October Events for Our Thirteenth Year

Boroughs of the Dead officially opened for business on October 7, 2013. For the past thirteen years, we’ve explored dark and hidden histories, we’ve walked through cemeteries and haunted neighborhoods, told stories about witches and Spiritualists, researched the ghosts of New York’s past, and created the city’s first (and only!) feminist ghost tour… oh and published multiple nonfiction books AND weathered a global pandemic. It’s been A LOT but somehow we pulled it off and kept this small business chugging along. And to celebrate this milestone, we’ve got a whole slate of fun tours, events, panel discussions, trivia nights, special discounts, and more!

Here’s a quick roundup of what’s on the docket, with more events to follow as they’re finalized.

House of Know, Sunday, September 20th (Flying Fox Tavern, Ridgewood)

Boroughs founder and USA Today-bestselling author Andrea Janes joins fellow horror writer Christa Carmen at the Flying Fox in Ridgewood for another pulse-pounding edition of House of Know! Andrea will be lecturing on 19th century sleepwalkers and psychics, Christa will talk about Mary Shelley. Free event, no RSVP required.

Brooklyn Book Festival, Saturday, September 26th (B-Scene, 50 Avenue B, Manhattan)

Art of Darkness: Writing the Weird, a panel discussion, will begin at 12pm and treat attendees to the collective insight of a cadre of spooky girl writers including Andrea Janes, Leanna Renee Hieber, Leila Taylor, J.R. Pepper, and Ilise S. Carter. Join us as we discuss our approaches to writing nonfiction horror.

East Village Ghost Tour with Exclusive Merchant’s House Access, Saturday, October 3 (East Village/NoHo)

We’ve collaborated with our friends at the marvelous Merchant’s House Museum for a special edition of our East Village Ghosts tour that grants exclusive access to the interior of this very haunted house for one night only! Entry to the house begins at 6pm, tour starts at 7pm. Select the “Merchant’s House Add-On” ticket at checkout to access the house. $40 tour only, $50 with house access. This is a rare chance to linger in the house in a small-group setting, after hours, as a docent guides you through some of its most haunted rooms. Space is limited to 15 people.

Thirteenth Anniversary Tour, with 2013 prices! Wednesday, October 7th (Manhattan)

The first tour we ever created was The Ultimate Greenwich Village Ghost Tour, and thirteen years later, we’re taking it back out at its original price: $25.

That’s right: a ghost tour at 2013 prices.

Revisit the stories that started everything, walk the streets where our company began, and celebrate how much has changed—and how much hasn’t—in thirteen years.

Death and the City: Spooky NYC Trivia Night (Lucky 13 Saloon, Gowanus)

Haunted Brooklyn panel discussion, Center for Brooklyn History, Tuesday, October 27 (Brooklyn Heights)

Join us for “Haunted Brooklyn: Ghosts, Folklore, and the Stories We Tell.” Just in time for Halloween, enter the shadowy world of gothic Brooklyn, where haunted houses, restless spirits, buried secrets, and unsettling legends speak to far more than a taste for the macabre.

At the center of the conversation is Melrose Hall, the fabled Brooklyn mansion whose dark history has inspired tales of imprisonment, violence, and ghostly encounters for generations. Andrea Janes, founder of Boroughs of the Dead and an expert in New York City’s haunted histories, is joined by a formidable panel to bring the lore of Melrose Hall and other Brooklyn ghost stories to life. Leila Taylor, author of Darkly and Sick Houses, considers how race shapes what and whom we fear. Colin Dickey, whose work Ghostland and other investigations centering the strange and supernatural, looks at why haunted places and the stories attached to them persist in our collective imagination. And acclaimed novelist Victor LaValle, whose fiction uses horror and the fantastic to probe race, family, violence, and American society, explores what the gothic can reveal that more conventional storytelling sometimes cannot.

Together, they move between folklore, literature, history, and the gothic imagination to consider how tales of the supernatural expose very real anxieties about race, gender, sexual violence, social order, and power, and what Brooklyn’s ghosts might have to tell us about the world of the living.

Houdini Panel discussion, Wednesday, October 28 (St. Marks Sanctuary, East Village)

Learn about Houdini’s rise to fame in New York, including the East Village, his place in the history of stage magic alongside other luminaries and – in honor of the 100th anniversary of his death – Houdini’s meandering detour into the strange worlds of ghosts and Spiritualism, some of which is directly connected to historic sites right here in Greenwich Village.

Come with a love for the world’s best-known magician, leave with a deeper knowledge of his backstory and his afterlife among the spirits!

Panelists include Ilise S. Carter, award-winning sideshow performer, and author of When We Spoke to the Dead; Allison C. Meier, writer, researcher, and magic history aficionado; Marc Hartzman, author of numerous books on subjects ranging from UFOs, ghosts, sideshow performers, and more; and Leanna Renee Hieber, author, tour guide, and designer of Harry Houdini-themed walking tours of New York City. Panel moderated by Andrea Janes.

We’re also offering a new Houdini-themed walking tour of midtown Manhattan, and tickets for various dates are available here.

Happy Hauntings!