Merchant's House Museum

The Merchant's House Museum at 29 East 4th Street in Manhattan is the city's only fully intact 19th-century home, and staff and visitors have reported the ghost of Gertrude Tredwell, the last family member to live there, appearing in a brown dress since her death in 1933. A 2020 paranormal research initiative concluded there is "very likely" paranormal activity in the building.

In 1933, a group of kids were playing on the stoop at 29 East 4th Street when the front door flew open and an elderly woman in a long brown dress rushed out to chase them away. Gertrude Tredwell had been dead for a few weeks.

The Merchant's House Museum is the only 19th-century residence in Manhattan that still has its original exterior, interior, and furniture completely intact. The New York Times once called it "Manhattan's most haunted house," and what makes that label stick isn't the drama of the ghost stories. It's the consistency. People have been reporting the same woman in the same brown dress for over ninety years.

Seabury Tredwell, a hardware merchant born in 1780 to a prominent Long Island family, bought the house in 1835. Joseph Brewster, a hatter, had built it a few years earlier as a speculative development, a four-story brick row house with a Federal-style exterior and Greek Revival interiors. Tredwell moved in with his wife Eliza Parker and their children. The family lived there for almost a hundred years.

Gertrude was the youngest of the Tredwells' eight children, born in an upstairs bedroom in 1840. She never married. The story passed down through local lore is that her father refused to let her marry a young doctor she'd fallen in love with. Whatever the reason, Gertrude stayed. She lived her entire 93 years inside that house on East 4th Street. When she died in 1933, the home became a museum (officially opening in 1936), and the strange reports started almost immediately.

The most common sighting is a woman in a brown dress moving through the rooms. In 2002, different witnesses described the same figure in the kitchen, drinking tea and staring out the window. Neighbors and passersby have spotted her from the sidewalk. Staff hear doors slamming when the building is empty. Floorboards creak in patterns that sound like footsteps. Voices call at night from rooms where no one is standing.

What sets the Merchant's House apart from most haunted locations is the museum's attitude toward its ghost. They don't dismiss it and they don't sensationalize it. When COVID-19 closed the museum in 2020 and the building sat empty, the staff launched a formal paranormal research initiative. Dan Sturges of Sturges Paranormal, who has investigated the house since 2007 and appeared on Travel Channel's Paranormal Caught on Camera, led the effort alongside a neuroscientist identified as Dr. Lee. They used specialized equipment custom-built for the house.

Their conclusion, stated publicly: the research points to "the very likely reality of paranormal activity at the Merchant's House."

The museum now runs candlelight ghost tours (50 minutes, $45) and extended investigations with Sturges (90 minutes, $70). They also produce a video podcast called In the Spirit of Science that documents ongoing research.

The building itself is remarkable even without the ghost. The parlors still have their original mahogany furniture, the gas chandeliers that Seabury Tredwell installed, the family's personal belongings in the closets. Eight people died in this house over the decades the Tredwells lived here. Gertrude was the last. She'd watched the neighborhood change around her, watched NoHo transform from a residential street into something she didn't recognize, and she refused to leave.

The people who work at the museum think she still hasn't.