Post by Graveyardbride on Nov 14, 2014 14:42:31 GMT -5
Things That Go Bump in New York
“There are certain spots where the physical and spirit worlds converge and New York City is one of them,” says the Reverend Daniel Neusom, pastor of New York’s First Universal Spirit Church. This is probably not surprising in a place with such a tumultuous history – a raucous colonial seaport that grew helter-skelter into the nation’s largest and most dynamic city. It is a proper mise en scène for brooding spirits.
Titanic Spirits. Take, for example, the most famous catastrophe in maritime history, the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. When survivors reached New York, it appears some of them may have been accompanied by the spirits of their doomed shipmates. These haunted survivors were people who disembarked the rescue ship Carpathia with no loved ones to greet them. They were offered temporary lodging at the American Seaman’s Friend Society Sailor’s Home & Institute, a five-story building on the northern edge of Greenwich village. They settled into the tiny rooms, grateful to be alive, but then began to feel they were not alone. The building’s creaking elevator, ordinarily manned by an operator, seemed to be ascending and descending by itself and there were reports of shrieks and wails emanating from hallways in the dark of night. Some of the survivors concluded the Titanic’s dead had indeed accompanied them to New York and established residence at the Institute. Today the imposing red-brick building that was once home to the Institute houses The Jane, a boutique hotel with minuscule 50-square-foot rooms designed to look like berths on a ship and communal, coed bathrooms. What were resting places for weary sailors are now occupied by young, adventurous travelers.
Pegleg Pete. There are ghostly legends all the way back to the New Amsterdam of Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutchman who ruled the colony with an iron fist and wooden leg. Almost from the time of his death in 1664, there were reports of his lingering presence. A century after Stuyvesant bitterly surrendered the colony to English intruders, who promptly renamed the place New York, his peg-legged apparition supposedly was seen wandering about the charred ruins of what had been his executive mansion. The fire occurred in 1774, a hundred years after Stuyvesant’s death. The mansion was eventually replaced by a church, St. Mark’s in the Bowery, and over the years, people have reported hearing what sounds like the thumping of a wooden leg in the grounds and church bells pealing without the aid of a bell-ringer. In a city he ruled for a quarter century, Peter Stuyvesant seems to be omnipresent long after his physical departure.
The Body in the Well. And then there is the strange case of Gulielma Sands, whose body was discovered by two boys in at the bottom of a well in 1799 in a hilly farming area of New York. Soon after her death, New York’s planners eyed this ground for expansion and by 1825, the hills were gone and the neighborhood (now called SoHo) was Manhattan’s most densely populated. The well (pictured above) still exists in the basement of the Manhattan Bistro, a quaint French restaurant on Spring Street. Apparently, Gulielma is still there, too. There have been several sightings at the restaurant of a spectral woman with long, unkempt hair, wearing a soiled, wet dress.
Deadly Duel. Elma Sands was the fiancée of Levi Weeks, who was accused of her murder. Weeks, the brother of a wealthy contractor, was aided in his defense by two men who did not otherwise get on well with each other: Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. Weeks beat the rap and his two prominent defenders continued to their fateful encounter. Burr and Hamilton had been ambitious young men, less than a year apart in age, who hoped for key roles in the new republic. Their rivalry was born early when the two began their political careers supporting competing factions. By the time of Elma’s death, Hamilton had finished a stint as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury and Burr was about to run for president. Hamilton’s support of Thomas Jefferson guaranteed that Jefferson would win the top office and Burr, who became vice president, would be Hamilton’s enemy for life. The feud peaked in 1804 after Hamilton made disparaging remarks about Burr, who thereupon challenged him to a duel. The duel was fought in New Jersey, with pistols the weapons of choice, and Hamilton was mortally wounded. Aides rushed the stricken man across the Hudson River to Manhattan and the Jane Street home of his doctor, John Francis. After Francis did what little he could, Hamilton was moved down the street to his own home, where he died the following day. Legend has that Hamilton never left the Francis home. A ghost in 18th-century attire has been seen there since the mid-1900s. Hamilton’s remains are interred downtown in the lush cemetery that surrounds Trinity Church, a majestic Gothic Revival structure at Broadway and Wall Street, where his ghost is said to hover near his pyramid-topped white tomb.
