Tenth Street's Houses of Death

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
​In 1856 a huge mansion was built at 14 W. 10th Street, off Fifth Avenue in an area now known as Washington Square Park. In 1957, Jan Bryant Bartell moved into the house adjacent to the 100-year-old brownstone, and it was not long before she realized she was never alone within those walls. She eventually wrote a book about her experiences titled, Spindrift: Spray from a Psychic Sea which detailed her experiences in both homes that shared a wall.

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Jan Bryant Bartell (1921-1973)

​Jannis "Jan" Bryant Bartell didn't always live at 14 W. 10th Street. In October, 1957 she came to see the property at 16 W. 10th Street in Greenwich Village known for its bohemian residents. On the corner from the house was the Church of the Ascension with a mural painted by John La Farge.

​The real estate agent led them through a cluttered and dirty apartment, and she was told the owner had used the townhouse to store forgotten and broken antiques for the past 17 years. The space once housed the servants, and was reached after ascending four flights of narrow stairs. 
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She had qualms about renting it, but was entranced with the architecture and history of the place. On the first night she spent there she had the first experience that caused her to scream and brought her husband Fred running. She described it this way:

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Moonlight meandered through the uncurtained windows, blanching the wall I faced. One moment, it was a bright, white blank. The next it was filled with a monstrous moving shadow that loomed up from behind me. It smothered me in a sinister, soundless void. Blacker than the night, it engulfed me. I could feel myself dissolving in it, slowly disappearing.

Mark Twain c.1908, supposedly ghostly activity at the house on 10th Street drove his wife out of the property

Her husband thought it was a product of imagination and tiredness, where she mistook a shadow caused by the trees. But Jan noticed that the trees only reached the third floor.

​She next experienced the sound of someone coming stealthily up the stairway. They shared the floor with another tenant, who was very loud when leaving or arriving so she knew it wasn't them. Another thing was the sound of subtle movement in parts of the apartment, which was not significant but even her dog Penny reacted to it.

Early one morning an hour before dawn her dog's growl awoke her. She heard the sound of a shuffling, stumbling gait come down the hallway and stop at the threshold of her room. She thought it was her husband but it turned out he was asleep.

Once a deliveryman asked if her place was haunted. When she asked why he wanted to know he said, "Because, lady, somebody followed me up the staircase!" On his descent down the stairs he screeched over his shoulder, "Lady, I wouldn't live here if they gave me the whole house!"

She tried to find another place to move to, however in 1957 there was a shortage of rental properties in New York. Once she found a brownstone floor-through in Chelsea, which in wariness made her ask the landlord if it was haunted. His response made her leave in a hurry. He said, "Sure—most old houses have one or two. We found a body up on the top floor six years ago when we put in a new ceiling. We traced old city records and discovered a woman had disappeared from this house in the 1880s. Apparently, a murder victim. You learn to live with it."

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16 W. 10th St. NY, Known as the Peterson House after its first occupant, Henry L. Peterson, an iron merchant, this is where Jan Bartell moved in 1957

Another time Mary a friend came over for dinner, and while they ate the loud crashing of plates came from the next room. When they ran there, everything was intact. That same night her friend didn't realize she had left the room, but looked startled when she saw her come back from the bedroom. The woman said, "there was a sound—like a rustling. I felt someone come up behind me—and stand there, right behind me. I thought it was you. And then you—you came in from a different direction." 

The activity would die down and escalate. Once her cleaning woman named DeeDee saw a woman in white go into a small room of the apartment. This is where Jan Bartell kept a recamier and slept most of the time. DeeDee never returned after that day. Jan went through different cleaning ladies, who she observed seemed to "suffer from mysterious ailments" and would stop coming after one or two visits.

What did return was a strange smell she had noticed the first night she slept in the apartment. Now her husband Fred, who was a skeptic smelled it as well. They couldn't track where the sickly sweet odor came from, but the small room with an arch entry where her mini-grand piano stood was where it smelled the strongest.

Another time while she was rehearsing lines for the play Bell, Book and Candle (which is about witches), she heard was she thought was the click-click of Penny's nail. Her pet had died a few months before. She ran to the hall, when she saw something gray "like a puff of smoke—streak past".  She felt the stir of air and a furry tickle over her foot. She realized instantly this could not be her pet, and that instead it was a rat. 

An exterminator didn't find the rat or any trace of rodents in the apartment. She never practiced the incantations of Bell, Book and Candle in the apartment again.

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John La Farge, self portrait c.1859

By then she was convinced the building was haunted, and spoke to different shopkeepers in the area. She learned the Tenth Street Studios located close by had been torn down in 1956, but it had a reputation for being haunted. One of the supposed ghosts was John La Farge (1835-1910).

