The story
Colross began around 1800 in Alexandria, Virginia, a grand Federal mansion of the Potts and later Mason and Smoot families whose grounds filled a city block — and whose Alexandria legends grew rich: the Smoot children, a son and daughter said in nineteenth-century telling to have died young (a tomb-disturbing storm among the tale's gothic flourishes), haunting the halls with small footsteps and laughter. The house's second life is the remarkable part: purchased in the 1920s, Colross was dismantled brick by brick and re-erected in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1929 — one of the era's great architectural relocations — where it now stands on the campus of a private school; Alexandria telling insists the children travelled with their house, while the original site's ground lies under later development. The mansion is school property, not visitable — exterior glimpses only, stated plainly, and the legends hedged as Alexandria folklore attached to relocated walls. Present Colross as preservation curiosity first: a haunted house that moved states.