Big Book of New York Ghost Stories

Introduction

History often comes back to haunt us. The crimes of our past leave an indelible stamp on our surroundings that current and future generations must confront and resolve, at least to the best of our ability. Consider the following examples, for instance.

Manhattan, 1799. A brutal, unavenged murder. Two days before Christmas, a beautiful woman is viciously beaten and thrown into a well at the intersection of Spring and Green Streets—a well that, many years later, would be unearthed in the basement of the Manhattan Bistro at 129 Spring Street. The victim’s boyfriend is indicted by a grand jury on suspicion of murder. But his famous defense team convinces the jury that he is as innocent as the victim was suicidal. The battered body pulled from the well and placed on public display for several days tells a far different story. Yet once the chief justice deliberately stresses to the jury that the case against the victim’s boyfriend is entirely circumstantial, the jury takes the hint and quickly acquits him. Public outrage forces the killer to flee the city, fearing for his life—but at least he still has a life to fear for. An apparition matching the description of the victim has been seen ever since, flitting about the neighborhood where the crime took place, so often that the Spring Street Ghost even inspired a series of paintings.

Cutchogue, Long Island, 1854. A heinous double homicide. On the evening of June 4, an Irishman named Nicholas Beheenan enters the farmhouse of attorney and retired merchant James Wickham, hell-bent on violating a young servant woman named Ellen. A fourteen-year-old boy wanders into the hallway, catching the intruder off guard, so Beheenan strikes him in the head, nearly killing him. Mrs. Wickham awakens to the screams and implores the man to stop. Instead, he turns toward her, hitting her so ferociously in the head with his ax that her brains are splayed across the floor. Now bloodthirsty, Beheenan turns on Mr. Wickham, striking him savagely about the head and face as well, until the retired merchant and attorney is maimed beyond recognition and mortally wounded. The servants run screaming from the house, alerting neighbors to the carnage. Several days later, Beheenan is captured, convicted, and sentenced to hang for his crimes. Previous owners of the former Wickham farmhouse reported feeling cold spots; hearing unexplainable sounds, such as footsteps leading to what had been the master bedroom of the Wickhams; and seeing an apparition of a man hovering menacingly over their bed.

Brooklyn, 1897. A calculated, brutal murder. George Stelz, assistant sexton of Brooklyn’s Most Holy Trinity Church, is slaughtered in the church vestibule as he descends the stairs after ringing the church bell. The poor boxes have been emptied, and Stelz’s engraved watch is missing. Though he had been struck viciously in the head seven times, the cause of death is ultimately determined to be strangulation. Three days before Halloween, police arrest Constantine Steiger for killing a police officer during a botched robbery attempt at another city church. He has in his possession Stelz’s watch. Steiger is convicted of murder for killing the police officer but refuses to admit he killed Stelz several months earlier, despite overwhelming evidence suggesting otherwise. As a result, nobody is ever held accountable for killing the sexton. Since then, there have been reports of mysterious footsteps pacing the floors and traversing the stairway of Most Holy Trinity in the middle of the night. The bell in the tower is alleged to have rung for no reason, and bloodstains stubbornly continue to surface occasionally on the wall in the vestibule where the murder occurred so long ago.

In each of these examples, the metaphoric Grim Reaper arrives to collect his harvest at a different time, in a different place, and under different—though invariably brutal—circumstances. Yet each victim dies at the hands of another, his or her last moments of life unspeakably horrifying. Imagine the shock to one’s psyche as it is jolted from its familiar physical form and thrust into a purely spiritual realm, where it is reluctantly forced to bear silent witness to the solemn reality of its own death. It sees, in disbelief, its mutilated, lifeless body. It sees the heart-wrenching anguish of its loved ones as they learn of the person’s passing. And it sees its killer getting away with murder. In light of such circumstances, how can a soul in such distress be expected to continue merrily on the journey we all must make, when every ounce of its now ethereal form is plagued by shock? Most victims of crime or tragedy may make a smooth transition to heaven, the other side, or whatever one’s particular belief system calls it, but it seems that not all do. And these souls need our understanding, rather than our fear.

