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just start from scratch and redecorate all you want here.%u201d A simple task, once one removed essences of 9b-year-old cat urine. Ana 188J was a good year.We emerged several agonized moments later and thanked the sales type and the owner for their time. Sales type concluded, %u201c Who knows? This house is so mysterious-it might even have its own ghost!%u201d Yeah, yeah, jabbered the agreeing owner, %u2018%u2018I%u2019ve heard strange noises at night myself.%u201d That's the termites finishing off your salon, nerd, 1 thought. And as my wife and I trotted off, I thought how no self-respecting ghost would inhabit the place. Serious researchers on the subject tell us that a ghost is no demon-sort, but a human spirit agonizing over some past life woes. That being the case, I could do without hanging pictures in the house while some pained animus intoned, %u201c Nooo, klutz, a little further to the right.%u201dBut with all due respect to this special place that is Brooklyn, our spirit life has been as interesting as the rest of our existence as a city.EARLY HAUNTINGSOur earliest recorded hauntings go back to the Revolutionary War era. As the deep, dark chamber of horrors (my file cabinet) tells us, Brooklyn was favored with a ghost of the first rank just after that time. The Lord High Haunter was none other than General Sir William Howe, who, along with his brother Admiral Richard Howe, sailed into New York harbor in 1776. In that summer they proceeded to plaster Washington and his army in today%u2019s downtown and environs.Lord Howe, who commanded the ground forces, was not satisfied to thrash us on the battlefield-he came back to haunt us, too. For a time, he enjoyed the hospitality of the Bergen homestead at what is now Third Avenue and 33rd Street. In his spare moments, he took to admiring a painting of King George that hung in the hallway. In the years after Howe died, at the stroke of midnight on each anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn, spurred boots could be heard rattling down the staircase. A ghostly visitor would then trod over to thepainting, admire it, and leave through-right through-the front door.i tie bergens seem to have made no effort to apprehend the General on burglary charges, and some word of his yearly jaunt got around. One year, an overnight visitor tothe house who had never known of the legend heard the noises. Peeking out of his door, he observed His Ghostship admiring the painting and passing out the door. The visitor, too, passed out.The house was demolished in the early 20th century, but if you see a chap in a red coat lurking about the Old Stone House at Fifth Avenue and Third Street some August 27th, show respect for the spectrehe%u2019s royalty.That same era also saw a slightly more dramatic haunting near the border between the town of Flatbush and the town of Brooklyn. BILLY GETS HISAn old colonial estate called Melrose Abbey stood at the intersection of Franklin and Washington Avenues from the 1700s until the 1930s. Now, when a place is called Melrose Abbey, it either has to be a haunted house or else it%u2019s an overdecorated Park Slope singles bar. The house was owned at one time by Col. William Axtell, a noted Tory who loved to harass Long Island rebels. He had little luck with those plots and even less with a young woman guest in his house. It seems that an attractive young in-law caught his eye, and, as legend has it, he ravished her and had her locked in a secret upstairs room. Some strange 18th century sense of honor led her to sit tight until she starved to death. Then, did Billy get his!She practiced her haunting technique until she had it down pat, and one night when the local Tories were sipping punch at an Axtell party, her emaciated apparition made a special ghost appearance. The Tory couples shrieked, tossed their Tory cookies, and took it on the lam out the nearest available door. Billy had a devil of a time explaining the whole mess, and his guest list at future parties dropped drastically. In later decades, as the house w'ent into ruin, local childrenwhispered that she could be seen floating from window to window. After the house was demolished, she supposedly hovered about die grounds every so often. She hasn%u2019t been seen in a number of decades.The 1800s saw a spooktacular rise in local ghosts, befitting Brooklyn%u2019s growing urban character. One of Brooklyn%u2019s old families, the Boerums, produced several state legislators, Kings County%u2019s first U.S. Congressman, a Hill and a Place named after them. They also produced a ghost story. In the early 1800s, a group of local young rogues was throwing an informal orgy in Cobble Hill when they ran out of brandy. The nearest supply was down near Fulton Ferry, and, to get there, one had to pass an allegedly haunted spot near Atlantic and Court Street. A certain young Boerum haughtily volunteered to fetch it, pooh-poohing any ghost tales. So, he went...and didn%u2019t return. When his comradesin-drink meekly set out to find him, they located him babbling incoherently in the road. He lingered on in that condition for some three days, and