Doris Lane

As a ten-year-old girl, Theodosia Burr could read Latin and Greek. Her doting father, Aaron Burr, thought she could walk on water. And that’s just what she’s been doing off the Outer Banks of North Carolina since early January 1813.

Born in the final year of the American Revolution, it is more or less accepted that she died in a coastal storm during the War of 1812 onboard a privateer, the Patriot. She certainly vanished. There was indeed a gale force storm off Cape Hatteras. A British ship did attempt to detain the Patriot. Three retired pirates separately in the course of the 19th century claimed to have plundered the schooner.

But what really became of Theodosia Burr Alston after her husband saw her off in Charleston on a trip to visit her father in New York?

To this day, as Theo’s ghost dressed in white is seen walking the tips of the waves off the beach of Huntington Beach State Park at Nags Head in North Carolina, nobody knows what became of her. But there are legends enough to explain her death or her later life, depending on whom you believe. The stories come from land and sea and one time they actually converge.
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It is hard to know what makes the night so black here. The night is black as pitch here. They all are here, every night, black as pitch. Look up and the clouds racing across the moon are black. The green grasses beneath your feet at night are black. The water is not blue, but brown, the river the color of weak coffee, from the cedar and the iron ore.

That river damn near never moves. It is the slowest flowing river, the Mullica. You could float on your back for five months and go nowhere a-tall. The water is very close to the ground here, 17 trillion gallons of it, sitting just underneath the million acres of Jersey Pine Barrens. There are places one wrong step could drown a man in an ocean of tea water.

The trees are low here, stunted and dwarfed, but not too short to hang a man. The lonely sand roads wind their way through the forest of pygmy pine. These roads are forlorn and carpeted thick with pine needles. You should not be able to hear footsteps out there in the night atop all those soft pine needles, but you do. The screams that tear your heart out through your mouth, you hear them, too.

We don’t go out at night here. A gun might help you with some sights you can see here, but not all of them. You might do better to stay inside. We who live here stopped going out at night a century or more now. It’s become the local custom, you might say, staying home at night.

It’s the night sights we’d rather not see out there in the black. The lady all dressed in white, the hanged man who goes looking for his gold to pay off the devil, but mostly we don’t want to see the devil itself, so we stay in at night here. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1977, a man was asleep in his loft on Wooster Street near Spring Street in the SoHo district of Manhattan. It was 2:00 AM and deadly quiet. It was a ground floor loft. Behind him was a blank wall with a door in it, but no windows to the front of the building. The only window was at the far end of the 1000 square foot space and it faced the back of a building on Greene Street.

When the lights were out, which they were, the loft was very black. As he awakened, he became aware of the sensation that someone was in the darkened room with him. As his vision cleared of sleep, he saw a glow at the Greene Street end of the loft, the glow gradually taking the shape of a slender, longhaired figure dressed in a long robe.

Shaking his head in wonder at what he thought was some sort of religious experience, the man left the visitation in the loft space and went out to the bathroom, which was in a hallway that ran along the space in which he had been sleeping. When he returned, the figure was still standing at the far end of the loft. He could not tell at the distance if it was male or female.

He decided to accept the presence and got back into bed. He lay there watching as the glowing figure began to move forward in his direction. After a moment, at his first sense of fear at the supernatural, the man shut his eyes and pulled the blanket up over his face. When he looked again the figure was gone.
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In 1798 Greenwich Village was a tiny country hamlet with a few grand estates, such as Richmond Hill, the home of the soon to be first Vice President of the United States, Aaron Burr, and family farms, such as that of early New York literary punster, Anthony Bleecker. That year, 1798, the Bank of New York downtown on Wall Street was quarantined for a clerk who had come down with yellow fever. To safeguard future operations, the bank bought a country lane in rural Greenwich, running from the Hudson River to today’s Greenwich Avenue, and established a field office there.

The 1822 epidemic brought a building boom to Bank Street of close-packed two- and three-story red brick town homes. By 1832, when the future home of the Bank Street Ghost was built, Bank Street looked much as it does today. For 100 years, as far as we know, everyone who resided in the house on Bank Street was alive.
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Edna Crawford Champion’s wealthy husband, Albert, invented the spark plug. Champion was a Frenchman with a French wife in Detroit, when he met young Edna while on a business trip to New York. She was there from St. Louis looking for a rich husband and she found Albert. He paid his wife a million dollars to divorce him, married Edna, and took her to live in Detroit.

The blonde and beautiful Edna did not take to the Motor City. World War I was over, the 1920s on the horizon, and Edna married Albert’s money to have fun. Well, good, New York here we come! Albert adored Edna and indulged her in anything she wanted, almost. He would buy her jewels, furs, and dresses. He would live in New York. He just wouldn’t give her any money of her own. And he was extremely jealous of any interest she showed in men nearer her age.

It was on a trip to join Albert, who was in Paris on business, that Edna met Charles Brazelle. Albert wasn’t able to meet his wife at the railroad station and sent an old friend named Barney Oldfield, an automobile racer, to pick up Edna. Barney had with him a younger friend—handsome, suave, Sorbonne-educated, half American and half French—Charlie Brazelle, who had a definite way with women.

Charlie and Edna began a hot love affair that very day. They met secretly at first, but once Albert Champion found them out, they started going out together in public. They were together at the Crillon Bar one day when Albert barged in, demanding that Edna either come home and be a good wife, or he would cut her off without a cent. Brazelle beat Albert to a pulp there in the Crillon. Poor old Albert was found dead in his hotel room a few hours later.

