Which New York City borough is a paranormal hot spot?
According to a paranormal expert who spoke with The Post, Gotham’s “most maligned borough” may also be its most haunted.
Andrea Janes, founder of Boroughs of the Dead, runs an independent, women-led tour company specializing in the macabre history of New York City.
For anyone seriously interested in ghosts and the places where they are said to gather, Janes says there is one clear destination: Staten Island.
“It’s wall-to-wall ghosts,” she said, pointing out that the home borough of Pete Davidson is filled with reportedly haunted mansions, asylums, forts and fields.
Much of Staten Island’s ghostly reputation is tied to its history as a place of isolation during disease outbreaks. Janes said the borough served, in various forms over several centuries, as a quarantine colony.
“If you ask me what is the most haunted place in Staten Island, I would say the entire island,” she told The Post.
Quarantine machine
In 1799, city officials moved to isolate deadly illnesses, including yellow fever and smallpox, away from New York’s busy ports.
That effort led to the creation of the New York Marine Hospital, grimly known as “The Quarantine.” It remained open until 1858, when public anger and fears of contagion erupted into an attack that destroyed the complex in a fire.
“Maybe that’s why the island is so haunted,” Janes speculated.
But the destruction of the original hospital did not end Staten Island’s connection to quarantine facilities.
In 1905, the island’s second-highest point was selected for a tuberculosis quarantine facility. Sea View Hospital opened there in 1913, providing wealthy patients with the era’s prescribed treatment: fresh air, sunlight and nutritious food.
Even those carefully prescribed conditions, however, could not save many of the patients who were sent there.
The College of Staten Island
The former hospital sites are grim enough, but Janes said one Staten Island location is even more disturbing. It is so painful, she told The Post, that she does not include it on her haunted tours.
“The College of Staten Island is on the former site of the Willowbrook State School,” she said.
“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 treating people with developmental disabilities.
Its appalling conditions were exposed in 1972, when Geraldo Rivera’s award-winning investigation, “Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace,” documented children living amid extreme filth, overcrowding and neglect. Some patients were also subjected to deeply troubling medical experiments.
The horrifying conditions at Willowbrook were allegedly among the inspirations for the 2012 horror series “American Horror Story: Asylum,” starring Sarah Paulson and Jessica Lange.
Willowbrook closed in 1987. Six years later, part of the former institution’s property became the College of Staten Island.
While most buildings have been converted into classrooms and offices, underground tunnels still connect them, and rumors of hauntings understandably persist.
The Billop Conference House
“There’s some kind of convergence of psychical activity right over Staten Island that I cannot describe,” said Janes, naming the Billop Conference House as one of the oldest sources of unease.
ALSO READ: Republicans are expressing concerns about Vice President Kamala Harris – NewsFinale
The house, which dates to the late 17th century, served as a meeting place for peace talks between American colonists and the British in the fall of 1776, but the “conference” that gave the house its name never led to a resolution, and fighting continued.
The house may be most famous for the legend of a servant girl murdered by Christopher Billop, the home’s paranoid, crown-loyal patriarch, along with several other rumors of bloodshed and betrayal.
But none of the connected crimes have been substantiated with historical evidence.
Still, visitors claim to have seen apparitions of a servant girl, along with the marauding forms of British soldiers.
Neighbors also attest to hearing a man singing or shouting and a woman screaming.
Curiously, these apparitions may predate the building itself:
The Conference House grounds include a stretch of land known as Burial Ridge, the largest pre-European Native American burial ground in New York.
Fort Wadsworth
Fort Wadsworth, a 226-acre public park situated on Staten Island’s northeastern coast, holds the record as the longest-serving active military post in U.S. history.
But that illustrious distinction has given rise to strange sensations.
“There’s something weird going on there,” Janes attested.
Visitors to the fort, which was turned into a park in 1994, have reported seeing apparitions of fallen soldiers moving through the walls and even driving old cars.
Visitors have also reported hearing disembodied footsteps, gunshots and cannon blasts.
Then there’s the smell of tobacco smoke that seemingly comes from nowhere — or cooking aromas even though there’s literally no kitchen on site.
Kreisher Mansion
For the most haunted spot in Staten Island, Janes calls out the Kreischer Mansion on Arthur Kill Road.
“It’s very haunted,” she emphasized.
German brick magnate Balthasar Kreischer built the gabled mansion in 1885 for his son, Edward.
But nine years later, 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.
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.
The house’s grim history helps explain some of its alleged paranormal activity.
Visitors have claimed to see apparitions in the windows and furniture moving of its own accord — and hear pots and pans clattering in the kitchen, plus a lone, harrowing cry emanating through the home.
Boroughs of the Dead celebrates its 13th anniversary this October. The para-curious can book a tour here and catch Jane on October 27th at the Center for Brooklyn, where she will appear as part of the panel discussion: Haunted Brooklyn: Ghosts, Folklore and the Stories We Tell.