NEW YORK-
The young man bent over his dying father in the dimly lit room, trying to hear the slightest breath. It was too late. Seabury Tredwell was gone forever, lying motionless in his bed.
For the next few days, the perfume of lillies drifted through the Manhattan town house as the wealthy merchant’s body lay in a coffin in the front parlor. After all, there was no embalming in 19th-century New York and the odor of decay had to be masked.
But the scene took place in present-day Manhattan. It’s a Halloween act at what is billed as New York’s “most haunted house,” ending with an outdoors procession that brings the casket down a Manhattan avenue to the cemetery.
“There’s a reality here that you don’t get in other Halloween experiences,” said Pi Gardiner, director of the Merchant’s House Museum. “We’re real to begin with.”
Tredwell, his wife and eight children, plus Irish immigrant girls who worked for them, really did live and die in the three-story house just off the Bowery in Manhattan. Visitors have reported seeing the ghost of a petite woman walking through the kitchen and her bedroom–daughter Gertrude, who died in 1933.
The three-story house is part of a lineup of spooky experiences in New York City. The theme of the annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, held the night of Oct. 31st along Sixth Avenue, is “Phoenix Re-Rising,” a tribute to the ancient roots of Halloween. In Celtic times, autumn was celebrated by gathering around a communal fire. Villagers would then carry home embers to rekindle their own hearths. The procession is to be led by dancing jack-o-lanterns and Squash Blossom puppets bearing the fire within a great pumpkin lantern.
The annual Halloween parade runs on Sixth Avenue from Spring Street to 21st Street, 7 p.m.- 10 p.m. Be prepared for extremely heavy crowds.
Elsewhere in the city, drawing audiences to the DUMBO section of Brooklyn, is “Hell House,” presented by the ultra-hip theater company Les Freres Corbusier. Based on a script by a Colorado pastor who wanted to scare kids into avoiding temptation, the show is a mix of Halloween stunt and morality play. The story involves a cheerleader who undergoes a painful, bloody abortion, two gay men wedding just before one dies of AIDS, and a “nerdy” girl being raped at a rave, then shooting herself in the head.
A review in the New York Observer newspaper said that “merely by sticking faithfully (as it were) to the scriptby playing it (as it were) straightLes Freres Corbusier has unleashed the edgiest entertainment to be had anywhere in the city. Not since the Meese Commission Report on Pornography has so much stagy titillation been collected in one place.”
Hell House is being staged in the St. Ann’s Warehouse, 38 Water St., Brooklyn; (718) 254-8779, nightly through Oct. 29; tours are $25 and are offered every 15 minutes, 7:30 p.m.-9:45 p.m.; .
“It’s 45 minutes of in-your-face, rocking your reality,” said the material’s original author, the Rev. Keenan Roberts. “It’s all real life.”
And so is the half-hour walk by candlelight through Merchant’s House, complete with a visit to the basement kitchen where “funeral biscuits” are prepared for a recreation of a 19th-century rite that is part of an exhibit on death and mourning. The home is filled with furniture from the Federal, Victorian and Greek-revival styles popular in New York at the time, along with items used in daily life like instruments for “bloodletting”–a practice meant to remove poisons from a sick human body, hopefully to ward off death.
One bedroom re-enacts a scene from Gertrude’s childhood, when the girl was close to death from scarlet fever. Her mother, Eliza Tredwell, keeps watch for three days and nights as she writes a letter to a friend.
“In our world of instant gratification, this is history masked as entertainment,” said Christine Scott, an actor who plays Eliza. “These are ghost stories with a past.”
This past is staged in an elegant, red brick and white marble row house built in 1832 and purchased by Seabury Tredwell, the prosperous hardware merchant. Preserved virtually intact, its moldings, mahogany furniture and the clothing worn by the Tredwell daughters were once part of a fashionable neighborhood in a city that was on its way to matching the worldliness of London and Paris.
The tour will take place the Friday and Saturday before Halloween, every half hour beginning at 7 p.m. (last tour at 10 p.m.). Tickets are $20; reservations required. The house is located at 29 E. Fourth St. between Lafayette Street and the Bowery; phone 212-777-1089; .
