A Haunting in Manhattan

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Lizzie: What am I most afraid of? Being the last to die. Dying. Being put into one of those freezing morgue drawers while I’m still alive. Cottage cheese. Sometimes Matt hides in the dark and jumps out when I least expect it. My heart stops!

Not ghosts. I’m not afraid of ghosts. Probably because their task lists aren’t really that scary. In Beetlejuice, the ghosts just want to stop their house from having a new design scheme. In The Amityville Horror, it’s basically the same thing. Ghosts are kind of like anti-house-flippers.

Last week, Kaitlyn, Nathan, and I went on a ghost tour of the West Village. It was sort of like apartment hunting, except the broker listed everyone who’d died at each apartment, and you weren’t allowed to go inside anywhere. Kaitlyn had done a West Village ghost tour several years prior, so she was kind of an expert on the whole thing.

Kaitlyn: I told Lizzie that I was down to repeat my West-Village-ghost-tour experience because the first outing had lacked a little something. Or a few things. It was a second date lacking in all romantic chemistry; the tour lacked participants aside from the two of us. The tour guide was also lacking in her memory of most of the basic facts of every ghost story she was supposed to tell. She was, however, wearing a cape. And she was very nice.

Gosh, that evening was such a challenge. But this one, I thought, would make things right: I would learn all about the ghosts in my favorite city in the world, and I would get to do it with my friend Liz.

To be clear, I’m not afraid of ghosts either, and I am saying that to bait one into revealing itself to me, which would be incredible. To me, the scariest things are bedbugs, the ocean, and the thought of anybody being mean to one of my sisters. And dying.

Lizzie: Here’s something scary: Before the ghost tour, I ate what I think might be the worst slice of pizza I’ve ever had in New York. It was at one of those tiny, narrow places—just a door at one end and pizza at the other. The lights inside were blinding. The pizza was so hot that when the guy handed it to me, a majority of the cheese slid off the slice and congealed on the paper plate. The crust tasted like nothing. Really, I should’ve known that this was a bad idea when I saw an ingredient list for the dough taped to the cash register: coconut oil, potato starch … Now that I’m revisiting this experience, I’m having a real-time sinking feeling that the pizza was gluten free. If your pizza is gluten free, it should be more obvious!

I met Kaitlyn at our tour’s designated meeting place, and our tour guide came over to introduce himself and say that we’d be heading out soon. Nathan showed up just as we were leaving, and he looked at our guide with a flicker of recognition. They knew each other! (From college, we found out later.) We soon learned that this was our guide’s first tour. I’m not sure if Nathan’s familiar presence was a comforting one to him. There were six of us in total, plus the guide: me, Kaitlyn, Nathan, a couple, and a woman who we would later learn worked at the ghost-tour company and seemed to be scoring our guide’s performance.

Kaitlyn: Liz was really upset about her pizza. We talked about it for a while. I told her that sometimes, when I get a classic New York slice, I tell the guy, “You don’t have to heat it up!” This helps with avoiding third-degree burns inside my mouth. It also makes me look absolutely crazed for pizza, unable to wait 30 seconds for it to be brought above room temperature. It’s a trade-off, like anything, but it’s only you who has to live with a floppy roof-of-mouth blister for several days after a cheese incident. I don’t have any advice about the possible gluten-free element she’s adding now.

Anyway, if I can offer some more detail about the people that Lizzie identified: Our guide was a former soccer teammate of Nathan’s who had recently moved to New York for acting school. His supervisor was wearing a T-shirt that said Everybody Croaks, and the couple were certainly tourists. The guy was carrying a small CVS bag, which signaled “forgot my toothbrush on this trip,” and the woman at one point said, “Oh, I want to go to a thrift store tomorrow.” She thought Lizzie and I were being rude, because we were taking notes on our phones, which can look a lot like texting incessantly. Nathan noticed her pointed looks in our direction and let us know. That’s why we have far more detailed notes for the first half of the tour than for the second half, when we pivoted away from our responsibilities as journalists in order to prioritize signaling our perfect politeness to a total stranger.

The first stop on the tour was a plaque having to do with Edgar Allan Poe, and the second was a 19th-century firehouse on 3rd Street, which is supposedly haunted by a man named Schwartz whose wife cheated on him, leading him to jump off the roof. The firehouse is now a private residence owned by Wolf Blitzer, our guide told us. “Wolf Blitzer?” I typed into my Notes app (before learning that I was offending somebody by doing this). I was 100 percent sure that the firehouse was owned by Anderson Cooper the last time I took this tour, but I reasoned that anything could have changed in the 400 years that have passed since I was 22.

Well, tragically, our guide was soon forced by his note cards to correct himself and inform us all that the firehouse was actually owned by Anderson Cooper. After he said this, we all took another long look through the huge windows on the front of the building, none of which have curtains. We were more interested in glimpses of Anderson Cooper’s lighting fixtures and personal belongings than we had been in Wolf Blitzer’s. I was also interested in how much the house cost, which, according to public property records, was $4.3 million in 2009.