There may be as many reasons for a spirit to haunt a place as there are ways to die. When a cold-blooded murder occurs, as in the cases described above, a spirit may linger until its killer is brought to justice. But even if the soul does cross over to the other side, it’s possible that the energy of its last traumatic moments before death may still imprint on the environment, where it remains indefinitely. Such a residual haunting would not be able to interact with the living, because there is no awareness associated with it. The soul is no longer there, but has left on the environment only a fleeting snapshot or movie clip, if you will, of a moment in its life. This phenomenon is commonly likened to a recording that continues playing long after the individual has moved on into the afterlife. It may be a recording of a mundane, routine moment in which the individual is doing something he or she did regularly while alive. Or it may be a glimpse of a pivotal moment in the deceased’s life, an event that somehow had a profound impact. Most such cases seem to be a glimpse of the last seconds of an individual’s life, such as the Seneca Hill Ghost running down the road in mortal fear for her life. Another common example is the victim of a fatal fall down the stairs whose residual haunting subsequently shows an apparition descending the stairs, seconds before the fateful event.

In some cases, it could be that the emotional energy expended in those final moments before death was so deeply charged by the heinous nature of the crime, or the severity of the tragedy, that it left an indelible imprint on the environment. Just as victims of unspeakable horror sometimes detach themselves emotionally from the incident, or their personality splits, or they repress their memories—all for their very survival—the psyche may splinter at the moment of a horrendous death so that the soul can adapt and move on. When there has been such an unspeakable death, it often seems to result in either a residual or a traditional haunting. Other explanations for traditional hauntings may include the individual’s fondness for a place, object, or person; apparent unawareness of his or her own death; and the proverbial unfinished business.

This book includes stories of both types of hauntings, traditional and residual. Some are old, some are new; some are bold, and others are subtle. In some cases, only one or two incidents occurred at a place, and they happened long ago, but often there have been ongoing incidents that continue to this day in places that have remained actively haunted for a hundred years or more.

New York State has eleven distinct regions, by most accounts. In this book, I’ve merged them into six: the St. Lawrence Seaway; the Adirondacks; Western New York and the Finger Lakes; Syracuse, Central New York, and the Capital District; the Hudson Valley and the Catskills; and New York City and Long Island. Because this is my seventh book specifically about hauntings around New York State, I tapped into many of the previous places I’ve written about, rewriting each story to include extensive (and often incredible) additional research and updates, where possible. I’ve also included many new stories as well. I hope the book instills in you a greater fondness for ghost stories and, perhaps more important, a greater respect for history. Hauntings and history will always remain inherently related. Enjoy the compilation.

Seneca Hill Ghost

The most shocking tragedy in the annals of this county was enacted this morning near Fulton village, twelve miles from here, as the result of which Charles Smedley and his wife were cruelly shot down, and, after failing to kill his wife, William Cooper shot himself to death.

All that can be learned at present is that Cooper returned home from a night of dissipation and engaged in an argument over the farm property, during which he fired a shot at his young wife, which missed. Seizing her two little children, the horror-stricken wife fled to a neighbor’s place, and while she lay prostrate on the ground, Cooper completed his work of destruction.

—New York Times, June 25, 1898

In Haunted New York, I wrote a story called Seneca Hill Ghost, about the well-known apparition of a frightened woman, often seen running with a young girl in tow as if fleeing in terror. She has been observed many times in the past hundred years in the vicinity of Seneca Hill near Oswego. At the time of that writing, I was unaware of any documented tragedy or murder involving a young woman and child in that hamlet, and I said that nobody had been able to find a reason for the well-known manifestation. Since then, however, I’ve been poring over old newspaper articles now available online and discovered that quite the opposite is true. A number of tragedies and murders took place on or near Seneca Hill, including the one described above.

Seneca Hill is a small community on the Oswego River between Oswego and Fulton. The majority of sightings attributed to the so-called Ghost of Seneca Hill occur along Kingdom Road, Dutch Ridge Road, and Routes 481 (along the railroad tracks), 57 (along the shore), and 45 (near Minetto). In other words, either our lady really gets around, or there are several female apparitions haunting the region. The latter seems more plausible, because witnesses describe the ghost in a number of different ways. The most common description is of a young woman running with a little girl, both of them barefoot, terrified, and wearing nightclothes. This would coincide with the probable physical appearance of the individuals involved in the dreadful Cooper crime scene. Cooper returned home late at night and shot at his wife, and the horrified woman grabbed her children and ran out the door, down the road. They were likely barefoot and wearing nightclothes, and they certainly would have appeared to be terrified as they ran to their neighbor’s house. They were, after all, running for their lives. Even though the woman and child were not killed at that time, this had to have been the most traumatic event of their lives.

