House of Death — 14 West 10th Street
A Greek Revival brownstone in Greenwich Village where Mark Twain once lived and a six-year-old girl was killed — New York's most literary address of dread, nicknamed for the deaths accumulated behind its doors.
Case File No. 237
FILE 01 The Legend
The house at 14 West 10th Street went up in 1856, a single-family brownstone in a block of them, and its ghost ledger began with its most famous tenant: Mark Twain lived there around the turn of the century — brief, but long enough that his ghost, in a white suit, is the house's signature apparition, reported by residents and collected in every New York haunted-house roundup. Locals came to call it the House of Death for the number of people said to have died inside over a century and a half — a nickname that hardened into law when the house made tabloid history in 1987: attorney Joel Steinberg and his partner lived at No. 14 when his illegally adopted daughter, Lisa, six years old, was beaten into a coma in the house and died; Steinberg's 1989 conviction for manslaughter made the address permanently infamous, and the New York Post has returned to the street's terrors more than once since. Between Twain and Steinberg the file fattens by retelling: a actress, a poet, a socialite, a woman said to have been shot by a lover at the turn of the century, and a century of residents reporting the presences that go with the brand. The building is now divided into apartments, its past sold by ghost-walk guides who work Washington Square; its most recent notoriety came when listings for flats in New York's most haunted house found buyers all the same — Manhattan real estate forgiving everything.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The recurring canon: Mark Twain in his white suit on the stair and in the parlour; a woman in white on the fourth floor said to be a socialite dead by her own hand; a child's presence in the upper rooms; and cold spots on the stairs that residents of successive generations have reported independently.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
Twain's tenancy is documented but brief — under two years, ending 1901 — and every Twain ghost postdates the house's nickname, which itself is a tabloid artefact. The Steinberg killing is horrid, real, and entirely human; attaching it to a ghost canon is what city folklore does with grief. The remaining deaths are the ordinary actuarial toll of a 170-year-old house in a dense city, marketed one legend at a time.