Lizzie: After Anderson Cooper’s haunted apartment, we strolled over to Washington Square Park, where we learned that the arch is hollow (and probably full of spirits). “Does anyone know what a potter’s field is?” our tour guide asked. Kaitlyn’s hand shot up. She knew the answer: It’s basically a giant burial site. Our guide told us that about 20,000 people were buried in the park in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, and that, if you dig deep enough, you might hit bone.

I recognize that some creative license is required when you’re trying to scare adults in the West Village on a Wednesday night, but I think the bones would be gone by now, right? I can’t Google “how long does it take bone to disintegrate,” because it could be used against me in a murder trial.

While all of this was happening, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was playing on a giant screen within throwing distance, so our guide’s stories were punctuated by loud blasts and indecipherable dialogue. As we stood there, a man walked by and yelled, “New movie tomorrow: the stranger on your back! The stranger on your back!” It was, if not unsettling, not fully settling either.

Kaitlyn: That guy was a freak, which I loved. Ever since Stomp closed, I have been looking for a new way to experience “the rhythm of New York,” and this ghost tour was it! You get everything. You get people shouting things that make no sense. You get a guy biking on the sidewalk, laughing to himself. You get another guy blasting a Major Lazer song out of his van while he attempts to parallel park where you are currently walking.

Returning to the potter’s-field question, I just want to set something straight: Lizzie accused me of having learned this information from my previous ghost tour, but that’s wrong—I knew it before that. (She also wondered if the term is a reference to Mr. Potter’s crummy housing development in It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s vice versa.) As the tour went on, I felt myself kind of wishing that our guide would ask more questions that I could answer. It just goes to show that you’re always the person you were in high school.

Moving on! In the park, our guide showed us an enormous tree, known as “The Hangman’s Elm.” Many had died there, but the tree was flourishing. “The blood must be good for it,” Lizzie said, shrugging. Then the guide told us that Stanford White, the guy who’d designed the Washington Square Arch, was murdered by an oil heir on the roof of Madison Square Garden in front of hundreds of people, inspiring a movie called, appropriately, Rooftop Murder. (The full story behind this incident turned out to be a little grosser than our guide felt the need to share during a fun outing. Thank you for your restraint.) On our way out of the park, we passed a woman wearing a sweatshirt that read Kim Is My Lawyer, presumably referring to Kim Kardashian.

Lizzie: We kept walking, sometimes making what felt like wrong turns. But what’s more straight-out-of-a-horror-movie than making a wrong turn? At one point, our guide started to jaywalk and then thought better of it, leading us instead to the safety of a crosswalk: “We don’t need to create any more spirits tonight.” One-half of the couple on our tour said, “I’m surprised more people don’t die on these streets every day.”

Kaitlyn: We stopped by Aaron Burr’s house and talked a bit about his bummer of a life. More exciting was a house on Gay Street, once lived in by the Prohibition-era mayor Jimmy Walker, who ran a speakeasy there called the Pirate’s Den. (Can anybody imagine having a comically corrupt mayor who is obsessed with clubbing?) The ghost element of this story was that the house was later lived in by the guy who created the scary pulp-fiction character “The Shadow” and seemingly willed it to actual life through his obsessive derangement—at least according to a puppeteer who lived there after him and was afraid that this was the case.

The lot next to the house was vacant. The guide told us that this was because an architect had been remodeling the building and accidentally destroyed its physical integrity while doing so. What! How does that happen? Nathan thought that maybe the guy put a water slide in the middle of it.

Lizzie: Our last stop on the tour was my favorite, and I’ll tell you why. The building was known as “The House of Death,” and, as an example of the many terrifying and unexplainable happenings within its walls, our guide told us this: One morning, the family woke up and found a shriveled grape on their table. A clear sign of spirit activity. A shriveled grape! I could feel my pulse quicken.

After the grape story, the tour came to a close. The group quickly splintered. We had a lot to think about, such as How related was Edgar Allan Poe to his wife? and When does a shriveled grape become a raisin?

Kaitlyn: And Does Anderson Cooper enjoy that people stop in front of his house and peer into his windows every night throughout the month of October? Also, does he mind how noisy that block is? Actually, does that affect the property value?

As we ambled back to the subway, I also thought about how there must be ghosts all over this town. The West Village has no unique claim on haunting. I mean, forget the 20,000 people buried in Washington Square; there are 1 million people buried under the new park on Hart Island, in the Bronx. There are, famously, more dead people in Queens than living ones! And the Brooklyn apartment I live in is 100 years old—surely some previous tenant isn’t enamored with our Ikea bookshelves?

Lizzie: On the way home, I almost stepped on a dead rat, paws up, on its back, in the middle of the sidewalk. If I were to be haunted by the ghost of anything, it would be a rat.

Kaitlyn: Actually, if Lizzie were going to be haunted by the ghost of anything, I think it would probably be the feral cat she and Matt once named Lil Smokey and were feeding pieces of hot dog for a while.

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