In New York City's forgotten borough, ghosts have the opportunity to thrive

NEW YORK (TND) — Staten Island may be New York City's forgotten borough, but its ghosts insist on being remembered. They're a particularly loud bunch, from the former patients still strolling the halls of an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium to a young Revolutionary War-era percussionist who's spent nearly three centuries drumming in a church cemetery. Their message: "Come to Staten Island; it's far more interesting than you think."

Now, I'm like others in the city, in that when given the choice between a destination I can walk to from my apartment and one that requires a subway, a boat, and a bus or two to reach, I will choose the former every single time. But after enough tales of spectral soldiers gliding through deteriorating walls into a once-operational military fort since reclaimed by nature, I found myself on a ferry bound for a borough I've stepped foot on fewer than five times during my decade of living in Brooklyn.

Actually, the last time I went to Staten Island was also in pursuit of ghosts, when some poor planning allowed me only enough time to visit the Conference House, the site of a servant girl's murder (which may or may not have actually happened) and the subsequent haunting by said servant girl (which I saw no evidence of). As the darkness began to spook me without even needing the help of the supernatural, I decided to abandon my intention to head over to the Historic Old Bermuda Inn and the nearby tugboat graveyard in the Arthur Kill waterway.

Both the inn and the marine scrapyard were on my list this year, along with nine other spots where spirits are said to spend time.

An ambitious plan for a single day, to be sure, but narrowing down my proposed route any further felt impossible. Staten Island is, for some reason, especially haunted, although I couldn’t tell you why. Yet as uninformative as my Google search for “Why is Staten Island so haunted?” was (it suggested "Why is Staten Island so hated?" as an alternative, to which there is no shortage of results), the mere fact that listicles of the borough's most haunted places often include over a dozen entries says plenty.

And so, beckoned by the plethora of spirits that join under half a million people in calling the least populous borough home, I set off on the Staten Island Ferry to face a fear shared by many a New Yorker — the uncharted expanse of essentially suburbia that lies just beyond the 5.2-mile boat ride from Manhattan.

By area, Staten Island is bigger than both Manhattan and the Bronx. My approach to the day, then, was based entirely on the ease of getting around the subway-free island.

That landed me at the Alice Austen House Museum — closest on my list to the St. George Ferry Terminal and with somewhat limited hours — well before opening. My hunt would be restricted to the grounds, but could relinquishing my chance to view the works of the pioneering female photographer who once lived at the Hylan Boulevard address actually increase the probability of seeing ghosts, who aren’t known to like crowds anyway? I sure hoped so.

Its alleged incorporeal inhabitants range from a broken-hearted British soldier who hung himself from the dining room's rafters to the spirits of enslaved Africans who lived there in the 18th century and can be heard rattling chains in the basement to this day.

By the time the Austen family purchased the farmhouse in 1844, the Revolutionary War-era ghosts were comfortably settled into their permanent residence. Alice Austen herself believed the Victorian Gothic cottage was haunted, but the presence of spectral roommates didn't dissuade her from remaining in her childhood home throughout the majority of her adulthood.

If Austen had been permitted to stay until death in the house she called Clear Comfort, perhaps her soul could have rested in peace. But life wasn’t so kind. In 1945, after the Great Depression had decimated every last bit of Austen's inherited wealth, the photographer and her longtime partner Gertrude Tate were evicted from the house. Tate went to live with her family, who did not approve of her relationship with Austen; Austen went to a poorhouse.

Only in the afterlife was Austen able to return to Clear Comfort, where she’s now believed to have joined the ghosts that once haunted her. She mostly keeps to herself, so long as the caretaker of the house chats with her once in a while (otherwise, she’ll knock her photographs off of the walls).

On the morning of my visit, a thick haze that truly made Manhattan’s skyline feel like an entire world away set a haunting mood well suited for the supernatural, but the grounds were more populated by the living than I anticipated.

