House of Death

Twenty-two people have died inside 14 West 10th Street, a Greenwich Village brownstone where Mark Twain lived in 1900 and once shot at a piece of kindling that moved on its own. Actress Jan Bryant Bartell documented seven years of hauntings in a memoir before dying the year it was published, and the building later became the site of the infamous Joel Steinberg child murder.

In the 1930s, a mother and daughter living at 14 West 10th Street saw a ghost near the window. It spoke. "My name is Clemens," it said, "and I has a problem here I gotta settle."

Mark Twain lived at this Greenwich Village brownstone from 1900 to 1901. He was broke, depressed, and writing furiously. The building already had a reputation then. Twain, a dedicated skeptic, dismissed the stories and moved in anyway. One evening by the fire, he watched a piece of kindling move on its own beside the fireplace. The movement was dramatic enough that Twain didn't investigate. He shot at it. When he checked, no rodent. Just a few drops of blood on the floor.

The brownstone at 14 West 10th Street was built in the 1850s, a Greek Revival home in what was then one of Manhattan's most desirable blocks near Washington Square Park. It stayed a single-family residence until 1937, when it was carved into 10 apartments. Twenty-two people have died inside its walls over the decades. That number sounds alarming, but as historians point out, it's not unusual for a building this old. What is unusual is how violent some of those deaths were, and how many residents reported something wrong with the place before the deaths made headlines.

Actress Jan Bryant Bartell moved into a top-floor apartment with her husband in 1957. Almost immediately, she felt what she described as "a monstrous moving shadow that loomed up behind her." She touched something in the apartment that was "chilly, damp, diaphanous as marsh mist or a cloud of ether." She stayed for seven years. A medium she consulted sensed multiple dead beneath the floorboards: a young girl, an aborted child, and a small gray cat. Bartell wrote a memoir about her experience called Spindrift: Spray from a Psychic Sea, published in 1974. She died the same year.

The gray cat shows up in other accounts too. Residents across different decades have reported it. A woman in a white, flowing gown appears on the stairs. The ghost of Twain himself, in his signature white suit with a cigar, has been spotted on the first floor and the staircase. A paranormal investigator who examined the building declared there were 22 spirits present, which happens to match the death count. Whether that's coincidence or a counting method is up to you.

Then there's the Steinberg case, which is not supernatural at all and is arguably the building's worst story. On November 1, 1987, former defense attorney Joel Steinberg, high on crack cocaine, beat his illegally adopted six-year-old daughter Lisa in the head. He then left for a dinner appointment. When he came back, he refused to help the child. He spent the next several hours freebasing cocaine while Lisa lay dying. Police found the apartment in filth, excrement and garbage everywhere, no working lights, drugs and $25,000 in cash scattered around. They also found a toddler tied to his playpen and covered in filth. Steinberg was convicted of first-degree manslaughter. He was paroled in 2004.

The Steinberg murder is what cemented the nickname "House of Death" in the public imagination, though the building had been accumulating tragedy for over a century by then. The ghost stories predate Steinberg by decades. Bartell's memoir was published 13 years before Lisa died. The Twain sighting in the 1930s was half a century earlier.

The building is still a residential apartment building. People live there. The ghosts, apparently, live there too. Twenty-two of them, give or take, if you believe the medium's count. The gray cat, the woman in white, the shadow that loomed behind Jan Bryant Bartell, and a dead humorist with a cigar who, 120 years after moving out, still has a problem he's got to settle.