A shopkeeper told her, "Well, he used to wear a black frock coat and a stovepipe hat, like Lincoln. And for a long time after he died, some of the other tenants, who knew him, claimed they saw him regularly—just popping in and out of the walls of the building. What's more, the claims kept up till they tore the place down."

La Farge had rented space at studio 22 at the Tenth Street Studio Building when it opened in 1858. Artist Feodor Rimsky and his wife moved there in 1941. One night in 1944 they returned from the opera, and were startled to find the front door unlocked and a light on inside. Rimsky pushed heavy drapes aside and saw a man standing in the library. He was dressed in formal clothes from decades earlier. The apparition suddenly vanished. 

Rimsky told the previous owner of the studio about his encounter, and he positively identified La Farge when shown his picture.

Another time Mrs. Rimsky saw the apparition wearing a black hat and a velvet coat in the studio. She described where it was "possessed of a face so cadaverous and death-mask-like".  He disappeared when she screamed.

During a dinner party, a guest at the Rimsky's named William Weber suddenly stopped talking while turning pale. He asked his wife and two friends if they could see what he saw. They didn't, and kidded with him about it, until he described the apparition which fit La Farge exactly.

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Tenth Street Studio c.1930s

​In 1925, John Alan Maxwell moved into the Tenth Street Studio Building in the studio Kahlil Gibran once occupied. One night in 1948, Maxwell woke up from a nap on the couch to feel a presence by him. He saw a woman bending over him while she straightened the sheet. Behind her was a man. Both were dressed in a fashion from an earlier period. Neither appeared to notice him. Despite their odd appearance he thought they were intruders, and he tried to punch the man who promptly disappeared. A search of the studio confirmed it was empty and the door was locked. This is when he realized he was visited by La Farge and his wife.

In 1964, when Jan Bryant Bartell returned to the 10th Street area, she would go on to occupy the home where James Boorman Johnston's widow and daughters moved after his death in the 1880s. He was responsible for building the Tenth Street Studio.

However before this occurred Jan Bartell continued to live at No. 16, where eventually she was able to secure another cleaning woman named Jake, who upon her first visit to the apartment smelled the strange odor that had wafted through the rooms on and off. She said it was a funny odor that reminded her of something dead. She tried to locate the source, but like the Bartells was not able to find it.

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14 West 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, was built in 1854-55 in the Angle-Italiante style.

One day she heard the cleaning woman talking in a low voice. When Jan asked if she was talking to herself, the woman responded she was talking to a gray cat that had just "scooted" by her into the bathroom. Was this the furry thing she mistook for a rat when it ran over her foot?

By then Jan Bryant Bartell tallied they had one ghost that smelled like death, one that smelled fragrant and rustled while it walked and a gray cat.

In 1963, she saw Hans Holzer on a TV show and wrote a letter to him. Among the description of her experiences, she told Holzer in her letter that "I became very ill the first week we moved in here, and I have been ill on and off more than I have ever been in my life since we came to this apartment. I have almost never quite been well in this place."

He came twice, the second time with Ethel Johnson Meyers, a medium. At the séance was the Bartells, one of Jan's friends who she referred to as Rocky, but Hans Holzer named him as Mr. Rockefeller, along with Hans Holzer, his wife and the medium.

Johnson Meyers described where she sensed a feeling of a jealous woman in what was known as the "small room" where Jan Bartell slept. The rotting odor wafted through the room where they were gathered, and the medium said there was something dead under the floorboards. She said it was an aborted child and there was a young girl with curly blond hair and blue eyes tied to this event.

An entity channeled by the medium said there was a small gray cat. Then a girl came through who called herself Reenie Mallison, then clarified her name was Mrs. John J. Mallison, later though she said her husband's name was Henry McDermott. Ultimately the medium said the girl was a servant named Irene Mallison who said she was born March 16, 1848. At the end of the séance Jan Bartell had an impression that the correct name was McDevitt and not McDermott. Three years would pass before she found the connection to the name McDevitt or a variation of it.

It's not clear if Reenie miscarried or aborted her first child, but did go on to marry the father of the infant, despite her own father's disapproval. Her husband was killed during the Civil War, and she died in childbirth along with the second baby.

Jan Bartell described where Holzer just shooed the ghost away telling it to leave. The medium still in trance, replied loudly, "Never! I will never leave here! They will have to go. This is my home. I will never leave!"

At the conclusion of the séance Jan Bartell felt there was a large credibility gap as to how accurate Johnson Meyers was.

