The Atlantic

A Haunting in Manhattan

Lizzie and Kaitlyn try to find ghosts, but all they see is Anderson Cooper’s apartment.
Source: Paul Windle

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Lizzie: What am I most afraid of? Being the last to die. Dying. Being put into one of those freezing morgue drawers while I’m still alive. Cottage cheese. Sometimes Matt hides in the dark and jumps out when I least expect it. My heart stops!

Not ghosts. I’m not afraid of ghosts. Probably because their task lists aren’t really that scary. In Beetlejuice, the ghosts just want to stop their house from having a new design scheme. In The Amityville Horror, it’s basically the same thing. Ghosts are kind of like anti-house-flippers.

Last week, Kaitlyn, Nathan, and I went on a ghost tour of the West Village. It was sort of like apartment hunting, except the broker listed everyone who’d died at each apartment, and you weren’t allowed to go inside anywhere. Kaitlyn had done a West Village ghost tour several years prior, so she was kind of an expert on the whole thing.

I told Lizzie that I was down to repeat my West-Village-ghost-tour experience because the first outing had lacked a little something. Or a few things. It was a second date lacking in all romantic chemistry; the tour lacked participants aside from the two of us. The tour guide was

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