Andrea Janes, founder of macabre tour company Boroughs of the Dead, has mapped the most unsettling paranormal hotspots across all five boroughs.
Janes, a scholar and author who has spent years guiding brave New Yorkers through the city’s darkest corners, insists the sheer density of death layered beneath modern streets creates an almost tangible energy. “The city is haunted as hell,” she told The Post. Blame centuries of history, a shortage of space and a city built atop the literal and figurative bones of those who came before.
“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,” she pointed out. According to Janes, the combined weight of history, death, and repurposing “creates a psychic force field where we’re surrounded by spirit energy,” which serves to explain why the city goes so hard for Halloween.
In Queens, the “White Lady of Astoria” has become something of a neighborhood fixture. Residents along a stretch of 44th Street have reported seeing the same apparition for generations: a woman in a high-collared dress, her white hair pulled back in a bun. Sometimes the figure appears by a sick child; other times she is seen walking in the backyards of the brick row houses lining the east side of the street. She is known to leave the scent of lavender in her wake.
According to Janes, this spectral visitor is the ghost of Elizabeth Hallett, who was massacred along with her family in the early 1700s. Two enslaved people belonging to the household murdered Elizabeth, her husband William, and their five children. Elizabeth was pregnant at the time of her death.
“It’s the most arresting ghost story,” said Janes. Mitch Waxman, who runs the history website the Newtown Pentacle and lives a block away from the homes, confirmed that locals view the spirit as benevolent rather than threatening. “One friend, who described [the ghost] sitting with her and her brother when they were ill, described it as a comforting experience,” Waxman said.
Staten Island drew Janes’s most emphatic assessment. “Staten Island is just wall to wall ghosts,” she emphasized. “It’s haunted as hell. It has haunted mansions, asylums, an old fort. There’s a convergence of psychic activity right over Staten Island that I cannot explain,” Janes said she feels an overwhelming sensation of past spirits when in Staten Island.
For specific haunted spots, she calls out the Kreischer Mansion on Arthur Kill Road. German brick magnate Balthasar Kreischer built the gabled mansion in 1885 for his son, Edward. In 1894, Edward was found shot dead behind his father’s brick factory across the street. Unsure whether Edward’s death was a murder or a suicide, his grieving family members sought the help of spiritualists, holding seances in the home, which some say opened up portals that would have been better left closed.
The mansion’s darkness extended into the modern era. In 2005, the Kreischer Mansion played host to the grisly mobland killing of Bonanno crime family associate Robert McKelvey. Along with three other mob members, Young stabbed and strangled McKelvey before dismembering his body and burning his remains in the mansion’s furnace.
Brooklyn offers its own unsettling landmarks. Janes says the intersection of Pacific and Smith streets in Coral Gardens is a source of a persistent, personal unease. “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,” she explained.
For a better-known Brooklyn haunt, she points to the Hendrick I. Lott House at 1940 E. 36th St. In the Marine Park neighborhood. One of Brooklyn’s oldest residences, the house was built by Hendrick I. Lott in 1800 and incorporates an earlier structure built by his grandfather, Colonel Johannes H. Lott, in 1720. New York City purchased the house in 2002 from the estate of Ella Suydam, a direct descendant of the original owner.
While no historical horror or tragedy is connected to the house, Janes suspects that the home remaining in a single family line for three hundred years has contributed to its creepiness. “The Lotts lived there for centuries, and the house is imbued with the psychic residue of them,” she explained. For the curious, while regular access is restricted, the Friends of the Lott House occasionally hosts special events and seasonal programming.
Manhattan’s City Hall Park represents what Janes considers peak spookiness in a borough she considers broadly haunted. “The history of City Hall Park is extremely layered,” she explained, noting that the park has served as a prison, almshouses, burial grounds, and the former home of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum. The latter was destroyed by a massive fire in 1865, killing countless animals, including two beluga whales that were boiled alive in their basement tanks.
A series of underground tunnels below the park link to an extant potter’s field, where the bodies of poor and unidentified New Yorkers were unceremoniously emptied into mass graves. “I’ve spoken to burly, skeptical security guards who work in City Hall Park who have seen and felt things,” she explained, relaying the story of a guard who felt an invisible force grab a pen out of his pocket and throw it across the tunnel he was walking through.
Janes shared that City Hall Park also borders an African burial ground and a former sugar refinery that housed Revolutionary War prisoners. “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.” She encourages both believers and doubters to stand in the park at dusk. “Be quiet for a minute and see if you can feel it. There’s something there.”
The Bronx claims literary horror through the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage at 2640 Grand Concourse. Many Bronx residents — and more than a few hopeful goth teenagers — swear the white clapboard home is haunted by the ghost of its morbid, mustachioed former resident. Poe moved into the cottage in 1846 with his wife and first cousin, Virginia, who succumbed to tuberculosis a year later. He wrote his magnum opus, “Annabel Lee,” in the house, which tells a chilling story about the death of a beautiful woman.
“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,” she said. That vibe is only heightened by the presence of Poe’s original furniture, including the bed in which Virginia died. “It’s a hundred percent worth visiting,” she attests.
Janes honors the dead by telling their stories on her guided tours and explaining that guests don’t have to believe in the paranormal to participate. “All of our tours are history-based, and some don’t have anything to do with ghosts at all,” she underscored. Boroughs of the Dead celebrates its 13th anniversary this October.
Janes appears on the panel discussion “HistoryHaunted Brooklyn: Ghosts, Folklore, and the Stories We Tell” at the Center for Brooklyn.