The 5 most haunted places in Brooklyn

By Joshua Encinias

While preparing for her book “Boroughs of the Dead: New York City Ghost Stories,” Andrea Janes ventured on a few local ghost tours but found them frighteningly inadequate. She describes the tours today as cheesy and the ghost stories lacking in heft or gravitas, historical or political context.

So Janes created the Boroughs of the Dead in 2013 to plug that glaring hole in New York’s ghost scene. With Boroughs of the Dead, Janes and her team — a coterie of artists and authors — are dedicated to sharing the real stories behind New York’s occult, specters and religious hauntings. Together, they lead ghost tours all over the city.

“The history of New York City is nuts and it’s hilarious. You’ve got to have gallows humor about it otherwise you’ll go crazy,” says Janes. “We have fun with these stories while also respecting the sanctity of the dead.”

The group takes its moniker for a nickname of Queens, which is called “Borough of the Dead” for their 5 million graves — but Brooklyn has no shortage of ghosts of its own.

“Brooklyn’s mysterious history lurks below the surface,” says Janes. “The unexpectedness of it makes its history even more fascinating for me.”

You can learn the gruesome details of haunted Brooklyn on two walking tours: Haunted Brooklyn Heights and Spiritualists of Green-Wood Cemetery.

Obviously, there’s no problem with fictional haunted houses this time of year, but “once you bring real human beings into the story,” Janes says, “A lot of that cavalierness has to fly out the window because the dead can’t defend themselves. Brooklyn is our town and these are our people.”

We spoke with Janes to learn about Brooklyn’s haunted hot spots. You can visit many of them on her tours, but just in case you want to go it alone, here are some of the more fascinating and ghastly true Brooklyn ghost stories:

Lovecraft in 1934

H.P. Lovecraft’s home
169 Clinton Street, Brooklyn Heights
When the “The Call of Cthulhu” author’s career and marriage fell apart, he spent two miserable years living in Brooklyn Heights, from 1925 to 1927 (although the area was part of Red Hook in the mid-1920s). Lovecraft’s chilling sci-fi and horror writing is almost as famous as his racism and xenophobia, but Janes suggests we don’t look away.

“That is a very delicate and controversial thing to talk about. Our tour talks about Lovecraft’s legacy as a writer, and his legacy as a person: what that means and how we receive his work today,” says Janes. “We’re still haunted by racism in this country, but instead of dismissing this person or laughing at him, we have an opportunity to engage with these difficult discussions in a way that can be productive and cathartic.”

Lovecraft himself is said to have haunted Brown University, near where he grew up impoverished in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1971.

The Brooklyn Bridge
Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
There are countless ghosts and hauntings related to the unchecked growth of New York City, growth that often trampled human needs. One of the ghosts people have alleged to have seen is a headless man who was decapitated while the bridge was being built.

“You don’t have to believe in ghosts to appreciate the Brooklyn Bridge’s crazy stories,” says Janes. “People who believe and those who are skeptical are all welcome to appreciate these ghost stories.”

Melrose Hall
Bedford Avenue, between Winthrop Street and Clarkson Avenue, Flatbush
William Axtell was in charge of the royalist regiment called the Nassau Blues during the Revolutionary War. Once, when the Americans tried to capture Axtell, he was saved by an Iroquois princess whom he named Isabella. The two fell in love but there was one little problem: Axtell had a wife. The soldier repaid Isabella’s kindness by hiding her away from his wife in a secret chamber below the ballroom in his home, Melrose Hall. In 1778, while Axtell was called away for a year, he ordered an elderly enslaved woman named Miranda to tend to Isabella. When Miranda died suddenly, no other people knew of Isabella’s presence and she subsequently starved to death in the secret chamber.

Many years later, Isabella’s skeleton was discovered in the chamber, and countless people have claimed to have witnessed her ghost. The house was torn down in 1903 but the site is considered one of the most haunted places in America.

Brooklyn’s secret tunnels
Brooklyn Heights
The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, also known as the Cobble Hill Tunnel, is an abandoned railway tunnel that runs beneath Atlantic. Built in 1844 by the Long Island Railroad, this tunnel is the oldest to run under a North American street. It also might be the most haunted: It was the site of at least one murder and rumored to have been a makeshift storage facility for river pirates hiding their booty. The tunnel was sealed in 1861 where it remained largely forgotten until an engineer named Bob Diamond rediscovered it in 1980 — and began documenting its darker side.

“For places you can’t reach because they’re restricted, our walking tour has guides who will take you to these sites and tell their stories in specific detail with thoughtful creativity,” says Janes

Brooklyn Theatre looking east down Johnson Street toward Adams Street, shortly after the fire

The Brooklyn Theatre Fire of 1876
271 Cadman Plaza, Downtown Brooklyn
On December 5, 1876, the Brooklyn Theatre caught fire when gas lamps collided with pieces of scenery during a performance of “Two Orphans” causing the building to collapse. Of the thousand people in attendance, 278 people died — the largest single loss of life in New York City until 9/11.

One of the first monuments you will encounter through Green-Wood Cemetery’s brownstone Main Gates is the Brooklyn Theatre Fire Monument. The Brooklyn Theatre Fire Lot was also designated as a mass grave to bury those lost in the fire whose families could not afford a proper resting place. As it happens, the Brooklyn Theatre was built at the site of the old St. John’s Church and its burial ground. When the church was torn down and the community moved to Park Slope, some bodies were left in the ground where the Brooklyn Theatre was built.

“You have a lot of ecclesiastical ghost stories in Brooklyn Heights, which makes sense because it was this very upstanding Protestant church-going community,” says Janes. “Brooklyn is the borough of churches, after all.”