A landscaping crew milled about the acre of land surrounding the house. On the walkway to the ivy-covered front porch, I crossed paths with a curious couple, who seemed to have stumbled upon the museum by chance. They asked me when it would open. “In an hour,” I said. Austen did not show up, and I had no more time to wait.

Just five minutes into the next spot on my list, and I was already wishing to run into another friendly face.

I hadn’t expected to be scared. Most of the stories online about Fort Wadsworth's hauntings teeter on unbelievable, the types of tales that are creepy enough to read but then easy to dismiss by reason of sheer improbability. How many people, after all, will actually see a glowing apparition in a Civil War uniform marching through one of the former military installation's underground tunnels? And suddenly traveling back in time to a gruesome battle via vivid hallucination, as one visitor reported, seems as unlikely as Staten Island becoming the new Brooklyn.

But among the overgrowth at Battery Catlin on the northern end of the 226-acre military-fort-turned-public-park, I couldn't shake the feeling I was being watched.

A glance in the direction of rustling leaves might have revealed the briefest evidence of a nebulous figure if only I had managed to turn my head seconds sooner. Every so often, I'd catch a glimpse of a sparrow or a squirrel, or maybe a ruby-crowned kinglet. Most of the time, I saw nothing, giving my imagination the green light to run wild.

With only sparrows and squirrels for company, I wondered if I had missed a "No Trespassing" sign barring visitors from traipsing around the remains of the Endicott Period gun battery. Built in the early 20th century and deactivated in 1942, Battery Catlin has fallen into a state of disrepair that would usually warrant at least a written warning to history buffs and ghost hunters eager to climb the crumbling structure. Some effort had been made to seal the magazines, but getting past the decaying doors would have been as easy as slipping through a gaping hole or following the instructions of graffiti to “kick here.”

More likely, though, it was the time of my visit — mid-morning on a Wednesday — that created such solitude. A weekend, surely, would be busier.

Or else, the unshakeable impression of being watched by no fewer than 15 pairs of penetrating eyes acted as a deterrent.

Now, before I terrify my mom with too much talk of isolation, it's really a false sense of seclusion. Steps away, the imposing Battery Weed, with its formidable granite walls stretching four tiers above the shoreline, simply draws more attention than a path partially obscured by greenery, and the nearby overlook near Fort Tompkins offers superior views of the Verrazano Bridge. From my viewing points atop Battery Catlin’s gun emplacements, I could see fishermen casting lines into the tidal strait that separates Staten Island from Brooklyn.

Battery Weed and Fort Tompkins are accessible only on guided tours and during open house events. Their heavily secured walls can’t be breached with a swift kick, but should the temptation to try to arise, the “No Trespassing” posters at both are impossible to miss. My confinement to the exterior of each edifice hardly makes for a fair comparison, but still, I experienced none of the eerie atmosphere that so thoroughly permeated the air at Battery Catlin.

A lack of battles at Fort Wadsworth admittedly lessens the probability of ghosts, so I boarded the bus to a spot where there should be no shortage of spirits.

Navigating the borough’s bus system was less scary than I expected, but so, too, was Moravian Cemetery.

Opened in 1740, Moravian Cemetery is the oldest active cemetery in Staten Island. Its 113-acre grounds are the permanent residence for many notable figures, including Union general Stephen H. Weed, for whom Battery Weed is named, and Alice Austen. There are Gambino crime family mobsters, Hudson River School painters, and a former Staten Island borough president. Martin Scorsese’s parents are interred in a private mausoleum at the cemetery, with a preplanned space remaining in the family tomb for the famed filmmaker.

None of these names are said to haunt the Staten Island burial ground, least of all Martin Scorsese, who is still very much alive.

Moravian’s most active spirits are instead a more private bunch, confining their unfinished spectral business to a section of the cemetery closed to the public since the 1970s.

