UPPER WEST SIDE — Meet the well-known phantoms of Manhattan’s Higher West Facet.
Authors Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes joined Localish to make clear storied hauntings of their e-book “America’s Most Gothic: Haunted Historical past Stranger than Fiction.” Hieber additionally guides excursions for Janes’ firm, Boroughs of the Lifeless. The strolling excursions revolve across the websites behind New York Metropolis’s ghost tales.
Hieber describes the Higher West Facet as very vibrant – and that features its paranormal scene.
The Higher West Facet’s “obtained numerous life, and so its tales of the afterlife are equally vibrant and relational.”
The Dakota Flats at West 72nd Avenue and Central Park West is an ideal instance. It has been the main focus of ghost tales from the get-go.
One of many constructing’s notable ghosts belongs to the person who developed the Dakota within the Eighties.
“Edward Clark had made all his cash by being the lawyer who helped Isaac Singer get the patents for the Singer Stitching Machine,” explains Hieber. “The Singer Stitching Machine cash went into what on the time was generally known as ‘Clark’s Folly,’ a nickname given to the constructing by skeptics of its location on an all-but-barren Higher West Facet.”
Clark died in 1882, earlier than the constructing was accomplished. He is stated to have caught round to ensure the constructing stayed as much as snuff.
“Workmen have observed a determine and once they see an image of Edward Clark they’re like, ‘That is the man who was watching over a number of the renovations via the years.”
A few the Dakota’s most well-known tenants included John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Hieber stated Ono has spoken of witnessing her late husband seem of their residence and reassure her. The beloved former Beatle was shot to dying exterior the constructing’s entrance in 1980.
Appropriately, Boris Karloff, who performed the unique Frankenstein, as soon as lived on the constructing’s basement degree. Rumor has it, youngsters have been too afraid to go to for trick or treating.
Film buffs would possibly acknowledge the constructing’s exteriors from 1968’s “Rosemary’s Child,” and only a few blocks away you may discover “Spook Central” and Tavern on the Inexperienced in Central Park, a few websites featured in 1984’s “Ghostbusters.
Central Park’s Boat Pond is house to a pair of Victorian sisters, clinging to one of many interval’s favourite pastimes.
“The Van Der Voort sisters are a ghost story that perpetuated after the nineteenth century,” explains Hieber. The duo is claimed to be spending the afterlife ice skating away… within the shadow of the Dakota residence constructing, no much less.
“America’s Most Gothic: Haunted Historical past Stranger than Fiction” is on the market now at Amazon and different e-book sellers.
You’ll be able to e-book at tour with Boroughs of the Lifeless at its web site.
