She Was One of New York's Richest Women. She Spent 24 Years Behind a Locked Door: Ida Wood

In the fall of 1907, at the height of a banking panic, an elderly widow walked into a New York bank and asked for her entire account in cash, then disappeared into a hotel room for the next twenty four years. When the door finally opened in 1931, the men who stepped inside found her living on crackers in filth, with a fortune hidden in shoeboxes, cracker tins, and the lining of the nightgown she slept in. I wanted to understand why a woman worth close to a million dollars would live that way, and the answer turned out to have less to do with madness than with a deal she once made with her gambling husband. What the courts uncovered after her death was something even the eleven hundred people claiming her money never saw coming. Source Material Visual material used in this production is obtained from publicly accessible archives, including the Library of Congress and open-license collections on Wikimedia Commons. Copyright & Fair Use Notice This channel incorporates copyrighted material under the principles of Fair Use as recognized by U.S. law. Under Section 107 of the United States Copyright Act, certain uses of copyrighted works such as for analysis, commentary, educational purposes, research, and reporting are permitted without prior authorization from the copyright holder. #idawood