The Twenty-seventh Ward Ghost Hunt

Brooklyn, November 1894. The Twenty-seventh Ward, today's Bushwick, still had open ground, with vacant lots running out toward Irving and Knickerbocker Avenues. Later writers place the scene by the cemeteries on the Brooklyn and Queens border. Something, the neighbourhood said, was walking those lots at night.

About a week before the story reached print, five young women saw it. A white, grim apparition. A woman in the scantiest attire, with disheveled hair and bare feet. They ran home and told their brothers.

The next night the five brothers went out with revolvers. Nothing. Then they reached the middle of a large lot. "The white figure suddenly arose from the ground in front of them and waved it's long, lean arms, and uttered a weird cry that chilled their blood." The brothers forgot all about their revolvers. They turned and ran home, in five different directions. The following night about 200 people went looking. They came home disappointed.

Peter Woelfel did not believe a word of it. He went out alone, and at about 1 a.m. he came back terrified. While walking across the lots near Irving and Knickerbocker Avenues, he said, he was confronted by the spectre. It performed the serpentine dance. He stood rooted to the ground, unable to move. Then, with a moaning wail, the ghost dissolved into the air.

Then came the crowd. About 300 gathered, most of them armed to the teeth. Some carried revolvers. Others had rusty old army swords. One man was arrayed in fragments of an ancient suit of armor. Policeman Holliday of the Twentieth Precinct was there too.

Later retellings quote the Times: three or four times there were cries that the ghost was coming. It didn't come. As midnight approached the watchers examined the air closely. Not even a suspicion of a ghost hovered near them. Slowly, they dispersed and went home.

The New York Times covered the affair on 23 November 1894 under the headline "BROOKLYN GHOST? PSHAW." Its tone was openly mocking. It opened with a comparison to London's Cock Lane ghost of 1762 and called the figure a "Hysterical Female Spook." Holliday had his own theory. "I think its the whiskey," he said. "The worst whiskey that's sold on the island and is sold right here in the Twentieth."

No prankster was ever named or caught, and no one claimed a hoax. The encounters ran from five witnesses, to five more, to one. Before crowds of 200 and 300, nothing appeared at all.

The ghost slept in the archive until the Bowery Boys revived it in Halloween posts in 2008, 2011 and 2014. In their telling the 300 became police officers, and the man in armour an officer. Ghost Theory later added a Captain Kitzer, who sent a squad of his men and a patrol wagon to catch the ghost. Neither detail appears in the surviving transcription of the Times article. The full original page may one day settle it.