The woman who once charmed New York high society in the 1860s and '70s as a young belle from Louisiana had apparently moved into the hotel in 1907 with nearly $1 million in cash and lived there in seclusion for 24 years. She died only a few months after being discovered, setting in motion a search for the rightful heirs to her considerable fortune. The Globe story reported the stunning results of the search: that Ida Mayfield Wood had invented her southern belle persona and managed to marry a wealthy and influential New Yorker. Her true identity was Ellen Walsh, daughter of immigrant factory workers in Massachusetts.

Details of Ellen Walsh's early life remain scant. Her parents were born in Ireland and immigrated to England before settling in America before the Civil War. Ellen was born in 1839, whether in England, Ireland, or America is not known. The family was living in Malden, Mass., by the late 1850s when Ellen disappeared, never to be heard from again by her family.

Some time later she showed up in New York City with a new name -- Ida Mayfield -- and a new identity as a beautiful and beguiling belle from a wealthy family in Louisiana. Somehow she managed to meet and wow a few prominent New Yorkers who added her to their guest lists for dinners and balls. Taken by her beauty and accent, not to mention her outspoken pro-Confederate views (views widely shared by many of Gotham's power elite during the War), Mayfield acquired a small army of suitors.

One of them was Benjamin Wood, the congressman brother of Mayor Fernando Wood and publisher of the New York Daily News. The two eventually wed and for a time they enjoyed the high life of fancy balls, fine things, and long tours of Europe. But the marriage was not a happy one. Benjamin Wood, it later emerged, was an irredeemable philanderer who lived apart from Ida for long stretches. And then there was the matter of Emma, a young girl the couple passed off as their own child but who was apparently fathered by Wood and another woman. To compensate for his failings, Wood regularly gave Ida large sums of money which she put in savings accounts and stocks.

Ida proved a wise investor and in 1899 Wood came to her for money to save him from some bad investments. She agreed to give him $100,000 but shrewdly insisted he surrender control of the newspaper to her. He consented and Ida became one of the first women to serve as publisher of a major metropolitan newspaper. She took a direct interest in the day-to-day affairs of the paper and even wrote editorials.

But it was not long after Wood's death in 1900 that her mental state began to deteriorate and she became increasingly reclusive and paranoid about her finances. The financial panic of 1907 apparently sent her over the edge. She sold the newspaper, withdrew almost $1 million from her bank accounts, and moved into two rooms at the Herald Square Hotel. Subsequently joined by a woman she identified as her sister and her "daughter" Emma, the three lived out their days in frugal squalor. They cooked their own meals and rarely ventured outside. Ida's two roommates died in the late 1920s, leaving her all alone as she approached 90.

In 1931, 24 years after she went into seclusion, the story of the "recluse of Herald Square" hit the papers. It emerged after her nephew Otis F. Wood initiated legal proceedings to have himself declared Ida's guardian on account of her poor mental state, advanced age, and dreadful living conditions. A psychiatrist appointed by the court found her delusional and paranoid, convinced that everyone was conspiring to get her money. She was also quite feeble, weighing just 70 pounds and nearly deaf and blind. The court named Wood as her guardian and soon thereafter the details of her fortune began to emerge.

An initial search of her hotel rooms turned up hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, found in pots and pans and stuffed in odd places. Investigators were then brought in to go over the rooms with a fine-toothed comb. Word of their discoveries became the talk of the town: shoeboxes filled with yellowed securities worth thousands of dollars, a diamond necklace in a cracker box, trunks filled with fine linens, and the ultimate cache -- fifty $10,000 bills sealed in a pouch secured to Ida's waist. The cash alone topped $750,000 -- an astonishing sum in 1931.

Despite her protests, Ida's nephew used some of her money to clean up her home and provide her with medical care. But at age 93 and in poor health, she died five months after her "discovery" in March 1932. A few days later she was buried next to her husband after a Catholic funeral.

News of her death made headlines everywhere and within weeks hundreds of people claiming Mayfield ancestry had hired attorneys and filed claims to Ida's estate as rightful heirs. By all appearances it looked like a messy legal situation that might take years to solve. To settle the estate, the court soon hired a law firm to conduct a comprehensive search to determine her heirs. No one could have known the stunning truth that would emerge from this search.

HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK

Dec. 1, 1917: Father Edward Flanagan opens Boys Town, in an area west of Omaha, Neb.

Dec. 6, 1921: Anglo-Irish treaty signed, ending the War for Independence and establishing the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion within the British Commonwealth.

Dec. 6, 1933: A federal judge lifts the ban on James Joyce's novel "Ulysses."

Published in 1922, it had been banned in the U.S. and Britain as obscene.

HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES

Dec. 5, 1901: Entertainment king Walter Elias Disney is born in Chicago.

Dec. 7, 521: St. Colum Cille, Irish saint, is born in Gartan, Co. Donegal.