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The cover of "Spindrift: Spray from a Psychic Sea" c.1974

In 1964, the Bartells were finally driven from the property, and they found another brownstone to move into. However on the last night she slept at the property she saw a "blob of black, at first, pooling in the doorway; then taking shape, growing taller and wider. I got the impression of a man in a voluminous dark cape with a wide-brimmed hat of the same somber hue... It began to move, or rather float, so quickly there was no time or emotion, not even fear. Within a fraction of a second it had advanced, drifted over my head and with an abrupt turn to the left, vanished through the single low, wide window."

She felt sure this was the same shadow she had seen the first night at the apartment, only now she knew it was a man.

Hans Holzer included the séance in his book Ghosts I've Met, where according to Bartell he used information given to him in confidence. She claimed Holzer was never authorized  to use the visit to the apartment in the book.

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Jan Bryant Bartell c.1965

In 1967, after moving to different apartments the Bartells returned to 10th Street, this time to No. 14 where Mark Twain had once lived in 1900. In 1937, the house was converted from a single family dwelling to 10 apartments, and again they were on the on the fourth floor which shared a wall with the apartment where they once lived from 1957 to 1964.

In 1938, David O. Selznick arranged for a plaque in memory of Mark Twin to be dedicated outside No. 14. His production of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was premiering at Radio City Music Hall.

They noticed a pattern within a few months of moving there that out of the ten families in the house, three all in the east wing had been visited by death.

Then a widow of one of the men who had died, committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Another neighbor in the house was mugged in the vestibule of the house, and later died from his injuries. Then this man's wife was not seen for several days. She was found dead, but the death certificate listed acute alcoholism. Another neighbor was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

In four years six people in the east wing of the house had died and one was dying.

They lived in the west wing, and were looking for a new place to move to, believing the house was cursed. Suddenly her husband Fred suffered a burst appendix and developed peritonitis and pneumonia. Her husband survived but the sick neighbor succumbed.

One day she went looking for the superintendent who she thought lived in the basement. He was not there. She found him in the building and he told her he had moved out after he saw boots that walked up and down the basement stairs, and then disappeared right through the wall.

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Mark Twain plaque at 14 W. 10th St., NY was dedicated by David O. Selznick

The Bartells eventually moved out to a house in the suburbs. Two weeks after leaving the "Mark Twain house" she got a call from the real estate agent who managed the property. He told her she was right about the house being cursed. He described where Mrs. McVitty the landlady was dead. It happened right after he accompanied her along with the superintendent to the Bartell's empty apartment to see about painting it, when she complained about feeling ill. They got her back to her house across the street where she dropped dead.

A few weeks later she got a call from the listing agent again who told her Mr. McVitty, the landlady's husband had died in the basement of the Mark Twain house. He apologized for laughing at her before when she first told him the house was cursed. He had decided to stop working with the property.

Jan Bartell wondered if the surname of McVitty, not McDevitt was the correct surname that came up in the séance with Holzer.

At this point is when Jan Bryant Bartell decided to write a book about her experiences. She went to the Mark Twain house to speak to the superintendent, who told her he had been working there for over 30 years. She asked him if he had ever seen anything else besides the boots. He said he sometimes saw shadows upstairs in the halls.

He then told her stories that the previous super had related to him. It had to do with Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, who had been seen twice back in the 1930s on the ground floor.

The superintendent described where, "A mother and daughter, and a young widder woman was sharing the apartment. The mother, she comes into the livin' room one evenin' before the lamps is lit an' she sees an old man with white hair, wild like. He sittin' in a chair lookin' out the window and she say: 'Who are you—what you want here?' An' he say: 'My name Clemens an' I has problems here I gotta settle.'"

The same family saw him a second time in the back bedroom. The family moved out, and he confirmed this was the apartment in the east wing where the first suicide occurred. In four and one half years nine people living in it or closely associated with the property were dead. 

There was an editor's postscript at the end of the book that reads: "Jan Bryant Bartell finished the writing of Spindrift in March of 1973. After delays in the typing—as one typist after another fell ill—she delivered the completed manuscript to the publisher on May 14. With elation, she looked forward to moving back to her beloved Greenwich Village—however far from Tenth Street. On June 18, Jan died alone at her home in New Rochelle. The coroner's report listed the cause of death as a heart attack."

It was surmised that Jan who was neurotic and suffered from depression committed suicide in the bathroom on June 18, 1973, however this has never been confirmed.

Her death was the tenth person who had lived at 14 W. 10th Street.

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Nussbaum and Steinberg while under arrest c.1987

Throughout the years it's been reported that 22 deaths took place of people connected to this property. 

One of the most recent and notorious took place in 1987 at No. 14.
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Joel Steinberg a disbarred attorney and his girlfriend Hedda Nussbaum, who worked at Random House as an editor of children's books, presented a façade of a successful, professional couple. They told neighbors they adopted two children, Lisa, 6 and Mitchell, 18 months (their respective ages in 1987).

