Nine Free Spooky Sights Around NYC, From Ruins to a Well

The scariest ticket in New York this October may be the one you don’t have to buy. With haunted houses running about $50 a head, Time Out New York contributor Rossilynne Skena Culgan, a certified NYC tour guide, has rounded up nine real places around the five boroughs with eerie histories, all free and open to the public. Some promise ghosts, some offer photo ops, and at one you can leave a secret behind.

Start at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, near the entrance to Four Freedoms State Park, where an ivy-covered shell of a building sits behind a tall fence. It is the former smallpox hospital, where patients were quarantined in the 1800s on what was then isolated Blackwell’s Island. Designed by James Renwick Jr., the architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the building later became a nursing school before it was abandoned in the 1950s. Only the ruins remain.

In Central Park, a witch on a broomstick is carved into a railing along the Mall, just before Bethesda Terrace. According to the source, the carving dates to the terrace’s 1800s construction, when Halloween was tied to Irish culture, and it pays homage to the Irish immigrants and workers who helped build the park. It sits among other seasonal pieces meant to mark the passage of time.

In Tribeca, fans of Ghostbusters can find the three-story firehouse where the film’s Dr. Peter Venkman slid down the pole. A sign and themed sidewalk artwork mark the spot. It is still a working fire station, so visitors should take photos from outside and stay out of the firefighters’ way.

Washington Square Park carries a grimmer past. During a yellow fever outbreak from 1798 to 1801, the area became a cemetery for 20,000 people, some of them buried in unmarked graves. A renovation in the early 2000s turned up 26 sets of remains, which were removed to be reinterred. One intact headstone found then is now mounted in the parkhouse, and a sign near the park office and bathroom maps the sections once used as a potter’s field, alongside a remembrance plaque.

In Downtown Brooklyn, the lobby of the Alamo Drafthouse at 445 Albee Square West houses House of Wax, a collection of 25 wax death masks. Each rests on a red velvet pillow, eyes closed as if sleeping; Napoleon Bonaparte, Mary Queen of Scots and King Henry IV are among them.

The most startling stop may be in SoHo. At 129 Spring Street, in the basement of what is now a COS store, stands the well where Elma Sands was found dead on January 2, 1800. Her boyfriend, Levi Weeks, was tried in what the source calls America’s first murder trial. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton served as his attorneys, and he was acquitted after five minutes of deliberation. Hamilton fans may recognize his name from a lyric in “Non-Stop.”

At Green-Wood Cemetery in Greenwood Heights, an art installation called “Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery” is a tall tombstone with a mail slot for dropping in a secret. When the grave fills, the artist collects the notes and cremates them in a ceremonial bonfire.

Uptown, the Morris-Jumel Mansion at 65 Jumel Terrace, built in 1765, is the oldest house in Manhattan and, the source suggests, perhaps the most haunted. George Washington used it as headquarters in the autumn of 1776. Paranormal investigations take place there, and tickets are available for those who want in on the frights, though the grounds are free to visit anytime.

Last is a metal archway near Little Island at Pier 54, a remnant of the Cunard-White Star Building. It marks where Titanic survivors came ashore in 1912 aboard the rescue liner RMS Carpathia, which had been due at nearby Pier 59 before the voyage changed course.