If the stories about the Vanderbilt mausoleum are to be believed, the massive stone archway and impenetrable gate not only defend the designated landmark from vandalism but also protect visitors from stumbling upon unsavory phantoms. Babies cry in the middle of the night, and a mysterious man in a suit chases away unwelcome guests trespassing on the grounds designed by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Photos of the French Romanesque-style monument to the illustrious family often reveal orbs and apparitions. Inside, it’s said the deceased Vanderbilts are propped up like statues.

In 1967, a 24-year-old Staten Island woman was crushed to death by a 15-foot-tall ironwork gate at the entrance to Cornelius Vanderbilt’s tomb. Soon after the freak accident, access to the Vanderbilt mausoleum was revoked for all but the family’s descendants.

I would have tried my luck with the tomb’s history of haunting incidents, especially as the deadly iron gates have since been replaced with padlocked steel doors, but getting caught trespassing felt like a far scarier prospect than running into a ghost. So instead of slipping through a hole in the fence along High Rock Park’s yellow trail, I made my way first to the blue trail and then onto the red trail to visit a 19th-century house in the middle of Staten Island’s Greenbelt — or what’s left of it, at least.

Compared to the Vanderbilts’ three-story tall masterpiece of a mausoleum, the Heyerdahl family’s house offers very little to look at. A stone staircase remains intact, but there’s no indication of the building itself, much less the surrounding orchards and cottages marked on hand-drawn maps from the 19th century.

The biggest — and only — documented instance of tragedy on Heyerdahl Hill was Thorwald Heyerdahl’s failed vision of planting a vineyard on the property, but it is not his ghost said to haunt the woods of LaTourette Park. Instead, the sightings are of a young girl on horseback thought to be fleeing Historic Richmond Town in the midst of the Revolutionary War.

There was no girl on horseback during my visit, only the weathered stone steps coated with freshly fallen leaves. But curiously, as I started back toward the red trail blazes, I smelled the unmistakable aroma of freshly lit palo santo, a holy wood utilized by Amazonian shamans and Brooklyn yoga studios alike to ward off evil spirits (or to mask the odor of heated vinyasa). Could someone have cleansed the space unnoticed while I stood just a few feet away?

Only slightly spooked by the familiar scent in the most unlikely of locations, I retraced my steps back to the blue trail and then took the fork heading toward Brielle Avenue. The route would take me directly past the abandoned Sea View Hospital before depositing me on the outskirts of the long-deserted New York City Farm Colony.

As I neared the former children's hospital at the Sea View complex, the disconcerting sound of adolescent laughter echoed in the distance. Thankfully, the dense woods I had traversed during the rest of my hike had begun to thin, and through the foliage, I could see several structures in the vicinity that were decidedly in use, providing a logical explanation for the all-too-apt soundtrack. (For even greater relief, I'd later learn that they were a high school and a community center, both places where youth are certainly known to gather.)

It was also thanks to the thinning of the forest, in tandem with the autumnal shedding of leaves, that I was granted a halfway decent view of the Sea View Children's Hospital looming to my left.

This was the closest I would get. The hilltop hospital opened in the early 20th century, was once a leading institution for the treatment of tuberculosis, but when researchers at the sanatorium began administering isoniazid to patients in 1951, the pill proved to be so effective a cure that there was soon no need for the facility where it was discovered. In 1973, Sea View’s last tuberculosis patient was discharged. Some of the buildings would be repurposed over the years to come; others were left to the whims of nature — with a strict policy against trespassing.

Nonetheless, urban explorers and rebellious Staten Island teenagers have roamed the decaying halls of the children’s hospital, snapping photos of antiquated wheelchairs and rusty cribs in the middle of debris-strewn rooms, and even rule followers may have wandered two feet off the trail for a closer look at the crumbling women’s pavilions. It’s little surprise stories from these visits tend to be of the spooky sort, full of disembodied voices and mysterious orbs fitting for an abandoned hospital where so many lost their lives to a deadly disease.

I emerged from the woods onto a paved road just as a woman was walking toward an assisted living facility that now stands on the property.