As also reported in the New York Times, a young lady named Callista Robinson was killed by lightning on July 14, 1859, in another tragedy near Seneca Hill:

An eyewitness describes the catastrophe as follows: The house was filled with smoke and the floor covered with plastering from the walls, and the parents almost distracted. I immediately sent for Dr. Place, who arrived in about an hour after the catastrophe. In the meantime, the youngest (aged 6 or 7 years) began to show some signs of life—but the deceased was killed instantly. She was a young lady aged about 16 years, uncommonly active and full of animation. She was struck on the head, badly burning her hair, also the sun bonnet which she was wearing. The lightning tore down the door casing, tearing it off and striking the girls, who had just ran there and clung together through fear of the terrible flashings.

Once again this was a real situation where a young lady and a young girl were reportedly running together in mortal fear of being struck, only in this case by lightning. The young woman died, and the little girl’s condition was grave at the time the article appeared in the paper. The similarities between this incident and some versions of the sightings on Seneca Hill are remarkable. First of all, most of the sightings have occurred in July, October, and November. The above incident occurred in July. Second, just as in the majority of the ghost sightings, the terrified young woman was hurriedly pulling a young girl of approximately six years of age along the road, as they tried to get to shelter to avoid being struck by lightning in the severe thunderstorm. Some accounts say that the apparition they saw was wearing a bonnet, and Callista Robinson was said to have been wearing a bonnet when she died. The Robinson sisters may have been barefoot, and they may have been carrying baskets, as some of the ghost sightings have reported, depending on whether that event took place in the daytime or at night. We’ll never know. But the Seneca Hill Ghosts are often seen wearing white nightclothes in Civil War–era style, and this particular event occurred just a few years prior to the start of that war, so this would have taken place during the appropriate time period.

One man said he was startled to see what he later learned was the Seneca Hill Ghost run right in front of his car out of the blue, and then into a nearby home. He asked his wife, who was sitting right beside him in the car, whether she had seen it, but she hadn’t. What’s interesting about this man’s account is that he saw an apparent apparition running frantically down the road, then up onto a porch and into a house. And that’s exactly what the news articles say occurred in the two cases described above—the horrified wife who fled to a neighbor’s house, inadvertently leading her murderous husband right to the doorstep of her neighbors, whom he then killed, and the sixteen- and six-year-old sisters who ran back to the entrance of their house in a futile attempt to escape the deadly lightning.

Other versions of the Seneca Hill apparition have the woman wearing a high-necked dress and racing past them, child in tow. But one individual described the apparition he saw on Kingdom Road as a woman who was walking, not running. She, too, was wearing nineteenth-century clothing. She had pale skin, and her hair was pulled up in a bun, but she didn’t have the usual wide-eyed, horrified expression on her face so commonly reported of the Seneca Hill Ghost. This individual saw the apparition around Halloween time, so he assumed it was a person wearing a very authentic costume on her way to a masquerade party. He had never heard of the Seneca Hill Ghost until he mentioned the oddly dressed woman to his friends, who then let him in on the story. Maybe it was Mrs. Warren E. Carpenter, whose husband was accused of murdering her in 1885. According to a New York Times article regarding that Oswego incident: The District Attorney, becoming satisfied that he could not produce sufficient evidence to warrant sending the case to the jury, moved to discharge the prisoner. The court advised the jury to find a verdict of not guilty, which was accordingly done, and Carpenter was discharged. The prosecution was unable to prove that the woman was murdered. Thus in the case of Mrs. Carpenter, it was never proven that her husband had killed her. If he had, he got off free. And if he hadn’t murdered her, then who did? These are the kinds of scenarios that are believed to leave a spirit unable to rest in peace.

One woman reported that the apparition she saw on Seneca Hill was wearing Victorian clothing, accessorized by a white bonnet and a basket. She said that by the time she did a double take in her rearview mirror, the strangely dressed woman had completely vanished, out in the middle of nowhere, where there were no houses around for miles. Maybe she had seen Anna Brown, a nineteen-year-old who was killed instantly in 1897 when she was struck by a passenger train as she drove over the railroad tracks a few miles south of Oswego.

