Which New York City borough has the strongest reputation for paranormal activity?
According to a paranormal expert who spoke with The Post, Gotham’s “most maligned borough” may also be its most haunted.
Andrea Janes, founder of the independent, women-led tour company Boroughs of the Dead, specializes in exploring New York City’s darkest history through macabre walking tours.
For anyone seriously interested in ghosts and wondering where they are most likely to be found, Janes has a clear answer: Staten Island.
“It’s wall-to-wall ghosts,” she said, pointing to the borough — and home of Pete Davidson — as a place filled with haunted mansions, former asylums, historic forts and eerie open fields.
Much of Staten Island’s supernatural reputation is tied to its long history as a place of isolation during disease outbreaks. Janes said the island functioned, in various forms, as a quarantine colony for centuries.
“If you ask me what the most haunted place in Staten Island is, I would say the entire island,” she told The Post.
Quarantine machine
In 1799, city officials sought to keep deadly illnesses, including yellow fever and smallpox, away from Manhattan’s crowded and heavily trafficked ports.
That decision led to the creation of the New York Marine Hospital, grimly nicknamed “The Quarantine.” The facility operated until 1858, when public fear of infection and mounting local anger erupted into an attack that left the complex burned to the ground.
“Maybe that’s why the island is so haunted,” Janes speculated.
But the destruction of the original quarantine hospital did not end Staten Island’s connection to institutional isolation.
In 1905, a tuberculosis quarantine facility was established near the island’s second-highest point. Sea View Hospital opened on the site in 1913, promising affluent patients the period’s favored treatment: fresh air, sunshine and nourishing meals.
Yet even those carefully prescribed comforts could not prevent many of the patients from dying.
The College of Staten Island
The former hospital grounds are bleak enough, but Janes said Staten Island is home to another site with an even more painful history. It is so disturbing, she told The Post, that she refuses to include it on her haunted tours.
“The College of Staten Island is on the former site of the Willowbrook State School,” Janes said.
“That’s a place I wouldn’t visit with a tour group because it’s too sad.”
Willowbrook opened in 1948 and became the world’s largest institution dedicated to caring for people with developmental disabilities.
Its horrific conditions were exposed in 1972, when Geraldo Rivera’s award-winning investigation, “Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace,” showed children living amid severe overcrowding, filth and neglect. Some residents were also subjected to deeply disturbing medical experiments.
The shocking reality of Willowbrook was later alleged to have influenced the gruesome 2012 series “American Horror Story: Asylum,” starring Sarah Paulson and Jessica Lange.
Willowbrook shut down in 1987, and part of the former institution’s property was redeveloped as the College of Staten Island in 1993.
While most buildings have been converted into classrooms and offices, underground tunnels still connect them, and rumors of hauntings understandably persist.
The Billop Conference House
“There’s some kind of convergence of psychical activity right over Staten Island that I cannot describe,” said Janes, naming the Billop Conference House as one of the oldest sources of unease.
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The house, which dates to the late 17th century, served as a meeting place for peace talks between American colonists and the British in the fall of 1776, but the “conference” that gave the house its name never led to a resolution, and fighting continued.
The house may be most famous for the legend of a servant girl murdered by Christopher Billop, the home’s paranoid, crown-loyal patriarch, along with several other rumors of bloodshed and betrayal.
But none of the connected crimes have been substantiated with historical evidence.
Still, visitors claim to have seen apparitions of a servant girl, along with the marauding forms of British soldiers.
Neighbors also attest to hearing a man singing or shouting and a woman screaming.
Curiously, these apparitions may predate the building itself:
The Conference House grounds include a stretch of land known as Burial Ridge, the largest pre-European Native American burial ground in New York.
Fort Wadsworth
Fort Wadsworth, a 226-acre public park situated on Staten Island’s northeastern coast, holds the record as the longest-serving active military post in U.S. history.
But that illustrious distinction has given rise to strange sensations.
“There’s something weird going on there,” Janes attested.
Visitors to the fort, which was turned into a park in 1994, have reported seeing apparitions of fallen soldiers moving through the walls and even driving old cars.
Visitors have also reported hearing disembodied footsteps, gunshots and cannon blasts.
Then there’s the smell of tobacco smoke that seemingly comes from nowhere — or cooking aromas even though there’s literally no kitchen on site.
Kreisher Mansion
For the most haunted spot in Staten Island, Janes calls out the Kreischer Mansion on Arthur Kill Road.
“It’s very haunted,” she emphasized.
German brick magnate Balthasar Kreischer built the gabled mansion in 1885 for his son, Edward.
But nine years later, Edward was found shot dead behind his father’s brick factory across the street.
Unsure whether Edward’s death was a murder or a suicide, his grieving family members sought the help of spiritualists, holding seances in the home, which some say opened up portals that would have been better left closed.
In 2005, the Kreischer Mansion played host to the grisly mobland killing of Bonanno crime family associate Robert McKelvey.
Along with three other mob members, Young stabbed and strangled McKelvey before dismembering his body and burning his remains in the mansion’s furnace.
The house’s grim history helps explain some of its alleged paranormal activity.
Visitors have claimed to see apparitions in the windows and furniture moving of its own accord — and hear pots and pans clattering in the kitchen, plus a lone, harrowing cry emanating through the home.
Boroughs of the Dead celebrates its 13th anniversary this October. The para-curious can book a tour here and catch Jane on October 27th at the Center for Brooklyn, where she will appear as part of the panel discussion: Haunted Brooklyn: Ghosts, Folklore and the Stories We Tell.
