Category: Boroughs of the Dead Announcement

Every once in a while the universe converges to make a ready-made experience just waiting to fall into your lap. This year, a fortuitous confluence of events means that if you’re the type who wants to recreate a Victorian Christmas in New York City in 2017 (because why not?) then you’re in luck!

Your guide to macabre gifts that matter. Our choices are still wonderfully grim and strange but with a tinge of something more than the usual fare, at the end of this nightmarish year.

Tickets to our annual holiday tour, Ghosts of Christmas Past, are on sale now! This two-hour walking tour combines some of the best true ghost stories of Greenwich Village with a special seasonal focus on the history of Christmas and its unique connection to New York City. It’s a refreshing alternative to the usual holiday fare, and perfect for anyone who likes their holidays with a side of creepy.

In the past, Hart Island has variously been used as a tuberculosis sanatorium, a Union Civil War Camp, a women’s insane asylum, and a boys’ reformatory. It was also used to launch missiles during the Cold War in the sixties from the Nike Missile Site, and it housed a rehab facility called Phoenix House in the sixties and seventies. And it has been and continues to be used as a potter’s field.

Tickets to all Boroughs of the Dead tours are now on sale for the Halloween 2017 season. Our meticulously researched ghostly and macabre historical tours are, as always, led by expert guides who are published authors, museum educators, and seasoned storytellers.

The following is a guest post by our guide Leanna Renee Hieber. Her custom tour, The Magic and Mysticism of Central Park, will run on Sunday, June 18th in a special Fathers’ Day edition. Tickets are available here. We think of Frederick Law Olmsted as the father of modern landscape architecture, and along with his […]

1920’s horror writer H. P. Lovecraft did not much relish his two years living in New York City (and that is putting it very mildly). He considered himself forever a New Englander and spent his long months of exile pining for his home in Providence, RI. But if there is one way that Lovecraft did resemble a typical New Yorker, it was that he was a walker.

Boroughs of the Dead is excited to announce a brand new tour in partnership with writer, tour guide, and H.P. Lovecraft aficionado Jane Rose. “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” follows the trajectory of the writer’s time living in Flatbush and Brooklyn Heights in the 1920s – a brief, difficult, but ultimately artistically significant period in the author’s life.

Inspired by the uncanny and ghostly tales associated with the Ship of Dreams, “Ghosts of the Titanic” explores the more mysterious and inexplicable aspects of one of the eeriest maritime disasters in history.