Walking tour · Manhattan

Ghosts of the Village

2.1 mi walk

Open in Stride Stories

The stories on this route

1. Merchant's House Museum

   Look for the red-brick row house with the white marble doorway and iron railings, at 29 East Fourth Street. It's one of a handful of old houses left on this street. If there's scaffolding, that's an exterior renovation that began in 2025.

2. Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

   Look up at the Brown Building, on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. Not every dark story in the Village is a legend. This one is real.

3. Washington Square

   Look around you: the marble arch, the fountain, the lawns and paths. Much of it sits on a graveyard.

4. Poe House

   Look for the small brick facade with a plaque, tucked into the front of NYU's law school. People say Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Raven here. He didn't. The Raven was published in January 1845, months before he moved in. What he did here was run a magazine, the Broadway Journal, until it failed in 1846.

5. The Hangman's Elm

   Look at the huge elm at the northwest corner of the park: thick trunk, wide crown. Parks says it's more than 300 years old. It's considered the oldest tree in Manhattan.

6. The House of Death

   Look at No. 14, the brownstone with the stoop and the tall parlor-floor windows. Mark Twain moved in here in 1900 and stayed about a year. That's the record. The rest is what people say. The house is nicknamed the House of Death, and is supposedly haunted by twenty-two ghosts.

7. Sixth Avenue and the Halloween Parade

   Look at the red-brick building with the tall clock tower: the Jefferson Market Library. It was built in the 1870s as a courthouse. Harry K. Thaw, the murderer of the architect Stanford White, was arraigned inside.

8. White Horse Tavern

   Look at the corner bar with the neon sign and the sidewalk tables: the White Horse Tavern. It opened in 1880 as a longshoremen's bar. Then, in the early 1950s, the poet Dylan Thomas and other writers started coming in.

9. Chumley's, 86 Bedford Street

   Look for the unmarked door at 86 Bedford Street. In 1922, Leland Stanford Chumley opened a speakeasy behind it, in an old blacksmith's shop. It had trap doors, secret stairs, and a hidden second entrance through a courtyard off Barrow Street.

10. One if by Land, Two if by Sea

    Look at the low brick building at 17 Barrow Street, with the big arched double doors. It's the restaurant One if by Land, Two if by Sea, here since 1973.

Stories researched October 2026 · every fact checked against a source