The Ghostly Tax Clerk of St. Ann's

In the spring of 1860, the old Episcopal church of St. Ann's had long since moved from its original site on Fulton Street at Concord, to nearby Washington Street. It was the oldest Episcopal church in Brooklyn. Its cemetery had remained on the old site and looked just as it had been in the late 18th century, full of looming gravestones and surrounded by a picket fence.

But what was essentially a country road sixty years earlier had now become a bustling thoroughfare full of shops, houses and throngs of people at all hours of the day and night. And none of them much liked walking past St. Ann's graveyard, as it was still called - especially after dark.

So in that year, 1860, the structures that would be known as St. Ann's Buildings were about to replace the lonely country cemetery engulfed by the new city of Brooklyn. But first, the gravestones and the bodies would be moved (presumably to the relatively new Green-Wood Cemetery not far away).

One night in May, as the moving process was in full swing, a few people passing the cemetery one night thought that they saw a "strictly orthodox ghost" standing between six and eight feet tall, wrapped in a white winding sheet. The people on Fulton Street were very frightened though the ghost was "well behaved" and silent and "went about its business - whatever that might be" according to the Eagle. The Eagle reporter thought that the appearance was "probably a ghost warning to the trustees who are about removing the bodies from the burying ground."

Over the next few nights, more and more people gathered to see the ghost. By the time the Eagle picked up the story, "seventy-five awe-stricken beholders" were waiting on Fulton. Among them were Officer Bennett of the Brooklyn police who had been ordered by his superiors to "pay attention to the ghost, and, if he found it at all convenient, to introduce him to the officers of the 1st precinct."

Bennett did find it convenient. He hid in the graveyard and "arrested the spectre" - only to discover that it was no apparition but a City Hall tax clerk named A.W.H. Gill, married and in his late 20s, who lived in nearby Washington Place. He said that "he was having a little fun" and "perambulated the graveyard in the character of a ghost" so as not to disappoint the people who originally thought they had seen one.

He was taken to the station house and "reprimanded" - and earned the nickname "Gill the ghost" for some time afterwards. Gill went on to serve with distinction in the Civil War, and by the early 1870s "[held] a prominent position in the City Government" - and, as far as is known, never "stalked about the lower end of [a] graveyard" again.

Note: I am revamping the sidebars (among other things) and will be putting up links for the "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" series (and probably some other series as well, such as the Victorian Brooklyn true crime stores).

SOURCES

"Two Old Churches: St. Ann's and Sands Street," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 31, 1872, p. 4.

Rice, Charles H., "Brooklyn Twenty Years Ago," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Apr. 2, 1868, p. 4.

[no title], Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 14, 1860, p. 3.

"A Ghost Story," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 11, 1860, p. 3.

1859 Brooklyn City Directory, at the Brooklyn Genealogy Information Page

A.W. H. Gill household, 1860 US Census, Brooklyn Ward 4, Kings, NY; p. 740, #272/372, Series M653, Roll 764.

A.W. Gill household, 1870 US Census, Brooklyn Ward 4, Kings,NY; p. 379, #540/731, Series M593, Roll 947.

Image from NYPL Digital Gallery of a structure Fulton and Concord Streets, which is likely to be St. Ann's Buildings, in the late 19th century.