A common theory regarding the spirit that roams Seneca Hill is that she is a mother from yesteryear searching for her daughter who drowned in the Oswego River. A mother searching in vain for her child might have left enough residual energy from such raw emotions as shock, horror, fear, and hysteria to continue to manifest a hundred years later, still running down the road trying to find her child. And there have certainly been many drownings in the vicinity of Seneca Hill over the years. One was a thirteen-year-old girl named Pearl Wilson, who drowned on June 18, 1900, along with her brother James in the Oswego River near Fulton. According to the New York Times, The children were rowing across the river with their brother. Becoming frightened, they accidentally capsized the boat, and all three were thrown into the water. The elder brother clung to the upturned boat. The others were drowned.

Over the years, the river at Seneca Hill has claimed many lives. Countless other tragedies and murders that occurred in the area have been lost to time.

Francis Marion Brown Theatre

The homeless old man hunkered down in his secret hiding place in the abandoned building at Fort Ontario Park one cold winter night in the 1930s, unaware of the fate that was about to befall him. The building had no heat, but at least he was out of the biting wind and the elements. His hands were numb, his face was icy, his teeth were chattering. North Country winters are so unforgiving, especially to the indigent. The hobo pulled his knees up tight against his chest and wrapped his shivering arms around them, gathering all of his extremities inward against his torso as if to intuitively protect his vital organs, and he sat there for hours. His swollen, blue-tinged fingers and toes throbbed with unspeakable pain . . . until, after far too long, they relinquished all feeling and simply went numb. Sweet relief. Then the urge to let his heavy eyelids close washed over him. How could anyone think of sleeping in such conditions, we might wonder. But that’s just it . . . he wasn’t thinking. At least not clearly. His mind had become as numb as his body. For no particular reason, he attempted to stand—perhaps the fight-or-flight reflex—but his movements had become choppy, exaggerated, like someone in the throes of an epileptic fit. He no longer had control of his extremities. They failed him when he tried to stand. But he didn’t care as he slumped back down on the mattress . . . his body was slowing down, he could tell. Yet he welcomed the kind embrace of unconsciousness as it swept over him. No more pain. No more pain . . .

The United States Border Patrol and the Art Association building that houses the Francis Marion Brown Theatre, also called the Oswego Players Theatre, replaced an old train station and vacant Army building that once stood there in Fort Ontario Park in Oswego. But apparently someone forgot to tell a former resident or two that the buildings they once inhabited in the flesh are no longer there—and neither are they.

Francis Marion Brown founded the theater group in 1938, and today the organization is one of the oldest continuously running theater companies in the United States. The Oswego Players believe their theater in Fort Ontario Park is haunted, and most agree that the ghost is an old homeless man who froze to death in a crawl space in the basement of what was then the train station—the place he called home. Today the crawl space is located right under the theater’s kitchen. On the night the homeless man died, the secret hiding place that had so often sheltered him in his times of need had become as inescapable and inhospitable as a prison in Siberia. According to one member, whose father-in-law had lived in the neighborhood in the 1930s and readily recalled the incident, the old man’s body was not discovered until spring, when nearby residents recognized the distinct, unforgettable smell of rotting flesh and followed it straight to the crawl-space hideout in the abandoned, unheated Army building. There they found his body lying on top of a mattress.

Members of the Oswego Players who frequent the building have heard strange voices, unexplained bugle calls, and doors opening and closing. They also have felt the strong presence of some unseen person in the dressing rooms. One lady saw a hanger on the door in the women’s changing room swinging rapidly and then abruptly stopping. It couldn’t have done that unless someone had grabbed it and held it in place, but nobody else was in the room with her at the time. Members have often reported cold spots in the building, and some have seen a shadow believed to be a ghost. It looked exactly like a person’s shadow moving along, but there was no physical body casting the shadow. One member has seen the stage curtains sway as if by a breeze, even though there was no air circulation anywhere in the building. Props have been knocked over, tools have been taken, and so on. One night, as the director was stepping down from the stage to return to her front-row seat, she lurched forward, fell off the stage, and broke her wrist. Witnesses claim they saw a sudden jerk at her midsection just before she fell, as if somebody had pushed her.

