Description of Place: In its heyday, the Old Davidson House was a sprawling stone and brick structure in an affluent residential neighborhood that included actors and captains of industry. Built like a medieval castle, the interior included a huge foyer and vast staircase with high ceilings, long corridors and ten palatial bedrooms over-looking a small garden area in back, but over the years, it quickly degenerated into a decrepit ruin that the local kids used to call a haunted house.

Ghostly Manifestations: The quintessential haunted house to the general public is a tall Gothic Victorian structure on a lonely street with a gated property filled with weeds and dead trees. They're often old and abandoned, but the interior is often intact enough to attract visitors and witnesses. Such houses do exist on desolate forgotten patches of real estate, but eventually, like the Davidson House, they are knocked down in the name of progress and lost to the ages.

"Back in those days, there used to be a large field behind all those grand houses." Retiree Johnny Downs walks down what is left of Third Street along what was once rows of the most expensive homes in Greenpoint but what  is now lines of restaurants and businesses against a lower housing development. I used to play ball back there..." He points beyond a local McDonalds in front of a storage business. "...And in the hill there was this cave left over from when the city used to dig the underground water works, but Scooter, Farina, Joe and I along with several other kids turned it into an underground clubhouse. I think we called it, "Captain Kidd's Hide-Out" or something like that. We were really into pirates back then Not to mention cowboys and Indians..."

"Anyway," Downs adds. "We'd been playing ball in the field that day when it got rained out and we ran for cover for the cave. Now, I guess the wet ground or something collapsed it, because we had a cave in, but instead of freaking out, Farina started following the cave deeper than we'd ever gone before and we ended up under the Davidson House, whittling our way through a wall and ending up in the house. Looking back now, it seems like kind of a surreal experience, myself and around six other kids, inside the large deserted house listening to the rain pelting the exterior of the house. Now, I gotta tell you, being a little kid and having free range of a large house like that, that was like a gift from God. First thing you're thinking of is of lost treasure and sliding down the staircase... and assorted mischief.

"After a while, your juvenile imagination starts falling prey to other ideas, like ghosts and spirits, and you start hearing things. You imagine the floors creaking, voices from the empty rooms and..." Downs looks around nervously as if he's reliving his experiences. "...the sensation of being watched. Joe says, "I think this place might be haunted." and before you know it white shapes are flying down from the ceiling after us, and eyes are looking back from pictures and shadows are running out of the darkness trying to grab us. Eventually, we realized getting a little bit wet is a small sacrifice to this experience, and we're high-tailing up the street to our neighborhood." 

Downs' experience might be responsible for coloring the stories and experiences of every other kid who ever went past that house. Allen "Farina" Hoskins was a long term Greenpoint resident up to his death in 1980. Following a short stint in the Army, he owned and ran the local Laundromat, and his walk too and from work during the Forties and Fifties took him past the Davidson House every day of his life. According to Downs, Farina was superstitious enough of that house that he crossed the street as he got close to it and then cross back again when he was well clear of it. In the waning years of his life, he told neighborhood kids that he saw faces staring out from the windows of the house and heard screams of laughter from inside of it. 

"Farina loved telling stories..." Downs recalled. "He was always telling us that something in that house was trying to get him, but we knew otherwise. We knew he was so scared of that house that he'd never get that close to it, but we listened to him anyway, even if he was full of it."

From 1928 to 1937, local police officer Edward Kennedy was constantly chasing the kids out of the house. He had the location locked and boarded up and sealed up, but Downs and his band of rascals somehow managed to keep getting back inside the place. One of those miscreants was Richard Michael Daniels, "Mickey" to his friends, but as an adult, he was truant officer Michael Daniels and later Police Lt. Mike Daniels. His wife was Mary Daniels, a school teacher at Green Street Grammar School (now Greenpoint Grammar School). Mickey also believed there was something sinister about that house, and for some reason, Edward Kennedy, who later became his supervisor, always frustrated Mickey with searching the house whenever there was reports of bootlegging in the area.

As former actress Jean Darling recalls: "The house was creepy enough during the day, but it was worse at night with that pitched roof reaching up into the sky, but then when you're a kid, everything looks so much bigger and spookier. Once you're an adult those, there was something about that house that stirred up all those childhood feelings. Even the older adults learned to treat that house with respect. I'm not aware of any stories, personally, but I do know it was reputed to be haunted."

Darling later recommended the CGS to track down Robert Hutchins, a friend from her youth who worked as a contractor in the area after the war. Hutchins was hired by many of the families along Third Street (or as she called it, "Money Avenue"), during the Forties and the Fifties. (She took her last name, "Darling," as her screen name from one of those families.) She believed he might be privy to many of the stories that went on along that street.