finally died, terror-stricken locals said that he had seen the ghost of a murdered m&fi. I tend to, think he had seen the price of Remy Martin .quarts.A LITTLE FUNA bit further north, during the same era, a legend of sorts grew up around the graveyard of the old St. Ann%u2019s Episcopal Church, which was in the area near the presentday Brooklyn Bridge approach, near Concord Street. On moonlit nights, some pedestrians on Fulton Street could see a ghost darting from tombstone to tombstone. Crowds gathered and continued to see the ghost%u2014until two town gendarmes collared him and dragged him off to the town hoosegow. In reality, the %u201c ghost%u201d was a local resident, one A.W.G. Gill of Washington Place, who said he was just out, gee whiz, %u201cfor a little fun.%u201d He was thereafter known as %u201cGill the Ghost.%u201d He later rose to the highest ranks of Brooklyn City government.Our next tale from the hallowed archives concerns the Kent mansion, once located on the outskirtsof the old city, near the New Utrecht town line. The house, at 59th Street and Second Avenue,was built %u00a301 a wealthy family bythe noted 19th century architect, A.J. Davis. An architectural gem, its Queen Anne towers and its battlements gave it the look of a house that just had to be haunted. Sure enough, in the late 1800s didn%u2019t a spook show up.It was a woman%u2019s ghost, and some said she was clad in a toga-like cloak, while others said she was nude. She would float around the top of the towers on summer nights, and then pass out over the Narrows. Soon, crowds of the local curious, swelled by large contingents of peeping toms, gathered to await her appearance. Fractured folklore has it that she didn%u2019t show for a while, but then she appeared, and the ghosthungry crowd happily viewed a performance not equalled for horror until Richard Harris recorded MacArthur Park.In the early 1900s she stopped her command performances, but1 she was not the only ghpst of the Narrows. Brooklyn%u2019s novelist L.J. Davis reminded me of a tale from the same era. One fog-shrouded evening, a New Utrecht doctor had to make a house call on Staten Island, and arriving at the 69th Street pier, he found no ferryrunning. Suddenly, a grizzled old captain who made irregular runs arrived and volunteered to take him across and wait for his return. The doctor made his rounds and returned to Brooklyn, thanking the captain for his trouble. The next morning the doctor learned that the captain had died two days before. FATTY%u2019S GHOSTIn this century, there have been reports that the ghost of film star Fatty Arbuckle inhabits the old Vitagraph Studio at Avenue M and East 17th Street. The studio subsequently became a production center for the National Broadcasting Co., which, when contacted, noted it had no corporate policy on ghosts. The only other comment I found was from a cameraman who expressed doubts that %u201c a nonunion guy would be allowed in here.%u201dNot too many ghosts are making the rounds in Brooklyn at the present time. Most have long since iiiuv ^ u iu the suburbs where they have married and bought ranch houses, in which they wail about real estate taxes and the Long Island Railroad, and excoriate various candidates for governor.There was a report about five years ago of a haunting on Court Street near State. A former occupant reported that %u201c several people saw the figure of a man in la Civil War uniform, and one saw a black-shrouded figure in the front room.%u201dAnd there are people in Brooklyn who maintain a serious interest in psychic phenomena in general. In the late 19th century, psychic Mo lie Fancher lived at 160 Gates Avenue in Bedford. She suffered a traumatic accident at age 17, and soon found that she could read sealed letters, tell time without benefit of clock and %u201csee%u201d colors in the dark.But current psychics are hard to find. I talked a few years back to Irwyn Greif of Sheepshead Bay, who did such ordinary things as detailed analysis of photos sealed in envelopes. He noted that local psychics %u201coperate independently, and tend to act like prima donnas. They don%u2019t work together%u2014for example, I certainly don%u2019t advertise.%u201d He added, %u201c Brooklyn is not that up on psychics. There%u2019s much moi %u2022 of an interest generally in psy hie research in M anhattan. %u2019It will probably take a century or so for some good solid discoveries in psychic research and ESP. And, by that time, Brooklyn will sport some classy ghosts of its own.A toga-clad figure (with rolledup sleeves) will parade down Atlantic Avenue at midnight, calling out, %u201c How am I doin%u2019?%u201d Not far away in Park Slope another spirit will call out, %u201c I am for life!%u201d and will call to other ghosts, %u201cI%u2019ll support you to the very end in your haunt.