I was born and raised in a section of Brooklyn, New York, where the streets were lined with one-hundred-year-old homes and quaint mom-and-pop shops. The house that my family and I lived in was a large, two-family stucco structure, located at 190 Sheffield Avenue. Although the house was torn down years ago, I will never forget the strange and frightening things that happened to me, there.
One, in particular, comes to mind. As a very young child, I had recurrent dreams of a man, walking through our house and exiting through the wall. It was always the same dream. The atmosphere was gray and the old, disheveled man himself, looked gray and sad as he eerily paced, one, slow step at a time, through my room and out the far wall.
I’d always wake up in a cold sweat after that dream, and feelings of being so close to death, covered me. Then, for a little while, the dreams stopped and I forgot them, until the final dream happened. It was identical to the rest, but something unexplainable followed, the next day.
I was sitting outside on the stairs of our house, gazing up at a beautiful, blue sky and picturing myself in the angel costume I was going to wear that night for Halloween. Our neighborhood was usually quiet but today, something looked different. It was graveyard quiet and the beautiful blue skies had suddenly turned a depressing, marble gray. In that moment, I realized that I was all alone. I looked down the street to see if anyone else was in sight, and that’s when I saw him!
An old, shabby-looking man, dressed in dirty, gray clothes, was slowly walking towards me. He looked straight ahead as he walked, and I almost felt like he didn’t even see me. I kept watching him as he drew closer, and I remembered the dreams. I hoped that he didn’t see me and would just keep walking, the way he always did in my dreams. But this time, it would be different.
I watched him as he crept up to the gate and began to walk parallel to it. When he got to the entrance, his head turned, and our eyes locked. I wanted to run but I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t even think. Although it seemed like an hour, I think that only a few seconds had gone by and finally, he turned his stare away from me and he continue walking. At that point, I unfroze and ran into the house and up to the second floor, where we lived. I raced into my room, shutting the door behind me, and tried to calm down.
I never did tell this story to any family member. Maybe I was too young to be able to describe it. But years later, I did discover facts about that house that could have explained some of the strange goings on.
Apparently, the former owner had committed suicide in the back room. He had a wife and several children and, at the time of the house purchase, a pretty good job. But then, he lost his job and couldn’t make the payments. He begged his mortgage holder for more time, but with no avail. Not being able to face eviction, he decided that suicide was the only way out of his troubles.
Many other things occurred in that house, in the twelve years that we lived there, but this one stands out in my mind the most, because I actually saw the ghost and felt his presence.
It was Halloween night in the late seventies and I was living in a modern apartment building on First Avenue and Seventy Second Street. A friend who was a well-off doctor invited my roommate and me to a Halloween gathering at his brownstone in Greenwich Village. It was not a costume party or a haunted house show, just a small group of friends getting together for cocktails and some food.
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