid stylization — the practice of respelling place names for menace or effect was familiar in 1930s yellow-press headline writing — but no editorial note from the period survives to explain the choice. By the mid-1940s the “Y” form had hardened in the popular literature as the fixed form of the alias, and it appears in this form in Frederic Wertham's The Show of Violence (1949) and in Harold Schechter's Deranged (1990).

How long the name persisted

“The Werewolf of Wysteria” did not survive the trial as a routine label in day-to-day press use. Coverage of Fish's January 1936 execution at Sing Sing in the New York papers reverted to plainer descriptors — “child slayer,” “sex slayer,” “convicted murderer.” The phrase did, however, survive in the historical and criminological literature that followed, and it is repeated in modern reference works as one of Fish's canonical aliases alongside the Gray Man, the Brooklyn Vampire and the Moon Maniac. Its longevity is largely a function of its phonetic strength rather than its currency in 1935 newspaper offices: it reads as a phrase, and it stuck.

For the broader treatment of Fish's tabloid aliases — their dates of coinage, their authors where identifiable, and their persistence — see the press-given names file. For the case the headline was attached to, see Grace Budd and the Budd letter.