New York's Financial District is the economic center of the entire US — but it's also one of the city's most historically gruesome, gory, and bloody neighborhoods.
Although its cobblestone streets might seem innocent, the next time you're in the area just remind yourself: More than 120,000 bodies have been buried on top of each other in the famous Trinity Church cemetery. City Hall Park is said to still be haunted to this day from all of the public hangings and lynchings that happened there in the 1800s.
Boroughs of the Dead, founded by Andrea Janes in 2013, leads unconventional walking tours that explore New York's dark, strange, and downright chilling nooks and crannies.
Just in time for Halloween, the company is running on double time, with multiple tours happening throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. I chose to take a tour through the Financial District with Janes herself.
Although Janes made it clear that she doesn't claim to be "clairvoyant by any means" there were several stops on the "Forgotten Dark Histories of Lower Manhattan" tour that she promised were "nauseating, intense, and overwhelming" due to their history. Below, a few highlights from our two-hour tour.
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We began our tour outside the National Museum of the American Indian, where Janes shares the gruesome story of the massacre of the Algonquian Indian tribe. Led by Willem Kieft, the director general of New Amsterdam in the 1640s, the bloody battle began at the very site where the museum can be found today.
When the tribe refused to pay taxes that Kieft had attempted to enforce, Kieft was more than a little upset. He decided to kill every man, woman, and child of the Algonquin tribe, focusing on the women and children. Fort Amsterdam was decorated with the heads of the slain American Indians.
To this day, there are tales of the ghost of a Native American woman wandering through the Bowling Green area.
If you work near the intersection of Pearl and Broad Streets, you might frequent Fraunces Tavern for happy hour. The tavern is well known for its rich history: George Washington and the Sons of Liberty would come to the Tavern before the start of the Revolutionary War, and Washington held his extremely emotional farewell banquet on the third floor after the War was over. There was also reportedly a murder, and a suicide occurred on the premises in 1712.
Many unverified reports of "paranormal instances" have been said to occur in this tavern. People have reported feeling a slight pressure on their back as though they're being pushed, doors have mysteriously slammed shut, keys have been seen gently swaying as though someone — or something — had brushed their finger along them. Janes also told the group a bartender's tale of both a night porter and a bouncer who once quit mid-shift for undisclosed reasons.
As Janes led us to Federal Hall on Wall Street, she told the group, "If you are a tour guide who loves 18th-century history, you will think of Wall Street not as a place where money was traded, but where human flesh was bought and sold."
In 1736, at the foot of Wall Street closer to the water, she explained, you would find a slave market. In fact, after Charleston, North Carolina, New York was the single largest slave-owning port city in the British colonies.
Back in 1741, Federal Hall was known as British City Hall. On the top floor was a jail, and in the basement, a dungeon. During the slave rebellion of that year, more than 100 men were captured and imprisoned in the dungeon and kept for the entire summer. Many of the prisoners were killed without warrant.
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