Hamilton’s shade may find solace in the fact that Aaron Burr leads an even more restless afterlife. Burr owned a large property in what today is Greenwich Village. His carriage house now houses an elegant restaurant called One if by Land, Two if by Sea, where the phantom Burr is said to pull chairs from under people and break dishes. Such cantankerousness might be expected because Burr had a rather unpleasant life. His once-promising political career was aborted by charges that he treasonously tried to provoke a war with Spain. Though cleared, he spent the following four years in Europe. He returned to heartbreak when, in December 1812, his daughter Theodosia was lost at sea. Some say Burr’s spirit can still be seen standing at the seawall of the Battery, gazing out into New York Harbor in search of Theodosia’s ship.
The Widow Burr. There is yet another legend involving Burr. Toward the end of his life, at age 77, he married a woman younger by two decades – Eliza Jumel, a social climber with a shady past who claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of George Washington. Mrs. Jumel lived on a spectacular estate close to Manhattan’s northern edge and rumor had it that she murdered her first husband, Stephen Jumel, in the house in 1832, a year before tying the knot with Burr. Her second venture into matrimony did not last long either. Burr attempted to get control of her considerable fortune and in July 1834, she filed for divorce. The decree came through September 14, 1836 – the day Burr died. Eliza Burr died in her fine home in 1865 and it is said she haunts it still. The only surviving pre-Revolutionary War home in Manhattan, the place is now a museum called the Morris-Jumel Mansion. On a field trip there in the early 1960s, visiting schoolchildren were admonished to be quiet by the flickering specter of an elderly woman standing on a balcony. Although no one gave credence to her claim that her father was George Washington, in old age, she bore a striking resemblance to the father of our country.
The Pirate in the Pit. About the time Madame Jumel switched husbands, two American soldiers stationed at Fort Wood on Bedloe’s Island were searching for the buried treasure of pirate Captain William Kidd. The notorious Captain Kidd, who had lived in New York for four years before his execution in 1701, had reputedly buried a treasure chest on Bedloe’s Island. Armed with a fortune teller’s map and divining rod, the two soldiers made their way to the indicated site and started digging. They did indeed find a chest, but as they were about to lift it, a flash of light and horrifying vision arose from the pit – or so they claimed. The terrified soldiers screamed, prompting sentries to investigate. The sentries later swore they, too, saw the ghost – that of a dead pirate buried beside the treasure. Since 1886, the site has had a permanent guard, the Statue of Liberty, on what is now called Liberty Island.
Sheltered Sisters. Jane and Rosetta Vandevroot probably never saw the famous statue. They were so sheltered by their rich, overprotective father they could venture unescorted to just two locations, a favorite restaurant and the ice skating pond in Central Park. Their father believed all the men who approached his beloved girls were fortune-hunters and scared them off. Even after he died, the sisters remained single and stuck to their limited routine until their deaths within months of each other. Witnesses still report seeing two elderly women in 19th-century attire cut ghostly figure-eights on Central Park’s frozen pond.
Another young woman, Gertruide Tredwell, suffered a similar fate at the hands of a tyrannical father. She was born in 1840, the youngest of Seabury Treadwell’s eight children, in a four-story home at 29 East 4th Street near Washington Square. Alas, Gertrude fell in love with a young man who was Roman Catholic. The Tredwells were strictly Episcopalian and any thought of marriage to a Catholic was forbidden by her father. A shattered Gertrude vowed never to wed. She watched as her siblings married and left the house and tended her parents until they their deaths. In 1933, at the age of 93, Gertrude herself passed on, leaving a home that had changed little during her long life. A distant relative bought the house and turned it into the Merchant’s House Museum, where Gertrude may still be dwelling in spirit. Some have reported seeing a prim lady in a plain brown dress playing the piano (above). A museum volunteer once claimed she felt a pencil she was holding begin moving of its own accord writing: “Miss Tredwell is here” in an unfamiliar scrawl.
Poetic Spirit. As with the rest of New York City, the spirit population has grown apace since Gertrude Tredwell’s day. Shades of the rich and poor, the obscure and prominent, are said to mingle in their democratic netherworld throughout the great metropolis. Many share a bond of self-destruction: swift suicides who leaped from skyscrapers, and slow suicides who drank themselves to death – none more famously than Dylan Thomas. The brilliant but sodden Welsh poet made four trips to the United States in the early 1950s and was a familiar patron of the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, once a Prohibition speakeasy. On his last trip, in 1953, Thomas spoke of seeing the gates of Hell, and thereupon downed 17 or 18 shots of whiskey at the White Horse. He went into a coma and within days he was dead. The bar consecrated a room to his memory, for the staff says he still visits and leaves half-empty shot glasses strewn about from time to time to mark his spectral passage. One can almost hear the refrain: “Do not go gently into that good night . . . .”
