New York City is home to 8 million living residents — and countless dead.
From Edgar Allan Poe’s eerie Bronx cottage to streets rumored to be haunted by wandering spirits, all five boroughs are steeped in ghost stories, restless apparitions and unexplained nighttime encounters.
“The city is haunted as hell,” Andrea Janes, a scholar, author and founder of the macabre tour company Boroughs of the Dead, told The Post.
The explanation, she said, lies in centuries of history, limited space and a city built—both literally and metaphorically—over the remains 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 said.
In Janes’ view, the combined force of history, death and constant redevelopment “creates a psychic force field where we’re surrounded by spirit energy.” It may also help explain why New York embraces Halloween with such intensity.
Janes helped The Post uncover the most chilling corners of all five boroughs—places where the past never feels entirely gone and some New Yorkers may not be the only people walking the streets.
The Bronx
Edgar Allen Poe Cottage
Many Bronx residents, along with plenty of hopeful goth teenagers, insist that the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage at 2640 Grand Concourse is haunted by the ghost of its morbid, mustachioed former occupant.
Poe moved into the small white clapboard cottage in 1846 with his wife and first cousin, Virginia, who died of tuberculosis the following year.
He wrote his magnum opus, “Annabel Lee,” in the house—a haunting poem centered on 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,” Janes said.
That atmosphere is intensified by the cottage’s original furnishings, including the bed in which Virginia Poe died.
“It’s a hundred percent worth visiting,” she said.
Manhattan
City Hall Park
Although Janes believes much of Manhattan is haunted, she considers City Hall Park the borough’s prime destination for supernatural unease.
“The history of City Hall Park is extremely layered,” she explained. Over the years, the site has served as a prison, housed almshouses and burial grounds, and been home to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum.
The museum was destroyed in a massive fire in 1865 that killed countless animals, including two beluga whales that were boiled alive in basement tanks.
But the park’s grim history does not end there.
A network of underground tunnels beneath the park connects to an existing potter’s field, where the bodies of poor and unidentified New Yorkers were dumped into mass graves.
Janes said she has spoken with burly, skeptical security guards who work in City Hall Park and claim to have seen or felt unexplained forces. One guard, she recalled, felt something invisible pull a pen from his pocket and hurl it across the tunnel he was walking through.
City Hall Park also borders an African burial ground and the site of a former sugar refinery that housed prisoners during the Revolutionary War, Janes said.
“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.”
Brooklyn
Hendrick I. Lott House
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.
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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.
Staten Island
“Staten Island is just wall to wall ghosts,” emphasized Janes. “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.
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.
Queens
44th Street between Broadway and 34th
Residents along this stretch of Astoria street have reported seeing the same apparition: 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 44th Street.
She is known to leave the scent of lavender in her wake.
According to Janes, the “White Lady of Astoria” is the ghost of Elizabeth Hallett, who was massacred along with her family in the early 1700s.
Janes shared that 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.
While the Hallet farmhouse is long gone, Elizabeth is said to haunt the row houses built on a 44th Street block in the early 20th century—though she’s seen as a benevolent spirit.
“One friend, who described [the ghost] sitting with her and her brother when they were ill, described it as a comforting experience,” said Mitch Waxman, who runs the history website the Newtown Pentacle and lives a block away from the homes.
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; curious visitors can book a tour here and catch Jane on October 27th at the Center for Brooklyn, where she appears on the panel discussion, HistoryHaunted Brooklyn: Ghosts, Folklore, and the Stories We Tell.