The Spring Street Ghost
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.
A few years earlier, in 1974, which was before the man in the story above had moved to Wooster Street, another man had met the Spring Street Ghost. In this earlier story, the man was resting on his waterbed when a female apparition appeared to rise out of the bed. She had long, gray hair and her robe was made of moss and seaweed. This sighting in 1974 took place in a building at the corner of Broadway and Spring Street.
It would be easy to think, given the era, of drug-induced hallucinations, had the Spring Street Ghost not been seen haunting the area since the end of the 18th century. Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, reports of sightings of the ghost of Elma Sands can be found in newspapers, magazines, and private journals.
In the 1970s, SoHo was not yet the fashionable residential district it is today. There were artists living illegally in loft spaces, it was true, but most of the cast-iron front buildings still were occupied by light industry. There were a few galleries and even fewer bars and restaurants. The streets at night, except for a few blocks of West Broadway and another few blocks on Spring Street, were desolate. The pioneer loft-dwellers generally knew something of the district’s late19th century past. The architectural wonders and the presence of artistic people had made SoHo, in a small way, something of a tourist destination.
Very few SoHo residents knew of its early 19th century past as the northeast end of Lispenard’s Meadow, a salt marsh stretching southeast to today’s Greenwich and Beach Streets in TriBeCa. In 1799, and for many years before and after, the meadow was a place to picnic, hunt small game, and ice skate. Broadway was a cow path at this northern end and Spring Street was a wide path to the Hudson River. A spring ran along it to the river from the Collect Pond near City Hall.
Even fewer SoHo residents had heard of Elma Sands, a young woman who left her home near the southwest corner of Lispenard’s Meadow and ended up dead in a newly dug well at the northeast corner of Lispenard’s Meadow. The well is still there beneath an alley alongside a building on Greene Street slightly north of Spring Street.
It was December 22, 1799. Elma Sands was a milliner, 21 years old. She lived at 208 Greenwich Street at the corner of Franklin Street in a respectable boardinghouse owned by her cousins, a family of Quakers. Levi Weeks was a boarder there. A young carpenter, Levi worked in the business of his prosperous brother, Ezra Weeks. A prominent builder, Ezra’s home and lumberyard were a few blocks south on Greenwich Street. Shortly before Elma was found dead in the Manhattan Well, in the vicinity of today’s Spring and Greene Streets, the Weeks brothers had built the wooden pipes that were to carry drinking water from it to the city.
In the week before her disappearance, Elma had confided in her cousins, Catherine Ring and Hope Sands, that on that Sunday night, she and Levi were to be secretly married. Earlier that Sunday a man who lived near the well saw a young man sounding it with a pipe. On questioning, the young man said he had done the carpentry work and wanted to know how deep the water was in the well.
Levi Weeks arrived at the Ring boarding house at 8PM and sat in the parlor. Elma went upstairs to put on her shawl and hat and to get a muff she had earlier borrowed from a neighbor. When Elma came downstairs, Levi was seen to step from the parlor into the front hall. The front door closed behind them.
The borrowed muff was found floating on the well water on Christmas Eve. Eventually word of the muff reached her relatives and Elma’s body was pulled from the well on January 2, 1800. Public opinion fastened immediately on Levi Weeks as the killer. But a trial held in March resulted in acquittal.
The defense attorneys, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, had managed to brand Elma a harlot. The girl, who had always enjoyed a spotless reputation, was a suicidal harlot, at that. Levi claimed they had quarreled and he’d left her standing in front of the house. He said he wouldn’t have married Elma, in any case, because the match did not have his brother’s approval. The jury was convinced that Elma, in despair, had thrown herself into the well.
The population of New York, at that time around 60,000, did not buy the verdict. Elma was a happy and decent girl in the public mind. Levi had seduced her and then killed her to get out of marrying her. Levi Weeks was hounded out of New York in fear for his safety, as mobs followed him everywhere, shouting, “Murderer!”
It is said a curse was placed on the two defense attorneys and on the judge for their part in freeing Levi Weeks. Elma’s Quakeress cousin, Catherine Ring, pointed to them, so the story goes, and said to Alexander Hamilton, “If thee dies a natural death, I shall think there is no justice in heaven!” Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton to death a few years later. Burr lived and died in disgrace. The judge disappeared from a hotel room in 1829 and was never seen again.
But Elma Sands was seen, again, and again, and again.
