Only The Dead Know Brooklyn, Part One: The Ghost of Union Street

It was a hot night in August 1890 when police officer Thomas McGrath had "an exciting experience with a ghost" in the streets of South Brooklyn. South Brooklyn was a working-class area with "a mixed population [of] Irish, Italians, Germans and Swedes [who] fill the brick tenement houses and run the stores."

There were few people out at 3 am: two men loading up a wagon in front of a livery stable, and the livery watchman smoking his pipe nearby were the only others awake. McGrath said that he saw a girl of about eighteen, dressed in a white Mother Hubbard gown (a long, loose dress resembling a nightgown) and a white Nelly Bly hat (probably a little hat such as the one worn by intrepid news reporter Nelly Bly, who is shown here).



She was drifting around the intersection of Union and Columbia Streets (see image above right), and McGrath tried to approach and help her:

We approached to within ten feet of each other and were coming still closer together when the woman completely disappeared. I was going toward her. I had my eye on her and there was nothing between us and the electric light was shining full on her when she disappeared. The woman was young. I saw her face plainly. She was very pretty...She moved very slowly and her footsteps made no sound, neither did her dress wave about as a woman's dress does when she iust walking. I tell you when I saw that I trembled like a leaf for I knew I had seen a ghost.

He added that he didn't want people to laugh at him and that he wasn't the only one to see the woman in white. After she disappeared, he went up and down Columbia Street trying the doors; there was one that was open. He fetched the watchman (who had a lantern) and McGrath explored the dark house with the open door - cellar, coal box and all. The watchman decided to wait outside. He said he saw the same woman come out of 84 Union Street earlier in the evening. Then he added that "now that he came to think of it, this must be the ghost of an Italian bride who was murdered on her wedding night in that house about seven years ago."

Mr. Fogarty of the Police Gazette, who lived at Columbia and President, told McGrath that he had seen her too, and that he was even more frightened than McGrath, who "was pretty badly scared."

I decided to check out the watchman's story about the murder at 84 Union Street - seven years before would make it about 1883. I didn't find anything to corroborate the watchman's story, but an 1886 Eagle article stated that there were at least six haunted houses in South Brooklyn. It also noted that there were a lot of supernatural events and ghosts in Brooklyn due to its "cemeterial environment." There were many cemeteries here and in Queens, many established during the 19th century as the original burial grounds in Manhattan became full and closed to new burials.

The follow-up story of the Union Street woman in white says that poor Patrolman McGrath was made fun of pretty well "by such citizens that did not stand in fear of his club." But several other witnesses did come to his defense. The Eagle noted that "She begins operations precisely at midnight and apparently does not go off duty till daylight." A crowd of 500 people waited to see her on at least one occasion, but she was nowhere to be seen - too crowded a venue, no doubt.

More Brooklyn ghost stories to come this fall, under the aegis of the title Only The Dead Know Brooklyn (after the Thomas Wolfe story).

SOURCES

"Many Ghosts," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Jan. 31, 1886, p. 15.
"All In White," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 12, 1890, p. 6.
"Many Saw Her," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 14, 1890, p. 2.

Images from NYPL Digital Gallery.