Historic Huguenot Street

Seven stone houses built by French Huguenot settlers in the 1700s line one of America's oldest streets, and each house has its own ghost. The Freer House has Annie DuBois sobbing at the well where she died, the Hasbrouck House has a dark-cloaked axe figure tied to a real 1970 murder, and staff keep ghost lights burning to keep the spirits company.

Gertrude Deyo's portrait keeps moving. Staff at the Deyo House find it in different rooms, sometimes turned upside down, sometimes facing the wall. Nobody moves it. Gertrude died in that house after childbirth, and the local theory is that she placed a fertility curse on the building before she went. Her portrait, apparently, still has opinions.

Historic Huguenot Street in New Paltz is not one haunted building. It's an entire street of them. Seven stone houses built by French Huguenot settlers in the early 1700s line what's considered one of the oldest continuously inhabited streets in America. Each house has its own ghost. The street runs its own haunted tours, and the organization keeps a "ghost light" burning in the windows to keep the spirits company.

The most famous ghost belongs to the Freer House. Annie DuBois lived there in the early 1900s and was rumored to be in love with a much younger man, roughly 40 years younger. When she learned he had died, she walked to the well outside the house in a long white gown and threw herself down. Visitors still report seeing a woman in white sobbing at the well's edge. The grief near that spot is supposedly so intense that some people have broken down crying without knowing why.

The Abraham Hasbrouck House has the darkest story, and it's verifiable. In 1970, a SUNY New Paltz exchange student named Henry Baddoo attacked a female student on campus. She screamed, he fled, and he ended up in a barn owned by Howard Grimm, an 82-year-old widower who served on the Historic Huguenot Street board. When Grimm tried to help capture the young man, Baddoo hacked him to death with an axe. Because Baddoo turned out to be the son of an international diplomat, he was eventually released from the Mattawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and deported.

Grimm's ghost walks the street at night. But the Hasbrouck House picked up something else after the murder: visitors describe a figure in a long, dark coat carrying an axe, accompanied by a large black dog. He reportedly lurks over sleeping people. The local lore connects the figure to Baddoo, but the image has taken on a life of its own, more bogeyman than specific person.

Then there's the basement. Historian Alf Evers and his parents discovered a child's bones buried beneath the Hasbrouck House. A physician examined them, but the remains crumbled and disintegrated shortly after being exposed to air. The identity was never established, though some suspect the bones belonged to an enslaved child. Sojourner Truth herself lived in servitude in Ulster County and New Paltz before escaping, and the Huguenot settlers were documented slaveholders.

The Death Coach rounds out the stranger legends. Residents of Huguenot Street described a spectral black carriage with no windows, no horses, and no driver that would arrive to collect the dying. One account tells of an old woman who watched her husband's spirit board the coach and wave goodbye.

Interpretations manager Megan Stacey leads the "Boos and Brews" tours on Friday and Saturday nights, combining local craft cider with stories drawn from archival research and anthropological digs. The organization also hosts a "Ghost Ball" event that invites guests to the postmortem wedding of Annie DuBois and her young love Hugo, a celebration the site calls "nearly 100 years in the making."

Most haunted street tours lean on one good story and stretch it thin. Huguenot Street has the opposite problem. A jilted lover's suicide. An axe murder. Unidentified child bones. A cursed portrait. A phantom carriage. Seven houses, each with its own resident ghost, each story grounded in documented tragedy. The ghost lights in the windows aren't decoration. They're an acknowledgment.