A ghost-tour founder calls New York City deeply haunted and maps the creepiest sites in all five boroughs, including a park where 18th-century executions took place.
Andrea Janes, a scholar and founder of the macabre tour company Boroughs of the Dead, helped The Post dig through claimed haunted corners across the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens.
She does not treat the city as a theme-park spook show. She treats it as a place that keeps building on top of graves, prisons, sickness, and murder.
“The city is haunted as h***,” Janes said.
"We just reuse these spaces over and over again, even if those previous usages were for a burial site or a site of sickness or suffering; we will just build on top of them,"
That reuse, she argued, “creates a psychic force field where we’re surrounded by spirit energy.” New York has about 8 million living residents. The dead under their feet get less airtime.
Janes picks Manhattan’s City Hall Park for peak spookiness. The history there is stacked: prison grounds, almshouses, burial sites, and the former home of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, destroyed by a massive fire in 1865. That blaze killed countless animals, including two beluga whales boiled alive in basement tanks.
Underground tunnels once ran toward a potter’s field. The park borders an African burial ground and a former sugar refinery. And in the 18th century, officials carried out executions on the commons in the south part of the park.
“The history of City Hall Park is extremely layered,” Janes said. “I’ve spoken to burly, skeptical security guards who work in City Hall Park who have seen and felt things.”
"You just have this intense, tremendous amount of history. There were even executions on the commons, in the south part of City Hall Park in the 18th century."
Her advice is blunt: “Be quiet for a minute and see if you can feel it. There’s something there.”
In the Bronx, the trail leads to the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage at 2640 Grand Concourse. Poe moved there in 1846 with his wife and first cousin, Virginia. A year later she died of tuberculosis in the house. Original furniture remains, including the bed where she died. Poe wrote “Annabel Lee” under that roof.
“There is a wide variety of opinions on whether the Poe cottage is actually haunted or not, but either way there’s definitely a vibe,” Janes said. “It’s a hundred percent worth visiting.”
Brooklyn’s Hendrick I. Lott House, at 1940 E. 36th St. in Marine Park, is one of the borough’s oldest residences. Colonel Johannes H. Lott built an earlier structure in 1720. Hendrick I. Lott built the main house in 1800 and folded the older piece into it. One family line held the place for centuries. New York City bought it in 2002 from the estate of Ella Suydam, a direct descendant. Friends of the Lott House sometimes runs special events. Regular access stays restricted.
“The Lotts lived there for centuries, and the house is imbued with the psychic residue of them,” Janes said.
She also flags the intersection of Pacific and Smith streets in Coral Gardens. She gets a queasy feeling there every time she walks past. She has found no hard research on the spot. People she talks to call it mob-related.
"Every time I walk by, I’m overcome by the queasy feeling I get in haunted places. I don’t know what happened there because I haven’t come across any details in my research, but everyone I talk to thinks it’s mob-related,"
Janes calls Staten Island “wall to wall ghosts.”
"It’s haunted as h***. It has haunted mansions, asylums, an old fort. There’s a convergence of psychic activity right over Staten Island that I cannot explain."
The standout is Kreischer Mansion on Arthur Kill Road. German brick magnate Balthasar Kreischer built the gabled house in 1885 for his son Edward. In 1894, Edward was found shot dead behind his father’s brick factory across the street. The family later held seances.
The house did not stay frozen in Victorian tragedy. In 2005, Bonanno crime family associate Robert McKelvey was killed there. Young and three other mob members stabbed and strangled him, dismembered the body, and burned the remains in the mansion’s furnace. Janes calls it “the most arresting ghost story.”
That is not folklore. That is a modern murder on top of an older death site.
In Astoria, residents have reported an apparition on 44th Street between Broadway and 34th. Janes identifies her as Elizabeth Hallett, the “White Lady of Astoria.” Per Janes, Elizabeth, her husband William, and their five children were murdered in the early 1700s. Two enslaved people belonging to the household were tied to the killings in that account. Elizabeth was pregnant. Early 20th-century row houses now stand on the block.
Mitch Waxman, who runs the history site the Newtown Pentacle and lives a block away, shared a friend’s account of the ghost sitting with her and her brother when they were ill. The friend called it “a comforting experience.”
Boroughs of the Dead marks its 13th anniversary this October. Janes is set for a Oct. 27 panel at the Center for Brooklyn titled HistoryHaunted Brooklyn: Ghosts, Folklore, and the Stories We Tell. She notes the tours stay history-based, and some skip ghosts entirely.
Believe in spirits or not. The executions, the mob furnace, the death bed, and the burial grounds are on the record. New York can rebrand a block. It cannot unmake what happened on it.
