In Brief
The Dakota, a co-op at 1 West 72nd Street in Manhattan, holds a whole crowd of ghosts. The most stubborn is said to be Edward Clark, the developer who died before it was built. An electrician saw him four times, shaking a wig in his face.
The Full Story
The Dakota, the co-op apartment building at 1 West 72nd Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, has a ghost in its basement who keeps to himself until he doesn't. An electrician working down there in the 1930s saw him four separate times: a short man with a long nose, a beard, wire-frame glasses, a wig, and a frock coat. On the last visit, the figure glared at him, snatched the wig off his own head, and shook it in the worker's face before vanishing.
The description matches Edward Cabot Clark, the businessman who commissioned the building. Clark hired architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh and broke ground in 1880. He died in 1882, two years before it was finished, and left it to his grandson. He never spent a night in his own masterpiece. The story goes that pacing the cellar is the closest he ever got to moving in.
He has company. Workmen reported a blond girl in a yellow taffeta dress and patent leather shoes with silver buckles, bouncing a red ball in a hallway. She said "It's my birthday," then was gone. No record names any child who lived or died there to match her. A porter swore a heavy metal bar flew across a basement room and landed at his feet, and when he bent to pick it up, it was too heavy to lift. The Weinstein family, who lived there, reported furniture sliding across the dining room on its own; Mr. Weinstein once saw a chandelier glowing in a room where none was installed, and found only old bolts in the ceiling where one had hung years before.
Then there's the figure with the body of a man and the face of a young boy. A construction worker reported it in the 1960s, watching, never speaking. Repairmen sent into Judy Holliday's old apartment after the actress died felt watched too, and several said they saw the same boy-faced young man.
The Dakota's most famous resident moved in with Yoko Ono in 1973. On December 8, 1980, John Lennon was shot in the building's entrance archway by Mark David Chapman, who fired five rounds, four of which struck him. He was 40. Before he died, Lennon had described a "Crying Lady" walking the halls, often identified as a former property manager whose son was killed by a truck outside the building.
The Dakota was already collecting these stories before Roman Polanski filmed its facade as the cursed apartment house in Rosemary's Baby in 1968. After his death, Ono said she saw Lennon at his white piano. He turned to her and said, "Don't be afraid. I am still with you."