It seems as if every old theater has a resident ghost, or maybe it’s just that we notice unusual phenomena more when we’re in a building where our primary task is to pay attention to the sights and sounds of the performance venue. The Oswego Players have told news media that they like the idea of having a ghost; it doesn’t scare them. They say the amount of paranormal phenomena has decreased in recent years, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the ghost of the old hobo is gone. He may simply be lying low, trying not to attract attention toward himself, especially if he thinks people are on to him. If he didn’t want to be seen or caught while he was alive, why would he would want to be noticed now?

Kappa Delta Sigma House

There is an enduring, albeit unproven, legend that a woman named Elaine hanged herself in the closet of a second-floor bedroom in the front right corner of the Kappa Delta Sigma House in Canton, and it is said that her spirit now haunts the sorority sisters’ house. Though no part of that legend appears to hold any merit, there does seem to be a benevolent someone watching over the young women passing through the doors of 53 Park Street.

More than a hundred years ago, this historic house on the corner of Park Street and University Avenue was built and briefly occupied by Heman Matthews, an early contractor who also constructed some of the other historic village homes that have since become St. Lawrence University sorority or fraternity houses. It then began a long stint of ownership by the Hale family, which is prominent to both Canton and the university.

In 1876, Ledyard P. Hale graduated from the university and moved to Wisconsin, where he continued his studies and began a law practice. The year 1879 was a pivotal one for him, as in that year he married Georgettie Bachellor; his father, Canton resident Horace W. Hale, died; and his newly widowed mother, Betsey Russell Hale, joined him and his new wife in Wisconsin. But according to early newspaper articles, the change in climate didn’t agree with the elder Mrs. Hale, so in 1881, the three returned to Canton, setting up house at 53 Park Street. Hale became the St. Lawrence County district attorney and county judge, and he and his wife raised two children, Horace C. and Irma, both of whom were born in the house. Horace eventually became a major and practiced law in Canton, and Irma married Carl F. Pfund.

Other than the busy social schedule one would expect of such a prominent family, the lives of the Hales were fairly uneventful during the many decades they occupied the home. There were births, wedding breakfasts, teas, and occasional natural deaths, to be sure, but no scandals or tragedies that would substantiate the legend of Elaine. Nobody named Elaine ever actually died in the home, as far as I could determine, although several Hales did. Matriarch Betsey Russell Hale died there while her son owned the home, in 1907. She was ninety-three years old, and the funeral was held at the house. Ledyard P. Hale also succumbed there in 1926, following a critical illness. Georgettie passed away at the home in 1935, after two months of declining health. The house was then occupied by daughter Irma and her husband.

The house finally left the hands of the Hale family when Irma sold it to St. Lawrence University’s Kappa Delta Sigma sorority in 1941, and it continues to be owned by that sorority today. The October 19, 1951, issue of the Commercial Advertiser stated that improvements and expansion of the home made it one of the finest of many fine chapters of university sororities at St. Lawrence. But it was that same remodeling that also may have attracted curious spirits from the past.

It is not clear when the ghost stories regarding Elaine began, but in 2002, the house historian and vice president, Megan Crowley, told me that ghost stories were part of the orientation into the sorority, so it is customary to pass them on to each group of girls who live there. She gave me the rundown of what she and her sisters had experienced, saying that she sometimes scares even herself while recounting the ghost tales.

Many girls have had the phone go dead while talking to guys, so the sisters reason that Elaine must not care for those particular guys. In other words, if Elaine doesn’t like him or thinks he’s no good for her girls, the phone goes dead. Conversely, if the boy does somehow find favor with Elaine, she assists in the process of bringing the young couple together. One girl was trying to send an instant message to her friends one day, but the computer screen kept scrolling down to her old boyfriend’s name every time she attempted to type. Becoming increasingly frustrated, she finally decided to call her ex, whom she hadn’t spoken to in quite some time, and she asked him if he was somehow tampering with her screen on his end. (It should be pointed out that the phone didn’t go dead right then as it usually did when a girl was talking to a guy.) He assured her that he wasn’t responsible for the computer mystery. What’s more, the two decided then and there to give it another shot, getting together again, and today they are happily married. So it seems that Elaine had some divine insight that proved to be correct. Stories such as these tend to keep guys on their best behavior while visiting the house, in an often futile attempt to win the matronly spirit’s approval.