%u201dSome things, you see, never change.Book Beat by L.J. DavisUp in Rochester, they claim that if anyone passes through town in a railroad sleeping car, they instantly hail him as a native son. Kurt Vonnegut has labelled this sort of spurious kinship a granfaloon: the comforting notion that, because you happen to share a piece of geography%u2014 Africa, for instance%u2014with a noted personage, a bond of instant kinship is formed.We are above such things here in the Big Bagel, of course, where it is known as the Pea-Picker Syndrome, but I confess that I felt a little flutter of pride when I learned th^t H.P. Lovecraft, America%u2019s premier master of the horror story, had once occupied digs 259 Parkside Avenue right here in Brooklyn, miles from where I live and years before I was born. Touchingly, it was the site of his nuptual bower.Loveoraft was a man of many sterling qualities, but sanity was not among them; he was as mad as a March hare, a creature which, in fact, he more than slightly resembled. He abominated the modern world and especially its vocabularly, detested all foreigners, lived on canned beans; and invented one of the scariest mythologies the world has ever seen. It involves idiot gods, witches, undersea humanoids, winged monsters from out of space, time travel, human sacrifice, and something called Great Cthulhu, an octopus-headed super baddie who lives in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, asleep. Brooklyn, however, gave Lovecraft the willies.He did not live there lone, and all too soon he was back in his beloved Providence, minus his wife, who had meantime gone to Cincinatti. His wife was Jewish, incidentally. This is important in the light of \\^ a t followed.ONLY BROOKLYN HORROR STORYWhat followed was that Lovecraft sat down and wrote what is to my knowledgethe only horror story with a Brooklyn setting. It is also one of the worst horror stories ever written%u2014worst not in the sense that it makes the reader whine for his teddy bear, but worst in the sense of awful. Its title is The Horror at Red Hook, its setting is latter-day Carroll Gardens, its villians are a bunch of Kurds, and its hero is an appallingly clean-cut young cop named Malone, an upright northern European who subsequently moves to Rhode Island and falls down in a fit everytime he sees a brick wall.The plot%u2014one of staggering complexity, by the way%u2014revolves around one Robert Suydam of Flatbush, a dirty old folklorist of Dutch ancestry who takes to visiting the degenerate foreigners of the dockside districts surrounding the Butler Street station house. The degenerate foreigners are sacrificing small children in the basement of their church, a development that is immediately apparent to everyone but the erstwhile Malone, who stands around looking handsomely puzzled.In some way%u2014don%u2019t ask me how, I%u2019m telling you what%u2019s written here%u2014the combination of wicked Kurds and slaughtered toddlers acts upon Suydam like a tonic. Instantly regaining his looks, youth, and fortune, he marries a beautiful girl from Queens and sets forth on a honeymoon cruise from which, apparently in mid-Atlantic, he is snatched, by those selfsame Kurds, and spirited the church cellar in Brooklyn, but not before he has been turned into r j old man. The corpse is met there b\\ >%u00bbe, whose attention has finally been attracted by the presumed abduction of three beautiful blue-eyed Norwegian kids from their homes in Gowanus%u2014an event that has both neighborhoods in an uproar, Gowanus because its children are missing, Carroll Gardens because it%u2019s got them.It is at tl s juncture that Malone finally decides to ; t, but nobody has ever advised him of the nwisdom of solitary excursions through sliding panels in the walls of folklorists%u2019 studies and soon he is hopelessly lost in the maze of catacombs beneath South Brooklyn. (Don%u2019t look at me that way; I didn%u2019t make this up, Lovecraft did). Prudently electing to rely on his instinct rather than his intellect, he threads his way past a lot of demons and corpses and eventually comes out in the subterranean landing stage just as the degenerate Kurds arrive in their boat and begin feeding bits of the departed Suydam to their goddess. Before Malone can put his foot down and bring the proceedings to a halt, the street falls on him, he goes mad, and moves to Pascoag, Rhode Island.Thus ends the tale, but in this Halloween season, I think we owe it to ourselves to take a peek at a few of Lovecraft%u2019s final words on the subject:%u201c As for Red Hook%u2014it is always the same. Suydam came and went; a terror gathered and faded; but the evil spirit of darkness arid squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses and prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where lights and twisted faces unaccountably appear and disappear.. .The soul of the beast is omniprese' and triumphant, and Red Hook%u2019s leg. ns of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths Stil chant and curse and howl as they file fo in abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whether, pushed on by blind laws of biology which they may never understand As of old, more people enter Red Hook han leave it on the landward side, and there are already rumours of new canals rui ling undergrouiv' to certain centres of traffic in liquor and less mentionabh' things....%u201dMany happy returns of he season, Carroll Gardens! \\Page 12 , T H E P H O E N IX , O cto b e r 2 6 ,1 9 7 8