The Bank Street Ghost
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.
Elizabeth Bullock stepped off a Greenwich Village street corner one day in 1931 and into a speeding car. Elizabeth was laid out in a funeral home on nearby West 11th Street, but all was not peaceful. Her Protestant husband and Catholic parents began arguing over her dead body. They argued about where she was to be buried, just as they had argued in life over where she was to worship. In fact, Elizabeth’s parents and her husband had not spoken since before the wedding, which her parents had not attended. But they were making up for it now, demanding Elizabeth be given a Catholic burial.
The widower had never trusted his wife’s family and wasn’t about to start now. He ordered the body cremated in the dead of night. As it turned out, he was proven right, as he left the funeral parlor early the next morning with his wife’s ashes in a heavy metal can labeled with her name and date of death. Just two blocks away he spotted the bulky shapes of his two longshoremen brothers-in-law on their own mission to save their late sister’s soul from eternal damnation.
No match for the bruisers, he quickly slipped around the corner on Bank Street, where he knew a house was being renovated into a boarding house. The house was open, as he had noticed earlier. Making sure the workers were busy at the back, he climbed quickly to the second floor, and stuck the can of ashes up on a beam that was exposed for repair of the ceiling. When his burly brothers-in-law caught up with him, he was empty-handed.
The house on Bank Street was built in 1832 as a large private home, which it was for 100 years. In 1957, it had been for two decades a 19-room boarding house. New owners then remodeled it back into a single family, with a living room running front to back on the first floor and opening onto the garden. A narrow stairway to the side led upstairs to the second and third floors. The new owners and their two servants regularly heard footsteps going up the stairway and walking across the second floor, followed by a light tapping sound. The occurrences happened during the daylight hours. Nobody was ever done any harm. The occupants just grew used to having a spirit as a housemate.
One day, a carpenter was hammering on the second floor ceiling, when plaster and dust came pouring down, along with the can full of Elizabeth Bullock’s ashes. Suspecting this to be the cause of the house’s troubled haunting, they invited Hans Holzer to come and hold a séance to try and determine what was to be done with the ashes. He concluded that Elizabeth Bullock herself was in a quandary about where the ashes should rightly be buried. She was not comfortable lying next to her husband in the Protestant cemetery, nor with her family in the Catholic cemetery.
The owners of the house on Bank Street solved the problem by burying Elizabeth’s ashes or placing the urn on the piano, depending on who is telling the story. Garden or piano, the sounds of the footsteps and hammering ceased, never to be heard in the house again.