“Weren’t you scared in there?” she asked me.

“A little bit,” I said.

Now, if she had posed the same question after my visit to the New York City Farm Colony, my answer would have been quite a bit more emphatic.

Alice Austen, I learned, had a knack for winding up in haunted places. There was, of course, Clear Comfort, but she also spent quite a lot of time playing tennis at Fort Wadsworth. Upon her death in 1952, she was buried in her family’s plot at Moravian Cemetery. And in between her Hylan Boulevard house and her permanent place of rest, Austen lived at the New York City Farm Colony,

The poorhouse dates back to a time when the areas surrounding New York City had not yet been consolidated into the five boroughs we know today. Its development began as the Richmond County Poor Farm in 1829 when Richmond County’s Board of Supervisors paid $3,000 to purchase a nearly 100-acre farm with the intention of providing the impoverished a place to both live and earn a living.

When Staten Island became a borough in 1898, responsibility for the Richmond County Poor Farm was transferred to the Department of Public Charities, and the institution was given a new name indicative of the consolidation of the City of Greater New York. The New York City Farm Colony would focus solely on able-bodied residents fit for the manual labor of growing enough produce to feed 3,000 people.

By 1925, the aging population of the Farm Colony and the admittance of ailing patients in various states of dependency led to the abandonment of the farm itself. Half a century later, the entire institution was shuttered.

Every once in a while, there’s talk of revitalizing the dilapidated buildings or tearing them down entirely, but a lack of action thus far has left the neglected property to graffiti artists and ghosts.

I don’t claim to have any tendencies toward clairvoyance, but the atmosphere of the New York City Farm Colony almost immediately had me on my toes. Briefly, I wondered if I could get enough photos of the first building I encountered to avoid having to venture any further into the depths of the former poorhouse. My resistance to running into one of the ghosts said to drift about the Farm Colony was so strong, in fact, that I did turn to leave prematurely, further motivated by the stories I had read of satanic rituals and unexplained disappearances.

But curiosity got the best of me, and I instead trudged onward, trying my best to avoid stepping on any particularly crunchy leaves that would give away my location to spirits or serial killers.

At one point, I looked down at my phone to check the time and found that the device had managed to turn itself completely off, making for an especially nerve-wracking couple of minutes while I rebooted it.

Later, in the comfort of my own home, my laptop froze while researching Andre Rand, a convicted child kidnapper whose crimes mirrored the local urban legend of a serial killer named Cropsey and who may have once had a campsite hidden within the abandoned Farm Colony. Coincidence? Or an ominous sign of an unseen presence?

Ultimately, my exploration of the Farm Colony was cut short by the limitation of the impending sunset. I’ll admit that my self-imposed boundary was determined in part by a fear of being alone in the dark, but more so, it reflected the terror of the 1-hour bus, 25-minute ferry, and who-knows-how-long wait for a 40-minute subway ride it would take me to get from the Historic Old Bermuda Inn back to Flatbush.

With my journey home in mind, I made the call to skip the slight detour to the College of Staten Island. As eerie as it may have been to survey what was once the site of the now-defunct Willowbrook State School, a state-supported institution notorious for its inhumane and downright disturbing treatment of people with developmental disabilities, I imagined the remaining daylight and the presence of students would detract from its sinister atmosphere anyway.

Plus, Historic Richmond Town's close proximity to the Church of St. Andrew felt like a two-for-one special, and from either, it would only be a short ride to the Historic Old Bermuda Inn.

My plan was to start at the allegedly haunted Voorlezer's House and then work my way around the 100-acre property that once served as the island's county seat. But as my bus approached the rust-colored clapboard house, we suddenly picked up speed, and I could only watch helplessly as we barreled past my requested stop so quickly that I imagined we'd soon be miles away from Historic Richmond Town. We came to a screeching halt at the next intersection, leaving me on the side of the road to discover the true fright of the area — trying to get around on foot.