Maybe the spirit they call Elaine is actually one of the Hale women watching over the girls. According to her obituary in the July 23, 1907, issue of the Commercial Advertiser, Betsey Russell Hale, the family matriarch, was a woman whose whole life was an example of beautiful Christian womanhood. Hers was always to do and look unselfishly to the interests of those near and dear to her. The sorority sisters would be fortunate to have such a caring soul watching over them. Or could it be Georgettie Bachellor Hale, a woman whose loyalty to St. Lawrence University never faltered, according to her obituary in the same paper in 1935. Though Georgettie never completed her college experience because of a health condition, she became a charter member and was one of the founders of St. Lawrence University’s Kappa Kappa Gamma. Does she now watch over the sorority girls occupying her former abode? If so, the young women in residence today would surely please her by planting flowers outside and keeping fresh flowers indoors. Georgettie was a member of the Canton Garden Club and loved flowers.

The sleeping quarters at the Kappa Delta Sigma house are called the cold dorm, because the windows are kept cracked open throughout the year to allow ventilation, so there’s always a slight chill in the air. But even if the windows were closed tight, there might still be a chill in the air in the form of a cold spot, as the sleeping quarters are believed to be haunted. One of the sisters awakened to the sound of someone quietly sobbing on the bunk closest to the door one night. Talking is forbidden in that room, to ensure that there’s always one silent area of the house where the girls can get a good night’s sleep, so she didn’t ask her distraught sister what was wrong, much as she wanted to. But the next morning, she did. Imagine her surprise when the girl responded that she hadn’t even slept at the house that night and had, in fact, just gotten home. So who was the woman she heard crying, and whose form she saw under the blankets? The sisters decided it must have been Elaine. But since there doesn’t appear to have been an Elaine in the history of the house, could it have been the spirit of Georgettie, crying over the loss of her husband, Ledyard, who died nine years before she did?

While I was there, I experienced some inexplicable phenomena as well. I was using a miniature tape recorder with new batteries and a new cassette to record the ghost stories Megan was recounting. On my way home from the visit, I played the tape and was disappointed to find that when it got to the part where we entered the room where the spirit dubbed Elaine allegedly hanged herself, the tape became very garbled, sounding as though it had been stretched and was ready to break or the batteries were about to die. Thinking that maybe the batteries were faulty, I pulled off the road and tried a couple other new ones, but that portion of the tape remained the only section too garbled to understand.

No matter who may be haunting the Kappa Delta Sigma house, everyone who has experienced something unexplainable there agrees that it’s an unusually helpful, if not doting, spirit who always has the girls’ best interests at heart. And that, my friends, is an undeniable Hale family trait.

Kendrew Corners

Who haunts the bridge at Kendrew Corners in DeKalb? Could it be a restless spirit from the nearby cemetery? And is this phantom responsible for the countless accidents, near misses, and bizarre sightings at that location?

One fateful, foggy night in 1982, a Riley sports car traveling at about twenty-five miles per hour approached the bridge at Kendrew Corners heading toward Ogdensburg. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a debonair middle-aged man wearing a bow tie, white shirt, and black cape appeared, stepping directly into the path of the slow-moving vehicle. At the moment of impact, he looked the twenty-year-old driver square in the eye, showing no concern, no surprise—nothing. The driver of the Riley, on the other hand, stared in horror as the imminent event unfolded. He braced himself and instinctively raised his forearm to protect his face, expecting a body to fly up onto the hood or windshield of his car. Instead, the man he struck fell straight backward—impossibly straight. Expecting the worst, the young man jumped from his car. But the stranger in the road was gone. After a frantic search of the roadside and surrounding grounds, the young man raced to his father’s house. Was he losing his mind?

He was white as a ghost when he blurted out to his father that he’d just hit a guy near the bridge but couldn’t find him anywhere. In an instant, his father was back in 1955, reliving an identical experience he’d never told his son about. The repressed recollections suddenly fresh in his mind, he asked his son if the man had been wearing a cape and bow tie and looked as though he were coming from a costume ball. The young man was speechless—it was as if his father had been with him and had seen the same thing. This was partly true. His father had seen the same thing . . . twenty-seven years earlier. He had been the same age as his son, and at the same exact location, when he and his friends encountered the phantom of Kendrew Corners. And like his son, they were unable to find any trace of the man they hit.