"I not only knew the house was haunted, I saw the inside of it." Hutchins recalls. "In the Fall of 1948, Mayor Richard Moore,  was recommended by Matt Beard, a very good friend of mine, about getting an estimate to have the old Davidson house restored. I don't know what their plans were for it, but in those days, you didn't say to a job, so we got the keys to the place from Roach Realty and I showed up with my pad, a pencil and a camera to to document the deterioration.

"Now, bear in mind, I had not seen that house since Old Chubby Chaney dared my step-brother Jack to go in that house and stick his head out the upstairs window. Entering it was like walking into the past. High ceilings, semi-bare rooms, furniture covered in white sheets, trash and debris from itinerants living inside, that eerie echo effect as you walked through, and Mattie and I walking through that house talking about the good old days. It had an all wood interior except for the plaster walls. Anyway, this was in the Fall and darkness was dropping fast and we were very quickly finding ourselves in this pitch black house without flashlights. We found these candles and were working our way nervously upstairs on these rickety loose steps when we heard a door open and close upstairs. We looked at each other in the darkness and we're wondering, "Who the heck is in this house?" We called out, "Who's there?" but we didn't get an answer.   

"Pushing forward, we're thinking we're just about to run into an old vagrant or something or even worse, maybe some thug hiding a still in the basement, but no nothing there, and it's getting darker and I'm seeing less and less and I decided to come back in the morning when there's more light, but as soon as I say that, whatever we had heard earlier is now downstairs and coming up to meet us. There were other voices, and it's laughing and whatever it is is pounding every step we had so nervously treaded over earlier and it's getting closer and next thing I know, Matt and I are rushing down the back stairs, I'm on top of him practically riding on his shoulders and jumping in his convertible and taking off. As I'm looking in the side mirror as we sped off, I'm seeing a curtain on the top floor falling closed again, so whatever it was, didn't want us in that house."

Although it can't be confirmed, it is believed that film director George McFarland based his 1953 haunted house classic, "The Gas House Kids," on his youth living in the shadow of the Old Davidson House. Actress Darla Jean Hood definitely thought so and so did the late country crooner, Carl Switzer, who all grew up in the middle class neighborhood of Greenpoint between McGowan and Currier Avenues. 

"George was a born entertainer." Eugene McFarland and his sister, Patsy Mae, are surviving siblings of George who passed away in 1993. "But he also knew a good story. When I was a kid, I recall him rushing home screaming that he'd been inside the house with Froggy and Buckwheat (childhood names of Billy McLaughlin and William Thomas), and some shaggy monster had tried dragging their buddy, Mickey (Gubitsosi), into the cellar. Well, Patsy and I started laughing our heads off thinking he's being funny and pop was trying to warn him about telling stories, but George's adamant and trying to get pop back to the house to save Mickey's life. Pop wouldn't go. His logic was that there wasn't anything in that creepy old house that could hurt anybody, but a few days later we heard that a chimp had escaped its trainer near the house and had turned up near the Tenement District so maybe that's what scared them..."

History: Built in the 1870s during the big housing boom in Greenpoint, the Davidson House once rested in an affluent neighborhood that included the likes of the Newmans, the Moores, the Albrights, the Darlings and the McAllisters. Census records identify the original owner of the house as Richard Davidson, M.D., a child psychologist, who died childless. His sister, Xenia "Zeffie" Tilbury, was married to Silent Film director Horatio Tilbury and lived until 1945, but she never lived there. Instead, her lawyers rented the house out to potential owners during the Twenties. On May 3, 1925, engineer W.R. Jones purchased the house to turn into a private amusement park attraction but was barred from doing so by the local zoning laws. Another tenant was George P. French (aka Professor Conrad A. Fleece), a phony spiritualist who bilked many gullible old widows out of their fortunes from 1925 to 1927 with fake séances and conjured spirits. In the winter of 1929, Richard's eccentric brother, Maxwell Davidson, a failed inventor, moved into the house as an illegal tenant until he was finally committed.

The house was almost completely deserted through the Thirties and the Forties. In June 1951, it was demolished by Bond Construction just as plans to use the house in a movie were underway. Recommended by actress Darla Hood, director Peter Vincent moved his film, "Dark Shadows," instead to the Old Laughingwell Mansion in Beverly Hills, which later became the home of Sixties actress Jennifer Farrell.

Identity of Ghosts: Unknown. There are very few records for the house, and even fewer photographs. It is possible the stories about the house were perpetuated based on its reputation; there are no confirmed stories on the location to base an investigation.

Source/Comments: Our Gang (Shorts: "Shivering Spooks"/"Moan And Groan, Inc"/"Don't Lie") - Activity loosely based on the shorts and the Heriot Tarbot House in Georgetown, South Carolina.

• W.R. Jones from "Our Gang" (Short: "Shootin' Injuns")
• Peter Vincent from the movie, Fright Night (1985)
• Jennifer Farrell from the TV-Series, "Jennifer Slept Here" (1983-1984)