Barflies. Both the living and the dead hang out in New York’s West Village, it seems, and not just at Halloween. Like Dylan Thomas, other shades are reputed to congregate in the neighborhood’s restaurants and bars. Among the restaurants said to be haunted is the Waverly Inn at 16 Bank Street, whose colorful history may well be conductive to the supernatural. Built in 1844, the place served as a tavern, a bordello and a carriage house. In 1920, it became a teahouse, where patrons included poet Robert Frost. It has been a restaurant ever since. Fire broke out at the Waverly Inn just before Christmas in 1996 and investigators probing its cause were perplexed. They identified the spot where they thought the fire had started, but found nothing. Asked about the restaurant’s history of alleged spirit sightings, a fire marshal told the New York Times, “Ghosts don’t’ start fires – we don’t think.” Hannah Dory, who purchased the establishment four years before the fire, isn’t so sure. Room 16 was undamaged by the blaze and according to legend, Room 16 was the favorite spot of the anonymous ghost believed to haunt the Waverly Inn, making his presence known in various ways. Some patrons and employees have seen the apparition of a man wearing clothing dating to the early 19th century. Others have heard odd sounds when no one is there to make them.
And then there’s Chumley’s a neighborhood pub at 86 Bedford Street. The proprietor, Henrietta Chumley, loved the spare layout of the place, but what she liked even more was the liquor selection behind the bar. One day in 1960, Henrietta drank herself to death, though it took a while for anyone to notice. She fell asleep while laying out a game of solitaire and never awakened. Ever since, the tavern’s lights sometimes go out by themselves and the jukebox plays of its own accord. Some say it is merely Henrietta summoning up a tune as she did in the good old days.
Shades of Broadway. No man, it seems, should have been more comfortable in a theater than impresario David Belasco. He was, after all, a famous producer and owned two theaters on Broadway. But legend has it that both these New York emporiums – the Republic and the Stuyvesant – were downright hostile to their proprietor. Objects would fall from the rafters and hit him and he was knocked unconscious on a couple occasions. There was even a rumor that Belasco died backstage at the Republic in 1931 after a crowbar dropped from a gallery, striking him on the head and killing him. This, of course, isn’t true. Belasco died at home after several heart attacks. Nevertheless, is spirit is said to haunt both theaters. The Republic is now the New Victory, one of the grand renovated theaters on 42nd Street. Theatergoers late in leaving after the curtain falls have sometimes reported feeling a cold chill they attribute to Belasco. His presence is stronger, however, in the former Stuyvesant Theater (above), which was renamed the Belasco in 1910. Above the theater, with its Tiffany glass and Everett Shinn murals, was an elegant private apartment where Belasco entertained a long procession of actresses and showgirls. Some stage hands and construction workers at this West 44th Street edifice insist they have heard footsteps coming from Belasco’s deserted apartment. Then there are the inexplicable sounds of the private elevator that Belasco used to whisk his mistresses to his lair – an elevator that was dismantled long ago. Perhaps, even in death, the impresario doesn’t lack for female companionship. A second apparition at the Belasco is a red-haired woman in a white negligee. Some believe her to be the shade of a stripper who hanged herself in the theater’s basement.
There are other ghosts on Broadway. Across the street from the New Victory is the New Amsterdam Theater, another gloriously restored showplace. Before the renovation, theater personnel reported seeing the specter of a weeping woman in a white dress trimmed in silver. She is believed to be Olive Thomas, a star of the Ziegfeld Follies, which were produced for years at the New Amsterdam. Olive was Flo Ziegfeld’s mistress and when she died in a Paris hotel room in 1920, she was buried in a white gown trimmed in silver.
Patrons of the Palace Theater at Broadway and 47th Street have spotted the apparition of a tightrope walker swinging from the rafters. The dangling spirit is said to be that of Louis Borsalina, an acrobat who plummeted to his death in the Palace in the 1950s. And workers at the Lyceum, who have heard strange noises there, speculate that Daniel Frohman, the producer who built the 1,000-seat theater in 1903, may never have left it. Oddly, when Frohman opened the Lyceum, he brought with him a young man he had discovered in San Francisco in 1882 and appointed him stage manager and house playwright. In time, the underling became his own boss and developed his own legend. His name was David Belasco.
Source: J. Jennings Moss, Discovery Travel.