Category: tour guide musings

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.

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.

The following is a guest post from our tour guide Marie Carter, who will be conducting a lecture on “The Poisonous Prohibition” at QED in Astoria on Sunday, June 25, 2017, and leading our “Haunted Brooklyn Heights” tour — which will feature stories of poison during the Prohibition, true crime, haunting, murder, and more — […]

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 proud to announce that two of its guides are featured in the upcoming Morris-Jumel Mansion Anthology of Paranormal and Fantasy Fiction, published by Riverdale Books.

This summer, Boroughs of the Dead tour guide Marie Carter had the opportunity to stay in a haunted mansion in Lake George, NY. Depe Dene Manor was built in 1892, and its first owner was Captain Dennison. Since it was built, there have been many reports of hauntings at the mansion. Marie Carter talked to some of the locals about their experiences and discussed experiences of her own while staying there for two nights.

It doesn’t seem real that this charming Dutch colonial house exists in urban East Elmhurst, a ten minute walk from Astoria and just across the bridge for Riker’s Island, but happily, it does.