Really, should somewhere with so few pedestrian signals and so many sidewalks with sudden dead ends be allowed to call itself New York City?

Trapped on one side of Arthur Kill Road without even the narrowest shoulder, I waited for a break in traffic that never came. Eventually, a car was kind enough to wave me across, and I made it without further incident to both the Voorlezer's House and the 18th-century Guyon-Lake-Tysen House, originally constructed elsewhere on the island and moved to Historic Richmond Town in 1952.

I saw neither the schoolteacher nor the young Revolutionary War-era girl whose spirits are said to have remained in the Voorlezer's House centuries after their earthly lives ended. Over at the Guyon-Lake-Tysen House, I found no sign of Elizabeth Lake Tysen and her 14 children, not even as an unusually chilly spot or an unexplained sound.

If I wanted another scare, though, I had one in store on my .2-mile walk to the Church of St. Andrew. As the shoulder of the road once again virtually disappeared over the crossing of a small stream, the cars whizzing by me felt only inches away. A parking lot up ahead provided some relief, but a hill blocking my view of oncoming traffic made crossing over to the church a challenge.

The Episcopalian church, first built in 1708 and reconstructed in the late 19th century following two fires, has embraced its reputation with haunted houses and paranormal investigations. The “Fright Night” events are the type to involve actors in creepy clown costumes, but the ghost hunters claim to have made contact with real spirits based on a strong sensation of being watched and the sounds of sobbing and footsteps.

Perhaps the church’s ghosts, including theRevolutionary War-era drummer boy on the grounds, decided I had already been frightened enough — they left me alone.

Timewise, I was in far better shape than I had been during my last visit to Staten Island. It was just shy of 6 p.m. as I awaited the bus that would take me to the Historic Old Bermuda Inn. If it arrived without delay, I'd squeeze in a quick visit to the boat graveyard in the very last moments of daylight before heading to the final spot on my list.

As it turned out, I once again would fail to make it to either.

With the bus set to show in only a few more minutes, I was hit with one of the worst stomachaches I’ve ever experienced. Trust me that if there had been any way to fight through the pain, I’d be rounding out my article with some sort of spooky anecdote about the heartbroken “lady in the portrait” who lived at the Old Bermuda long before it was an inn. But continuing onward just wasn’t an option, so I darted across the congested street one last time and hopped the next bus back to the St. George Ferry Terminal.

I made it to the ferry terminal without throwing up, which felt like a big accomplishment, and slid into a seat to bide my time till the next boat. My abdominal pain began to subside. A hint of nausea lingered until I reached my apartment nearly an hour and a half later, at which point I suddenly felt good as new.

I see three possibilities:

One, it was an everyday, run-of-the-mill stomachache, albeit more painful than most, that simply resolved itself over time.

Two, I picked up the presence of some sort of malicious spirit along my self-guided tour of Staten Island’s most haunted locales, and that ghost wanted me out of its borough, stat. (If this theory had any truth to it, I’d wager I picked up the paranormal stomach bug at the Farm Colony.)

Or — and this one’s my favorite — three, it was actually a benevolent ghost trying to protect me from whatever horrors the Historic Old Bermuda Inn had in store, likely working in tandem with whichever forces kept me from visiting last time. The stomachache, therefore, was a kinder gesture than allowing me to encounter an evil spirit with the potential to do so much worse. Once the ghost verified that I was safely home with no chance of returning to Staten Island that night (or maybe even for another few years), it released me of my pain.

Maybe someday, I’ll make it to the Historic Old Bermuda Inn and the boat graveyard. I can also stop by the College of Staten Island, the Billiou-Stillwell-Perine House, the Kreischer Mansion, Wagner College’s Cunard Hall, Snug Harbor, the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum, the Gustav Mayer House, and the St. George Theatre, need I remind you that Staten Island is a paranormal investigator’s paradise.

But for now, I’m satisfied imagining that a kindly ghost spending eternity in New York City’s forgotten borough was looking out for me.