Let’s dive into one of the most haunted homes in the village: 14 West 10th Street. AKA: The House of Death.
If you’ve ever wandered down West 10th Street on a crisp October evening, you might have passed it without even noticing. A handsome brownstone, stoically lined up with its neighbors, ivy climbing like gossip up the facade. And yet this particular address, 14 West 10th Street, is better known by its nickname: The House of Death.
It’s the sort of name that sounds like it belongs in a Scooby-Doo episode. But this is New York, where the glamorous and the gruesome are often roommates.
They say more than 20 ghosts reside inside, a proper brownstone boarding house for the dearly departed. The most famous of them? Mark Twain himself. Yes, the great American wit supposedly still roams the halls in his iconic white suit, muttering complaints about life, death, and possibly the plumbing.
The Early Days of 14 West 10th Street
Long before it was a ghost story, the House of Death was a house of ideas. In the 1880s, it became home to the widow and daughters of James Boorman Johnston, one of New York’s great philanthropists.
Johnston was no ordinary Gilded Age gentleman. He helped found the Metropolitan Underground Railroad, shaping how we New Yorkers move through our city. But he was also a cultural visionary: he opened a reading room and library, and most famously, the Tenth Street Studio Building, a collective of artists’ studios and galleries with annual funding for resident painters.
After the Boorman family left 14 West 10th Street, the house seemed to shed its air of refinement and promise. What had once been a brownstone of beauty and culture slowly turned into something else entirely.
How the Haunting Began
It’s difficult to tell when the hauntings of 14 West 10th Street began, but the earliest incident is recorded in 1897, when celebrity cyclist Fred H Andrew hit an eight-year-old boy with his bike, who suffered a broken leg. Andrew was arrested.
By the early 1900s, the house’s reputation had begun to grow. Guests and tenants spoke of whispers and sighs in rooms that were supposedly empty, and objects that shifted when no one was looking. Some claimed to see glimpses of a woman in a flowing gown, gliding silently down the staircase before disappearing into the shadows.
The Ghostly Guest List
Mark Twain: Twain lived here briefly in 1900, and many swear he never left. Dressed in his iconic white suit, he’s been spotted pacing the staircase.
The Lady in White: A pale figure who drifts through parlors and vanishes at will, her entrances and exits as theatrical as any Broadway performer.
The Others: Paranormal investigators count more than 20 spirits within its walls, from shadowy figures on the stairs to phantom cats darting through the halls.
Mark Twain’s Battle of Phantom Rats and Depression
In early 1900, just a few years after Andrew was arrested for reckless bicycling, Mark Twain moved into the House of Death.
Twain battled bankruptcy and depression, racing against deadlines to finish the work we still treasure today.
Though a lifelong skeptic of the supernatural, he documented a strange encounter at 14 West 10th Street: one evening, he noticed a panel of wood moving by itself. Convinced that rats were trying to steal it, he fired a gun at the wood.. only to discover a few drops of blood but no sign of any intruder, human or otherwise. Even for Twain, the experience was disturbing.
Jan Bryant Bartell: The Woman Who Heard It All (and barely lived to tell it)
While writer Jan Bryant Bartell didn’t technically die inside the Greenwich Village House of Death, her detailed writing gives us a firsthand account of living there.
Jan Bryant Bartell was an actress and writer who moved into the top-floor apartment in the late 1950s. From her very first nights, she sensed something uncanny. Footsteps followed her on the stairs, shadows loomed just beyond reach, and every so often, she described a smell like “rotting flesh, sweet and suffocating” that clung to corners before vanishing.
When Jan’s beloved dog died, and then a tenant just 24 hours later, Bartell and her daughter fled Greenwich Village. Unfortunately, the haunting seems to have followed.
Bartell wrote about these experiences in her 1974 memoir, Spindrift: Spray from a Psychic Sea. The book reads like a gothic diary- part confessional, part séance, part fever dream. And in a twist, Bartell died shortly after finishing the manuscript, as though the house had finally claimed her.
Lisa Steinberg Tragedy
The most infamous tragedy in the house’s modern history was the shocking abuse and murder of 6-year-old Lisa Steinberg by her adoptive father, Joel Steinberg, in 1987. The case horrified the city and cemented the “cursed” reputation of the brownstone. Neighbors said afterward that the house seemed to hold onto the grief like smoke in the walls.
Can you visit the House of Death Today?
You can’t go inside 14 West 10th Street; it’s a private residence. BUT you can take a stroll by the famous haunt, or you can catch a glimpse of some of the interiors on this old streeteasy listing.
In the daylight, the house looks like any other charming Village brownstone, the kind of place your Instagram would approve of. But lean a little closer, listen a little harder, and you might catch it: the faint shuffle of invisible tenants, a whisper of Twain grumbling about deadlines, or Jan Bartell scribbling furiously in the corner, recording it all for posterity.
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