The House of Death: Greenwich Village's Most Famous Haunted Address
- Dana at Vibe Tours
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
There is a townhouse on West 10th Street that looks like almost every other townhouse on the block.
Federal-style brick. Wrought iron railings. A short flight of steps up to a black door. If you walked past it on your way to dinner, you probably wouldn't look twice.
But ask anyone who has lived on this block for more than a few years, and they'll tell you: that's the House of Death.
It's one of the most talked-about addresses in Greenwich Village — a building with a reputation that has outlived nearly everyone connected to it, and a history that is, in its own way, more interesting than the legend.
A House Built for New York's Establishment
14 West 10th Street was built in the 1850s, on what was then — and still is — one of the most desirable blocks in the city. Long before anyone called it the House of Death, it was simply a fashionable Greek Revival townhouse, home to the kind of families whose names ended up on banks, museums, and transit charters.
One of its earliest notable residents was James Boorman Johnston, an executive in his family's iron-trading firm and a man with his fingers in a remarkable number of 19th-century New York ventures. Johnston was a founder of two ambitious — and ultimately unrealized — companies with "Underground Railroad" in their names: the Metropolitan Underground Railroad and the Broadway Underground Railroad. Despite the name, neither had anything to do with the famous network that helped enslaved people escape to freedom. These were proposed underground subway companies, decades before New York actually built one — one of several 19th-century schemes to put trains beneath Broadway that never quite got off the ground (or, in this case, under it).
Johnston's older brother, John Taylor Johnston, would go on to become the founding president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And just a few doors down from 14 West 10th Street, James Boorman Johnston himself commissioned the Tenth Street Studio Building — one of the first buildings in America designed specifically as working studios for artists, and for decades a gathering place for some of the era's most celebrated painters.
In other words: long before this house had a nickname involving the word "death," it sat at the center of a block that was quietly shaping New York's financial, cultural, and artistic institutions all at once.
A Reputation That Came Before Him
By the time Mark Twain moved into 14 West 10th Street in October 1900, the house was already nearly fifty years old — and its golden era as a single-family showplace for the Johnston family and their peers had long since faded.
What's harder to pin down is exactly when the house's reputation started to shift from "fashionable" to "strange." By some accounts, the first whispers go back to the years just before Twain's arrival — vague stories of sounds in empty rooms, objects that didn't stay where they were left, the kind of details that tend to accumulate around any large old house that's seen a lot of tenants come and go. At least one account claims that by the time Twain moved in, the building already had a name for itself as one of the Village's odder addresses.
Which makes what happened next either a remarkable coincidence, or the moment the legend found its main character.
The Skeptic Who Became the Ghost
When Twain and his family moved into 14 West 10th Street, he was 65 years old, recently returned from years abroad, and — by his own account — looking for a quiet place to settle in the city he loved.
He'd just spent the better part of a decade in a kind of exile: a punishing world lecture tour undertaken to pay off debts after his publishing company collapsed, years living abroad in Europe, and, in the middle of all of it, the death of his eldest daughter Susy from meningitis while he was away. By the time he reached West 10th Street, Twain had buried a child, rebuilt his finances from nothing through sheer work, and watched his own writing turn noticeably darker in the process.
He was not, in other words, a man inclined toward sentimentality or superstition. Twain was famously a skeptic of the supernatural — he'd written a comic short story called "A Ghost Story," in which a ghost spends the whole tale haunting its own fake corpse, a small joke at the expense of anyone who took such things seriously.
So when Twain heard the rumors about his new house, the story goes, he waved them off entirely.
Then, one evening by the fire, he saw a piece of kindling near the fireplace move on its own.
Twain — never a man to overthink a problem — grabbed his pistol and shot at it, assuming a rat was making off with the firewood. When he went to investigate, there was no rat. No intruder. Nothing.
Just a few drops of blood on the floor, and no source for them at all.
Whether that story is something that actually happened, or something that's grown in the telling over twelve decades, it's become one of the most-repeated details about the house — and it's a perfectly Twain way for a skeptic to have his first brush with the unexplainable: not with fear, but with a gun and a theory about rodents.
He lived in the house for a little over a year. By most accounts, it became one of his favorites.
And then, the story goes, he never really left.
Reports describe his ghost on the first floor and near the staircase — a man in a white suit, the same white suits Twain became famous for wearing in his later years. One account from the 1930s, decades after Twain's death in 1910, describes a mother and daughter living in the building who said they saw a man matching his description sitting near a first-floor window. He spoke to them, they said — just one line, something about having "a problem here I gotta settle" — and then he was gone.
A skeptic, by his own account. A man who shot at ghosts rather than believe in them. And yet, more than a century later, he's the name most associated with the house's haunted reputation — not because he started it, but because he became part of it.
The Actress Who Wrote the Book on It
If Twain is the House of Death's most famous resident, Jan Bryant Bartell is its most thorough witness.
Bartell was an actress, poet, and lecturer — she'd appeared off-Broadway in productions of Bell, Book and Candle and Night Must Fall — when she and her husband, restaurant manager Fred Bartell, moved into a top-floor apartment on West 10th Street in 1957. By her own account, she didn't believe in ghosts either, at least not at first.
That changed quickly.
Bartell described hearing footsteps on the stairs that didn't belong to anyone. A cold, damp presence she said she could feel — and once, she claimed, actually touched — accompanied by a smell she described as sweet and unbearably cloying, then gone as quickly as it came. A shadowy, hulking figure that seemed to follow her from room to room.
She and her husband lived with it for years before finally moving out. Bartell spent over a decade afterward writing about the experience, eventually publishing a memoir, Spindrift: Spray from a Psychic Sea, in 1974 — the same year she died.
Whatever was or wasn't haunting that top floor, Bartell's book is the closest thing the House of Death has to a primary source — a first-person account, written by someone who lived there for years and was, by her own telling, dragged into believing something she'd started out dismissing.
Why This House, on This Block
Greenwich Village is full of 19th-century buildings. Most of them don't have nicknames.
What makes 14 West 10th Street different isn't that it's older, or stranger-looking, or built on worse ground than its neighbors. It's that, over more than 150 years, this one building has intersected — more than once — with people whose own stories were, in their own ways, larger than life. A Gilded Age family that helped shape the city's museums, transit ambitions, and art world. A literary giant carrying real grief into a new home. A writer who spent over a decade trying to put into words something she couldn't otherwise explain.
That's the real story of the House of Death. Not that it's the most haunted building in New York — there's no way to actually measure that — but that it's a small case study in how a neighborhood remembers, misremembers, and sometimes can't quite let go of its own past.
Walking Past It Today
If you walk down West 10th Street today, the House of Death looks exactly like what it is: a beautifully preserved 19th-century townhouse on one of the best-kept blocks in the Village. People live there. Lights go on in the evenings. It is, by any ordinary measure, just a house.
And that's part of what makes it worth talking about. Greenwich Village doesn't need haunted houses with gargoyles and broken shutters — it has something more interesting: ordinary-looking buildings with extraordinary histories, hiding in plain sight on streets most people walk down without a second thought.
It's one of the stories I tell on our Haunted Greenwich Village Tour — not because I can prove anything about what does or doesn't happen inside, but because the real history is strange enough on its own.
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