By Lindsey Wagner and Sandra Ifraimova
Photo: Lindsey Wagner
Every town has its ghost stories. Legends about grim and ghostly events from long ago that haunt the minds of believers and skeptics alike.
Paranormal investigators, like Dan Sturges and his team, investigate eerie experiences that people can’t explain. “Sometimes, more often than not, there’s a rational explanation,” he says.
But, other times, could that tingling feeling that makes your hair stand on end or those footsteps you hear when you’re all alone at night, be caused by the alleged souls of the dead?
New York has many places with haunted stigmas. Here are a few for you to enjoy this Halloween.
HOUDINI’S HOUSE
Harry Houdini, the magician known for his Chinese Water Torture Cell trick and for being buried alive, died on Halloween in 1926.
His wife, Bess, refused to accept that her husband was no longer going to “magically” appear in her life. After selling their home on the Upper West Side, Bess moved to Inwood.
According to Cole Thompson, founder of MyInwood.net and member of Volunteers for Isham Park, just before Houdini left his wife for the afterlife, the couple decided on one thing: For the next decade, on the anniversary of his death, Bess would take part in a séance where Houdini would appear and produce a secret code that only she would know.
“Every Sunday, at the hour of Harry’s death, Bess would lock herself in a room of her Payson Avenue home with a photograph of her dead husband and wait for a sign,” Thompson said.
Read more: Uptown Haunts: Ghosts Stories of Inwood and Washington Heights | The Uptowner.
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