A paranormal expert has crowned Staten Island the most haunted corner of New York City.
Andrea Janes, founder of the macabre tour company Boroughs of the Dead, told The Post that the borough Pete Davidson, 31, calls home is “wall-to-wall ghosts.” Janes, who has spent over a decade guiding the para-curious through Gotham’s darkest corners, said that “if you’re really serious about ghosts and want to know where most of them are,” Staten Island is the only destination that matters.
The island’s spectral density traces back to its long service as a quarantine zone. In 1799, city officials exiled deadly diseases like yellow fever and smallpox to its shores, creating the New York Marine Hospital—ominously nicknamed “The Quarantine.” The facility operated until 1858, when terrified locals attacked and burned it to the ground. “Maybe that’s why the island is so haunted,” Janes theorized. The quarantine legacy continued into the twentieth century: Sea View Hospital, opened in 1913 atop the island’s second-highest point, housed tuberculosis patients prescribed fresh air, sunlight, and healthy food until they succumbed anyway.
Yet one site disturbs Janes too deeply to include on any itinerary. “The College of Staten Island is on the former site of the Willowbrook State School,” she told The Post. “That’s a place I wouldn’t go with a tour group because it’s too sad.” Willowbrook opened in 1948 as the world’s largest institution for people with developmental disabilities. Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 award-winning expose “Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace” revealed children subjected to depraved medical experiments, extreme filth, and crushing neglect. The conditions allegedly inspired “American Horror Story: Asylum.” The facility closed in 1987, and classrooms and offices now occupy most buildings, though underground tunnels still connect them and rumors of hauntings persist.
Janes pointed to the Billop Conference House as one of Staten Island’s oldest wellsprings of unease. The late-17th-century structure hosted failed peace talks between American colonists and the British in fall 1776. Legend holds that Christopher Billop, the crown-loyal patriarch, murdered a servant girl in the house, though no historical evidence substantiates the crime—or several other rumored bloodlettings. Visitors nonetheless claim apparitions of a servant girl and British soldiers, while neighbors report a man singing or shouting and a woman screaming. Burial Ridge, the largest pre-European Native American burial ground in New York, sits on the same grounds, suggesting the phenomena may predate the house itself.
Fort Wadsworth, a 226-acre park on the island’s northeastern coast, carries its own burden as the longest-serving active military post in U.S. History. “There’s something weird going on there,” Janes attested. Since becoming a park in 1994, the site has generated reports of fallen soldiers passing through walls, phantom old cars, disembodied footsteps, gunshots, and cannon blasts. Visitors also describe the smell of tobacco smoke and cooking aromas where no kitchen exists.
For Janes, no single address tops the Kreischer Mansion on Arthur Kill Road. “It’s very haunted,” she emphasized. German brick magnate Balthasar Kreischer built the gabled 1885 residence for his son Edward, who was found shot dead behind the family brick factory nine years later. The family, uncertain whether it was murder or suicide, held seances with spiritualists—rituals some believe opened dangerous portals. The mansion later hosted the 2005 mobland killing of Bonanno crime family associate Robert McKelvey, who was stabbed, strangled, dismembered, and burned in the furnace by three fellow mob members including Young. Visitors now report window apparitions, self-moving furniture, clattering kitchenware, and a lone harrowing cry.
Janes’s conviction extends to the entire borough’s atmospheric anomaly. “There’s some kind of convergence of psychical activity right over Staten Island that I cannot describe,” she said. When pressed for the single most haunted location, her answer encompassed everything: “If you ask me what is the most haunted place in Staten Island, I would say the entire island.”
Boroughs of the Dead marks its 13th anniversary this October, and Janes will appear October 27 at the Center for Brooklyn on the panel “Haunted Brooklyn: Ghosts, Folklore and the Stories We Tell.”
