This Halloween, tour a haunted Heights

October 7, 2014 Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Famed horror writer H. P. Lovecraft lived at 169 Clinton St. in Brooklyn Heights.

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As Halloween approaches, Brooklyn-based company Boroughs of the Dead, founded by local author Andrea Janes, is offering fall tours through various New York neighborhoods, among them Brooklyn Heights. Each tour is led by Janes, whose book “Boroughs of the Dead: New York City Ghost Stories” inspired the company. The book is a work of fiction, but in the course of her research, Janes discovered a wealth of ghostly, gory New York-centric stories, and decided she wanted to share them with the world. Janes is also the author of the Young Adult novel “Glamour” and several short horror stories. Her short story “The Last Wagon in the Train” was shortlisted in “The Best Horror of the Year 2013.”

“The inspiration for the Haunted Brooklyn Heights tour came from a passage in Henry Reed Stiles’ 1869 ‘History of the City Brooklyn,’ which outlined a strange ghost story of the old, long since disappeared Cobbleshill Fort,” Janes told the Brooklyn Eagle. “When I discovered this was where the Trader Joe’s is now, and that it was just down the street from the former home of H.P. Lovecraft, I had to make it a tour.

“Technically, the first story on the Haunted Brooklyn Heights tour is about a block into Cobble Hill, but the rest of the tour will wend its way northward, to some of the borough’s oldest and most enchanting houses,” said Janes, who has always been fascinated by the architecture of Brooklyn Heights. “I found several Cobble Hill ghost stories as I was conducting my research, so perhaps I’ll do a ghost tour of that neighborhood next year.”

The Brooklyn Heights tours, offered Oct. 24, 25 and 31 at both 7 and 9 p.m., are 90-minute walking tours that explore the darker side of the graceful old homes in one of Brooklyn’s oldest neighborhoods. Highlights of the tour include the former site of a “ghost-haunted” fort and the eerie tale of what happened there, “Mystery Houses” that are not quite what they seem, the Phantom Bell Ringer of Brooklyn Heights who shattered the peace in 1901, the former home of horror master H.P. Lovecraft, the wraiths and spirits of a haunted churchyard and more.

Tours run rain or shine and meet at the northwest corner of Court and Pacific streets (half a block south of Trader Joe’s). Tickets can be purchased at boroughsofthedead.com.