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The woman stands on a balcony that once overlooked a Manhattan Island of hills, creeks, rivers, and woods, all the way to a small New York City at the Battery, and from East River to Hudson River. She cautions visiting school children to be quiet and then passes through a solid wood door; yes, through the wood of the door. She wears a frothy, purple dressing gown.

She is Madam Stephen Jumel, otherwise Eliza Brown Bowen Jumel Burr, a woman of parts and a past.

A prostitute in Providence, Rhode Island in her youth, Eliza Brown or Betsy Bowen, as a young woman in the early Republican city of New York, frolicked with the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, and Alexander Hamilton. She was described in her day as “a beautiful blonde with a superb figure and graceful carriage.”

One of the many rumors circulated as the cause of the later duel between Hamilton and Burr was a lingering competition over the favors of Eliza Jumel. She was also said to have covertly carried political intelligence from the Federalist Hamilton to the Republican Burr.

She became the mistress of a wealthy French wine merchant named Stephen Jumel and lived with him for several years in his mansion at Whitehall and Pearl Streets. After they were married, the Jumels lived in France, where they were a social smash at the Imperial Court of Napoleon I. The Jumels offered Napoleon an escape from exile and protection in America after Waterloo, but the Emperor declined.
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The Stuyvesant Theater opened in 1907 on West 44th Street in New York, with David Warfield appearing in A Grand Army Man. Today it is known simply as the Belasco Theater in honor of David Belasco, actor, manager, director, dramatist, producer, who built it.

David Belasco was a theatrical visionary who founded the Little Theater movement, which emphasized intimacy of surroundings and actor-audience contact. He is credited with bringing a new realism to American theater. He introduced many technical advances in staging and design, earning him the sobriquet, “Wizard of the American Theater.”

The architect of the Stuyvesant was George Keister, but he was so closely supervised by Belasco, the project was more of an architectural partnership. The Belasco reflects its founder’s ideal of a theater building. Its exterior is in the Georgian Revival style, unusual for theaters at the time, with an office pavilion on the second story.

Belasco insisted on opulence. The lobby and doors were designed by John Rapp. The lobby boasted eighteen Everett Shinn mural panels and Tiffany glass lighting. The interior ceiling was made of back-lit colored glass. When the theater opened it was considered technically state-of-the-art and Belasco’s experiments there with staging and lighting design greatly influenced the future development of theatrical stagecraft.

In 1909, a 10-room penthouse was added to the rooftop and David Belasco moved in. A year later the name of the theater was changed to the Belasco. He lived in the penthouse until he died in 1931 and was buried in Linden Hills Cemetery in Queens, New York. But the spirit of David Belasco never moved out of the Belasco Theater.
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At one time there was a house in Jersey City haunted by three ghosts: a man, the woman he loved, and a third ghost. A Mrs. Magee owned the house and had once shared it with her pretty daughter. A stubborn and domineering Irishwoman, Mrs. Magee lived long enough to regret events concerning a man, his maid, and a railroad terminal peanut stand.

Such a rake was Conny O’Ryan; a gambling man of Civil War Era Manhattan. Word was, he could beat Saint Patrick, himself, at cards, if they were playing for beer. Conny was an engineer, who made good money at his work, and even better at his gambling. As much as he loved gambling, Conny loved booze and women. But Conny lost his heart for good and all one day to a pretty girl who ran a peanut stand in Jersey City.

She was as famous as he, in her way, Biddy Magee, famous for her beauty of face and form, and for her refined nature. With her peanut stand located at the busy Jersey City railroad terminal, Biddy caught the attention of many a traveling man. Biddy loved the attention and she loved the railroad. She loved paths to just about everywhere crossing just there, where she was selling her hot peanuts to travelers. She had a pleasing voice and tended to sing while she worked. Everyone smiled when Biddy was around. And what a looker she was, too, it bears repeating.

When Biddy Magee walked down the aisle of an idling railroad car, heads turned. Every red-blooded man aboard realized he wanted a bag of peanuts more than anything. One day that man was Conny O’Ryan, heading home from an all-night wagering fest in New Brunswick. His pockets full of winnings, he was ready to buy every last bag of her peanuts. But, somehow, for the first time in his life, silver-tongued Conny could not speak.
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This is a true crime story and a ghost story.

It involves a large house in Morristown, New Jersey, in which a triple murder in 1833 produced two ghosts: one haunts a popular nightclub and restaurant that occupies the building today and the other haunts the village green.

The house on South Street was built in 1749 by John Sayre. There used to be a barn out back and a field of corn. In 1833, the year of the murders, the elderly Judge Samuel Sayre and his wife Sarah lived there with a servant named Phoebe.

It was important that the murders take place on a weekend. The killer planned to be on a ship home to France by Monday. Morristown probably wouldn’t miss one of its families before then, Antoine LeBlanc figured. If he just killed them, stole the money and the horse, he’d be on his way back to Newark in no time, and onboard the ship to France. He’d be home to his beloved, a German girl named Marie, and rich enough to marry her.

The Sayres needed a gardener, some say, or a farmhand, and they turned to John P. Fusier of New York, who ran a boarding house and agency for servants who had emigrated from France. In late April 1833, Samuel Sayre hired Antoine LeBlanc through Fusier. Shortly after LeBlanc arrived and began working, the Sayres and Phoebe were dead.
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