In 1955, the father, then twenty years old, was driving a 1947 Chevy convertible about twenty-five miles per hour, on account of the fog, as it crossed the bridge at Kendrew Corners on Route 812. He and four friends were on their way to a dance in Hermon. Suddenly a man dressed in a ritzy outfit from the 1920s or 1930s appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the road. There was no time to for the driver to react. The five young people in the Chevy stared wide-eyed at the man as he hit the car and fell back, straight as an arrow. They jumped from the car with flashlights, expecting the worst, but the man was gone. There was no sign of him anywhere—no mark on the car, no footprints in the soft earth on the side of the road to indicate the pedestrian had run off into the woods. Just to be sure, they searched the woods too, but still found nothing.

They had all seen him, they agreed. He seemed to purposely step out in front of the car as it approached, before turning to look straight at the youngsters, coolly, as if he’d been waiting for them. They would never forget what he looked like, how strangely he was dressed—and yet, he was gone.

Bewildered, the youngsters analyzed each second of the ordeal. Though they had seen the man hit the car and go down, they never felt or heard the thud of his body against the car. They watched him fall straight backward in complete and utter silence, even though they knew he should have been thrown up onto the car or slumped over the hood, since they were going so slow when he was struck. Then it dawned on them: they must have hit a ghost. Opting not to go to the police, for fear of being mocked, they instead waited several agonizing days to see if anyone was reported missing, injured, or even dead in the area, especially near Kendrew Corners. As they expected, no such report was made. Not in 1955 . . . and not in 1982.

The odds of two members of the same family experiencing the same chilling, unexplained incident at the same age and same place twenty-seven years apart were astronomical. But apparently it happened.

If two generations of the same family saw the phantom, how many others have seen it over the years? One woman who lives in the vicinity told me that when she was a teenager, she saw a man dressed similarly walking down the road past her house on Route 812 in broad daylight. The stranger’s appearance was so unusual and out of place that she ran to the barn to get her sister, but when they came back out to look, the man was nowhere in sight.

The bridge at Kendrew Corners, five miles from Heuvelton, has been the scene of countless accidents, some fatal. And we’ll never know whether some of the victims swerved to avoid hitting something standing suddenly in front of them at the bridge—like a man who has a habit of disappearing quickly. There was a fatal accident a few years before the 1955 phantom sighting and another tragic accident a year after it. In 1951, a horrific accident claimed the lives of three young men, ages seventeen, eighteen, and twenty-four, when the 1949 Chevy pickup they were driving struck the bridge’s concrete abutment. The driver’s disappearance from the scene of the crash led to speculation that he had wandered off somewhere, the victim of amnesia. But his body was discovered several miles downstream in the Oswegatchie River four months later, effectively ending that mystery. Five years later, in 1956, a forty-two-year-old former Ogdensburg man struck the guardrail at the Kendrew bridge and died after being thrown from the vehicle.

We may never know who the phantom at Kendrew Corners is, or why he chooses to prey on cars carrying young men on foggy nights. All we can do is slow down as we approach the bridge, so we don’t lose control—and pray that a caped man doesn’t suddenly appear in front of us before it’s too late to stop.

Pine Grove Cemetery

Joan and Blake Szarka were strolling along Pine Grove Cemetery’s winding paths one balmy summer evening, when the wind suddenly picked up, and their dog halted and began to whimper. Just as a chill shot through Blake, they heard someone behind them hiss, Turn around. Without looking back, the frightened couple made haste to the main gate and out onto the safety of Beach Street, more than a little shaken.

At the time of the incident, they had been discussing one particular tombstone—that of a man named Dragon Obretenoff, who was killed in 1949 when a hunter allegedly mistook him for a deer and shot him in the face and chest. The Bulgarian native was a well-known restaurateur who owned Wimpy’s Diner and the Pine Grove Restaurant in Massena at the time of his death. He was also a well-known womanizer, a fifty-two-year-old single foreigner with a penchant for the ladies. Now the man who once publicly professed his love of the Massena area is buried in a plot to the left of the mausoleum at the rear of the cemetery on a downhill slope. His modest tombstone simply says, Dragon Obretenoff, 1897–1949. Joan and Blake had been wondering about him as they walked past his tombstone, knowing that he had been shot and killed, but unaware of the specifics of the incident. They were discussing various theories when they heard the slow, menacing command to turn around, leading them to wonder whether the voice had anything to do with Dragon or his