ROOSEVELT ISLAND APARTMENTS
Location: Roosevelt Island is the island in the East River between Manhattan and Queens in New York City. The island is accessed by cable car running along the Queensboro Bridge from Manhattan and by subway.
Description of Place: Once used a prison, later converted into substandard housing, the existing structures were converted in 1976 into a rent control community district with homes, apartments and a small school for children living on the island. Despite endless renovations, the buildings are in continuous repair due to previous years of neglect. The majority of the apartments are crampt, more ideal for single people living alone than for families. There are three buildings under the Roosevelt Apartment House moniker on the island known as Building A, Building B, and Building C - a layover from back when it was a prison. The layout of the island is eclectic, offering the most favored architectural styles of the area.
Ghostly Manifestations: New York City is full of well-known and obscure haunted locations. Some of them like the Morris-Jumel House pop up on every Internet website dealing with locations of paranormal repute while others such as the Dolphin Hotel successfully slip though the cracks and crevasses of rumor, innuendo and suspicion. Apartment 9-F in Building C on Roosevelt Island is known to the tenants and residents of the building, but largely ignored to the world off the island... until now.
The elevator in the building constantly runs by itself to the empty tenth floor where juvenile delinquents are blamed for constantly flooding Apartment 10-F, but they plead their innocence often as they are wrought to do. Even if one is to take their word for it, 10-F still floods, still irking the tenants down below in 9-F who suffer from the incessant water-damage and pound and curse for their inexperienced maintenance man to fix and control the gushing water from the ceiling and walls. One would think the simple solution would be to simple shut off the water in that accursed apartment - permanently, but there is something else at work. The water in the building acts as if it is possessed.
Of the tenants, Dahlia White of 9-F screamed the loudest to her superintendent, but she has also seen the possible culprit to the daunting mischief. The flooding female is the apparition of a young girl around 8 to 10 years of age . Rarely seen, she rides the elevator as her personal toy, her feet scampering up the stairway between the roof and the tenth floor with unbridled youthful exuberance. Her voice has been heard singing through the elevator shaft, and her visage vanishes around corners hiding from the living. However, it is in 10-F where she is felt the most by the living. In 9-F directly below, Dahlia has heard the sound of a young girl living alone above her, and has experienced damage directly caused by her careless propensity for leaving water running. Her daughter, Cece (short for Cecilia), has felt her too.
The truth of the matter is, that it is a very leaky building, and when it rains, water runs down through the elevator shaft, through walls, down ducts and into the basement. Gurgling noises often come from inside the walls, but then, there is also that element that does not make sense. Faces look out from the inside of washing machines, giggling comes from watery halls and Cece has shared many a bath with her non-corporeal friend. Dahlia instead thinks of the presence as a spoiled child trying to get her attention. When her attention was elsewhere, something would happen to get her attention. A faucet would come on, water would drip from the ceiling and puddles of water shaped like the footsteps of a little person appeared on the otherwise dry carpet.
Of late, another otherworldly tenant has moved into Apartment 9-F. Faucets still come on and pipes still gurgle in the walls, but with the disembodied voices of a singing child are the stern scolding sounds of an older woman correcting a child. It leaves the residents to wonder: could her mother now be around to finally control her?
History: Originally called Blackwell's Island and nick-named Welfare Island, Roosevelt Island was named Minnahanock by the local indigenous Native Americans up until Dutch Captain Johann Manning acquired it in 1666 as farmland. The state later acquired it and built the first permanent structures to use the land as a penal colony and later as a prison. Immigrants that were rejected for entering the United States were also held here before shipping back to their native countries. Actress Mae West served time in Welfare Penitentiary here. It was named after former President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1973. (Contrary records claim it was named after Theodore Roosevelt in 1945).
Through 1921 to 1973, the island was made more attractive to potential residents and visitors. In 1976, Stern-Jackson & Associates renovated and sub-divided the old prison into Roosevelt Apartments, part of the three residential districts on the island. Nick-named "The Little Apple," an allusion to New York City as "The Big Apple," the island is a small nearly self-sufficient community nearly without automobiles on the island, except for some forms used for public transit.
Identity of Ghosts: In life, the girl suspected to be the ghost was ten-year-old Natasha Rimske. She was the daughter of Russian immigrants; her father having traveled to California for work. Her mother apparently grew tired of having to care for a daughter and called him to come get Natasha, and that was reportedly it - until it was discovered that he had never returned to pick up his daughter. Left alone in her apartment, Natasha wandered up one day to play on the roof, climbed on the water tower and apparently fell inside. Her body found inside about a year earlier. Her ghost started appearing almost exactly the month she vanished.
Source/Comments: Dark Water (2005) - Loosely based on the Johnson House in Madison, Indiana (The Johnson House was loosely turned into the 1996 movie "The Uninvited" starring Sharon Lawrence, Beau Bridges and Alex D. Linz.)