Only the Dead Know Brooklyn: A Haunted Woman

-And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?

-I think he died for me, she answered.

--James Joyce, "The Dead" (1914)

The dead know Queens, too.

And one ghost - although an immigrant to America - knew its neighborhoods and its cemeteries well. Too well for one Irish woman and her family, who lived in the village of Maspeth, Queens.

Nellie Alcock McCormick had a secret, a secret that kept her and her husband Tim moving from one neighborhood to another. And in the summer of 1884 the thing she dreaded most was beginning to happen again, this time near their house in Maspeth.

The girls who worked for pea farmer W.H. Ring heard the ghost one afternoon in late July. The farm was quite close to Mount Olivet Cemetery, and the cries that the girls heard came from the direction of the cemetery. They heard someone calling out "O ho!" again and again, and it frightened them. They all stopped picking peas and went down to Mount Olivet, stopping by a little lake. There they heard the sound again, this time louder.

Everyone was terrified. They ran to tell Farmer Ring. He listened, and suggested that they get on with the pea-picking. The girls promptly quit and ran home.

Mr. Ring considered this and then went down to talk with Town Constable Henry Bosch. Bosch nodded. He had heard about this, too. He had neighbors who had heard the "O ho!" emanating from a tall, thin man. Ring and Bosch and some other people went off to search in the woods for the man. Near Mount Olivet, they heard it again, only now the sound seemed to be coming from the Lutheran Cemetery.

Mount Olivet and the Lutheran are quite near one another, as you can see on this map. Mount Olivet is the green section in the middle and the Lutheran is directly below it.

At the cemetery gates one man said he was sure it was a ghost and he wasn't going in. It was nearly dark, the others agreed and they all went to Bosch's house. More neighbors gathered there; several had indeed seen the ghost. They said he traveled between Mount Olivet and Lutheran, and several said that he carried a large carving knife, too.

About fifty of the men, armed with shotguns, decided to make a second attempt at "capturing" the ghost (having made what sound like rather vague plans). At that moment, a woman burst in, calling for her husband Tim to come home - the ghost was in their house. Then she fainted.

Later, the woman - Nellie McCormick - told this story:

You see, before I married Tim in the ould country, I was Miss Nellie Alcock. I was keeping company with Mike Kelly, of Templemore, an' we were engaged to be married, an' we would have been, too, only Tim came along an' says, 'Nell, I'm going to America, will you come wid me?' 'Indeed, I will,' says I, an' we got married. The week after I was married, poor Mike committed suicide; an' from that day until this, his ghost has haunted me. If you remember about three months ago, we lived up by Calvary Cemetery, an' we heard Mike. We moved out here, thinking, of course, that he wouldn't find us, but the poor fellow follows me up. I've had masses said for the pace of his poor soul, but it doesn't do me any good. He still follows me. If he keeps on, he'll drive me out o' my mind.

I wonder why Nellie thought that a ghost would not be able to travel as easily as the living in Queens - and as always with the stories of people long ago, I wonder what happened to them. In this case, as with most stories concerning ordinary people, there was no follow-up.

Her story reminded me a little of "The Dead" by James Joyce - the last story in Dubliners (1914). In it, a woman reveals to her husband, after a family party, the story of the boy who loved her in her youth, and who died partly of consumption, but mostly of grief, when she was sent off to a convent school in Dublin.

The McCormick story was reported with comic flair in the paper (complete with digs at the Irish and German working-class residents of Maspeth). I think that Joyce would have told it quite differently.

A mysterious sidenote: I was not able to find any of the people named in this story - including two female witnesses, Ring, Bosch and the McCormicks - in Queens in either the 1880 or the 1900 census. Not one of them seems to be there - or, perhaps, they are hiding behind mispellings and some census taker's inscrutable handwriting.

SOURCES

"A Haunted Woman," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Jul. 27, 1884, p. 1.
"A Monosyllabic Ghost," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Jul. 28, 1884, p. 2.

Image of Lutheran Cemetery, Middle Village, Queens, from NYPL Digital Gallery.

For more of the Only the Dead Know Brooklyn series:

The Ghost of Union Street

The Ghost of Gil-Martin's Castle

The Ghosts' Boarding House