Steinberg beat Lisa after freebasing cocaine and left her unconscious in the bathroom. He went to meet friends and Nussbaum didn't help the girl because she was afraid of Steinberg, or so she claimed during the trial.

When he returned, he freebased more cocaine with Nussbaum until 4 a.m. The girl was still unconscious and help was not called until 6:30 a.m.

Authorities found the second floor apartment in disarray. Nussbaum's face was bruised, and Mitchell wore a urine-soaked diaper and was covered in dirt. He was tied to a playpen by a length of rope around his waist. Lisa died three days later, when she fell into a coma.

Prior to this, residents of the building had reported on suspicions that Nussbaum and Lisa were being abused.

Steinberg was convicted of first-degree manslaughter, and was released in 2004 after serving 16 years in prison. It turned out he had never legally adopted either child. Later interviews of him after his release report that he expressed no remorse over Lisa's death.

The charges against Nussbaum were dropped, since she was presented as a victim of domestic abuse. Critics suggested she was a consensual partner in a sado-masochistic relationship, and an unprosecuted conspirator in her daughter's death.

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Death of Robert Johnson (Johnston) Jr resident of 16 W. 10th St in an explosion c.1931

No. 16 adjacent to No. 14 had its own weird history.

In 2012,  Dennis a tenant at No. 16 who had lived there for 30 years at an apartment downstairs from where the Bartells lived, believes the stories described in Spindrift are true. He said he had seen "little clips and vision of women in long gowns going from room to room." 

One night he was photographing a dancer who told him she had seen a lady in a "long flowing gown, followed by a cat, walking into the room."  She was not the first woman to describe a similar sighting.

​But what is the identity of the ghosts at No. 16 where Jan Bryant Bartell lived for seven years? It could be a cast of dozens.

In 1878 No. 16 West Tenth Street was occupied by James Franklin Doughty Lanier of the firm of Winslow, Lanier & Co., Bankers on Nassau Street. In 1879, one of his customers was involved in a robbery grift operation involving the Metropolitan Hotel. Lanier died the following year, then 1896 his widow who still lived at No. 16 received a very strange letter. It was signed by R. Wilson 127 Bowery "notifying her that many residences of the rich, including hers, were to be blown up with dynamite by men who were made desperate by idleness and poverty, and advising her that she could secure additional information at the place named before 2 o'clock yesterday afternoon." She told her son-in-law Miles Standish. A guard was posted outside the house.

The police visited 127 Bowery which was a lodging house known as The Owl and found Wilson whose real name was Edward Meserve. He claimed he had sent the letter as a warning based on a conversation he overheard from two men, while he visited on the Union Hotel at Hester Street and the Bowery. They were planning to bomb other homes of the wealthy.

Despite his claims his motives were friendly, he was arrested, but then discharged.

In 1903, Mrs. Lanier died at her home, age 82, from pneumonia.

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Lillian Nordica photographed in Berlin with her beloved black Standard Poodle, Turk. Turk traveled with her throughout the USA and Europe. c.1894

In 1904, John G. Milburn, president of the New York State Bar Association bought the property from the Lanier estate. Strangely though after claiming he would be living there, he decided to lease it out.

By 1906, the Milburns had returned to the house. It turned out their house in Buffalo was where President McKinley died in 1901 after being assassinated.

However their stay did not last long and by 1907 the house was rented out  to Edward Greenleaf. The Milburns kept the property until 1920. Sometime during those years the property had been divided into apartments.

In 1921, Leo Mielziner a portrait painter lived there. Marjorie Bevens an illustrator called it home.

In 1930 a touch of scandal touched the occupants. Adele Ryan of No. 18, granddaughter of Thomas Fortune Ryan, was accused of alienating the affection of "Robert Johnston, night cub entertainer, of No. 16 West Tenth Street, by presenting him with liquor, first editions, perfume and money." Mrs. Johnston filed a suit for $500,000 for the loss of her husband's affection.

However by 1931 Mr. Johnston's (Johnson) troubles were over, when he was killed when traveling aboard the Sea Fox a yacht that exploded on May 24 killing all 8 passengers. He washed up at Ryde and Port Chester, and was described as a cabaret entertainer which appeared "in smart night places in New York, London and Paris, his partner being his wife Muriel." By then his liaison with Adele Fortune Ryan was over.

According to Jan Bryant Bartell her apartment at No. 16 was once occupied by Lillian Nordica, a famous opera singer who probably stayed there around 1909 when she married her third husband, George W. Young a wealthy New York Banker. She wasn't the ghostly lady with the cat, since she was known to travel with her black poodle Turk, but then who knows?

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