NEW YORK CITY MUNICIPAL COURTHOUSE
Location: The center of commerce, entertainment and culture for the state if not
the entire East Coast, Manhattan Island is the one location almost everyone is
referring to when they mention New York City. Located at the southeast tip of
New York between the Hudson River and Long Island Sound, it is one of the five
boroughs of New York City including Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten
Island and is crossed by a grid work of streets running the extent of the
island. The New York City Municipal Courthouse, the symbol of jurisprudence for
all of New York City, is located at
Description of Place: The granite-faced courthouse is a four-story front against a seven-story structure. The front is based on a Dorian-style architecture of Ancient Rome rising above a 100-foot wide flight of steps to an imposing colonnade of 10 granite fluted Corinthian columns. Above the columns are the engraved words of George Washington: “The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government.” It houses five courtrooms with a commissary on the top floor outside the criminal courts. The basement is divided into cells and holding rooms above a sub-basement with some old tunnels leading into the city’s subway and sewer systems.
Ghostly Manifestations:
Judge Harry T. Stone’s courtroom on the sixth floor has a bit of notorious
history in the Manhattan Judicial System. Through his courts are processed
somewhere between a hundred to two hundred felons ranging from such mediocre
felons as pick-pockets and hookers to the bizarre, such as the mentally deranged
demanding to be returned to their home planet. Private citizens are a dime a
dozen as they air their grievances to Judge Stone and his over-worked staff. It
is no wonder that the staff acts a little crazy to get through the process of
getting through the in-and-out rut of the court system.
Psychiatrist Dr. Sydney Freeman once noted this same behavior in an
over-worked MASH unit in the Korean War. Among the strange antics of Stone’s
staff trying to keep and preserve their sanity comes a few stories which seem to
echo from another place and time.
“I love that stuff.” Stone mentions with a
boyish grin in his eye. A former magician and entertainer, he has collected
quite a number of stories that have been told on the ghosts of the courthouse.
Some of them date back to 1927 and range from sightings to strange noises. An
avid fan of the music from the Roaring Forties, he has heard the music sometimes
playing in the building, but he admits it’s a bit hard to pinpoint.
“Sometimes I’ll have a tune playing in my head.” He continues. “And from somewhere it might be playing in the building. It may be just a figment of my imagination or just wishful thinking, but my staff has heard it too.”
"Back in 1990, there was a young ghost
hunter who came through my court for leading an unsanctioned ghost hunt in a
derelict townhouse here in Manhattan that was about to be leveled." Stone
recalls. "Perhaps you've heard if him, Will
Collins? We've become buddies since. I even married him off to his wife.
Anyway, back then, he had a crush on my public defender who's now my wife, but we hit it off talking and
were shooting the breeze in my chambers after midnight when the conversation
turned to his work and ghosts and all that, and we started hearing the sounds of
people shuffling around outside my chambers. At first, we just ignored it, it
was probably the night cleaning staff, or something, but then it
started getting a bit more obvious. I opened up my door to see how long whoever
it was was going to be out there and guess what, no one was there." Stone
pauses with a youthful sparkle filling his face. "Well, what do you think
about that?"
Mac Robinson, Stone’s former court clerk,
now a local documentary producer, reluctantly admits to have had a few so-called
hallucinations he has previously not wanted to go on record. A former military
man with experience in Viet Nam, he is a perfectly rational and level-headed
man, but he has mentioned in confidentiality that he has seen a shadowy figure
sometimes sitting in the dark corner of the courtroom. He doesn’t remember
much about him because the room was dark the first time, but as he tried to
approach him, the image vanished.
Long-time building superintendent Art
Fensterman has long known the building was haunted. His father, Walt Fensterman,
was a previous building superintendent and he used to take home stories about
the elevator going up and down all night long unattended or shadows racing to
hide in the building’s boiler room every time someone went down there. In
fact, Art says the ghosts were his reason to work alongside his father when he
first started working in the building in the 1950s.
“Oh, sure,” Art likes to repeat the
stories told to him. “Most of the lawyers and judges here don’t want to talk
about that stuff, but their assistants like to blab on what frightens and
unnerves them. I remember one lawyer; I think her name was Billie Young or
something like that. Several months after starting as Judge Stone’s public
defender, she was alone in the bathroom with a lady she said that didn’t have
any legs. According to her, this figure was standing in front of the mirror
brushing her hair and as Billie looked closer to her, she noticed that she was
floating in the air where her legs were supposed to be. I heard the story from
the other lawyers after she transferred to Queens.
“I myself had seen a few things.” Art
continues as he demonstrates. “I was replacing some fuses to the elevators
controls down here and as I snapped the plate back into place, I just happened
to see the face of someone looking over my shoulder in the reflection. I snapped
the plate in, stood to turn around and no one was there. Great stuff!
“Some of the people who use the stairs have
reported seeing and hearing extra people ahead of them in the stairs.” Art
continues. “One of the judges I hear actually got security to break into his
office because he heard someone prowling around in there. They came down, knock
down the locked door and no one was there. No one even came out of the other
door.”
Judge Stone’s wife, Criminal Court Judge,
Christine Sullivan, his former public defender as well as once a State Assembly
Person, has privately mentioned in rare conversation off the record that she
believes in an afterlife because of her years of working as a public defender in
her husband's courtroom. She has confided with friends about comments that she
once heard an unattended typewriter in the Public Defense offices sometimes
start typing by itself while she was alone. She has heard sounds of people from
empty rooms and noticed shadows quickly guiding down halls when she was by
herself. After joining Judge Stone's Court, she subsequently got her own office
on the Sixth Floor and outside that door was a broom closet that was usually
locked; yet, there were sometimes occasions she felt someone of an otherworldly
nature was inside it. She admits that on more than one occasion as to having
heard moaning noises from that broom closet when she was working after hours as
if, as she describes it, “two people were having extreme sex in there.”
Bailiff Bull Shannon, a tall amiable,
bald-headed figure of a man, has a bit of a friendly childlike attitude toward
the so-called ghosts. He’s seen shadows move through empty halls and figures
vanish on stairways. Sometimes he hears a voice calling him, but when he turns
round, no one is there.
“There’s one ghost I haven’t seen.”
Bull admits. “Every so often, I go up on the roof to be alone on break and
think. It's my place for deep contemplation away from work, and I often look over
the edge of the building from between the stone gargoyles part of the structure
and watch the cars and reflect on my life. Yet, practically every time I come
back down the stairs from the roof, there's suddenly several witnesses describing
one of the gargoyles up there having been moving around up there where I've
been. I’ve never seen a
thing, but every time I go up, someone other than me ends up reporting having seen
the moving gargoyle, and I've yet to see the freaking thing for myself!”
Assistant District Attorney Daniel R. Fielding
doesn’t give any more credence to the countless myriad sightings anymore than
bailiff Roz Russell. Russell has replaced two former court officers: Selma
Hacker and Florence Kleiner. A short time after she first started working in the
courthouse in 1991, she remembers entering the bailiff’s break room and barely
acknowledging two older female bailiffs sitting around the table sharing
stories. She didn’t think about it at the time, but a few months after start
work, she walked past the pictures of deceased employees in the downstairs
cabinet in the foyer and there were the pictures of Hacker and Kleiner. They had
been the ladies she at seen at the table.
Judge Stephen Wexler downstairs on the second
floor has proved his hard sense of justice enough times to earn the nickname,
“The Hammer.” His career was most documented during the eight weeks he
judged the Scoleri case on two brothers who chopped up and hid their victims in
cars they crushed in an auto junkyard located in Queens. Twenty years after both
Antonio and Nuncio Scoleri were electrocuted for murder, Wexler says he has seen
apparitions resembling the murderous brothers lurking around the courtroom where he tried them for
their crimes. Other witnesses have seen them mulling around the courtroom and
sitting in the shadows still waiting for a verdict other than guilty.
Former New York Mayor Leonard “Lenny”
Ramis also replied after retiring that he knew the old courthouse was haunted.
He recalls that in 1984 he saw the spirit of Fiorella LaGuardia wander a bit
confused through his old office. He also adds that he has felt the man’s
spirit several times during his two terms as mayor.
The most oft remembered and referred to
revenant in the building is that of Ray Heston, a public nuisance who until his
heart attack in 1939 created major disturbances and acts of malicious mischief
on parts of New York for most of the 1930s. In death, his stunts have downsized,
but his practical jokes have not. Believed responsible for most of the
poltergeist action in the building, particularly around Stone's courthouse, he has moved chairs and furniture from room
to room unseen, locked doors, rapped on walls, turned on water faucets and
generally proved to everyone he is still around. His most significant behavior
occurred on Halloween of 1989 when psychic Rochelle Blaumberg was being booked
for a minor altercation in a Manhattan restraunt. To impress her, he knocked the
power out in Stone’s courtroom and forced the air conditioning to blow gusts
of wind through the room to reduce the ambient temperature down to twenty
degrees.
“It was a fluke.” Assistant District Attorney Dan Fielding remains a skeptic. “A very cold but explainable fluke.”
History: The New York City Municipal Courthouse was built between 1919 and 1927
by Boston architect Guy Lowell. Lowell had won the bidding for the right to the
construction in 1913 with his design for a round building. The construction was
delayed for a few years as the designs were altered for a more hexagonal form.
The courthouse was the first major New York commission for Lowell. The
completion of the building then precipitated the move from the old courthouse in
the Tweed Building to the spacious new building in 1927.
Identity of Ghosts: Rochelle Blaumberg reportedly claimed that there were as many as twenty-five to thirty ghosts in the old courthouse. Among them is Ray Heston who had a heart attack in Judge Stone’s courtroom while awaiting trial. He had a list of priors involving forty arrests ranging from public mischief to public endangerment to him and others. One of his pranks involved tee-peeing the Brooklyn Bridge amidst foolishness such as crank-calling Fiorello LaGuardia who was mayor at the time. La Guardia himself haunts the structure trying to give advice to his successors. There is also supposed to be the ghosts of Antonio and Nuncio Scoleri who were executed by the electric chair at Ryker’s Island for murder. Others have reported a spectral hooker with white skin lurking in a third floor ladies restroom and a 1920s gangster-type moll in a pin-striped suit. Reportedly, Guy Lowell, who some insist was entombed in the south portico, wanders the basement investigating the stability of the place.
Dawn Rochner, another psychic and sensitive medium oft times employed by the Collinsport Ghost Society, adds that there could be many more spirits than that, possibly as many as 200 to 250.
"I think the courthouse was built on top
of what was once an old graveyard, possibly Mennonite." She adds. "The
basement is also connected to very old tunnels to former structures. Human
remains were found floating down there washed up from other places in the city.
It's a public building, both for the living and the spirits of the dead."
Source/Comments: Night Court, Episode: “Come Back to the Five And Dime, Stephen King, Stephen King” and the movie “Ghostbusters” (1989) - Architecture and History based on the New York City Municipal Courthouse. Hauntings based on the Denver Courthouse in Denver, Colorado, the State Capitol Building in Albany, New York and the State Capitol Building in Nashville, Tennessee.
Dr. Sydney Freeman from the TV Series, M*A*S*H* (1972-1983)