00;00;00;28 - 00;00;09;28
Unknown
Yeah. But, you know, it's it's. Come on.

00;00;10;01 - 00;00;22;24
Unknown
You come to me when I'm lonely. I take your hand and we go home.

00;00;22;26 - 00;00;34;07
Unknown
You cover me with your love. We. Cover you with my love.

00;00;34;10 - 00;01;09;26
Sasha Graham
Hello and welcome to Sasha Graham's ghost stories by the fire. I'm your host, Sasha Graham on. And why Western Catskill Radio on 93.6 FM on your radio dial. It's just after midnight. The hour when witches gather and goblins meet. When owls are hooting and the lovers cheat. But right now, midnight belongs to you and me. I'm hoping you'll listen along.

00;01;09;26 - 00;01;39;03
Sasha Graham
As I broadcast from the old fire tower in  Wands Hollow, New York. I've got a sweet view of the valley right now. So for you locals listening in after days of pouring rain and even a brief snow shower, the sky has finally cleared up. And it's looking extra pretty tonight. So if you're not ready to hop into bed just yet, why don't you take me outside for a listen?

00;01;39;06 - 00;02;15;01
Sasha Graham
This way we can gaze up at the stars together. I've been out in the wild gathering ghost stories just for you. And tonight I have a triad of tales, all involving an infamous New York City borough just two hours south of where I'm reporting. Welcome to season two, episode 23, Bloodcurdling Brooklyn. Brooklyn happens to be a hotspot for supernatural happenings.

00;02;15;03 - 00;02;53;10
Sasha Graham
The Brooklyn's most haunted landmark is its famous Brooklyn Bridge. It was the world's first steel suspension bridge and took 14 years to build. Unfortunately, over 20 workers were killed while building the bridge, and they haunt it to this very day. The laborers immigrants from Ireland, Germany and Italy were paid about $2 a day. Many of the workers were killed by falling stone while constructing the bridge's granite towers.

00;02;53;12 - 00;03;28;17
Sasha Graham
Some fell from the top of the towers and plummeted to a watery death. The deadliest bridge work occurred inside massive wooden boxes that were sunk into the bedrock beneath the East River to provide a base for the towers. Workers would be overcome with compression sickness, otherwise known as the bends, if they came to the surface too quickly, their bloodstream would fill with nitrogen bubbles, blocking their blood flow and killing them dead.

00;03;28;20 - 00;04;04;23
Sasha Graham
It is said the Brooklyn Bridges most famous ghost can still be sensed if you venture out on a moonlit night and stand beneath the arches. Many have felt or claimed to have seen, the headless ghost of a Brooklyn Bridge laborer, whose life was ended in 1875 when a cable, one of the steel whips, snapped and decapitated him. He wanders the overpass to this day, searching for his lost head.

00;04;04;25 - 00;04;42;21
Sasha Graham
But tonight I'm bringing you three brand new creepy Brooklyn stories. All three stories were recorded at the original home of Sasha Graham's ghost stories by the fire at the Barrow's intense tasting room at Industry City, Brooklyn's. Our first storyteller, author Fenella Austin, takes us on a journey to an empty playground in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. Empty playgrounds feel like discarded toys strewn aside and forgotten, like the magic of our childhood.

00;04;42;23 - 00;04;53;25
Sasha Graham
Here's Finola Austin with the swinging sister.

00;04;53;28 - 00;05;16;16
Fiola austin
So yes, my name is Finola Austin. I'm a historical novelist, the writer of Brontes Mysteries, which came out in 2020 and tells the love story of Branwell Bronte, brother of the famous Bronte sisters and an older woman. So one thing you should know about me is that throughout my life, I've lived in a series of places where you would have thought that I would have seen ghosts.

00;05;16;19 - 00;05;41;26
Finola austin
So first I was born in England. In the aptly named town of Gravesend. Not the Brooklyn neighborhood, but Gravesend in Kent in England. It's the place where Pocahontas died. And I lived in a house called Strawberry Cottage. It was built in 1840, and it had been a servants cottage beside the big house, which burned down during World War Two.

00;05;41;28 - 00;06;08;06
Finola austin
But I didn't see any ghosts there. Then I moved to County Antrim and Ireland with my family, and to a little bit of a later house. It's called the Bishop's House was built in 1899 and had indeed been a Bishop summer house and then a girls high school. And when we first moved in, all the old people in the town told us, oh, you know, the bishop still walks the halls of that house.

00;06;08;09 - 00;06;31;27
Finola austin
There's a secret passageway linking that house to the church. And I would torture my younger sister and her friends at sleepovers with stories of that bishop and how his goes with lure them into the passageway to starve to death. But I never saw him. And then I moved to Oxford, where I was lucky enough to study classics and English literature, for university.

00;06;31;27 - 00;06;57;28
Finola austin
My college is Merton College, Oxford, which is one of the three Oxford colleges that claims to be the oldest. It was built in the 1200s. We have the first legal paperwork. But University College does have the benefit of just being named University College. So I think on balance they got it. And I lived in a series of old quadrangle, by the croquet lawn or by the old chapel.

00;06;58;00 - 00;07;21;28
Finola austin
I saw plenty of students and dons in their billowing robes, but all of them were very much of this world and were not guys. So would this very disappointing and inauspicious start to a writer's life. I'm going to fast forward to just a couple of years ago in Brooklyn. I've lived in New York eight years now, and but 2020 is going to stand out in all of our memories.

00;07;22;01 - 00;07;47;19
Finola austin
I now live in Park Slope. At the time, I was living in Clinton Hill, and like many of you, I'm sure my existence was almost entirely on zoom. So I spent my days on zoom calls for work, and I spend my evenings on zoom calls with friends. Some of them successful and some of them less so. I even did my 29th birthday party on zoom was not the most fun I've ever had.

00;07;47;21 - 00;08;12;10
Finola austin
But you know, I was not going outside at all, so I was getting my groceries delivered. Or if I'm honest, my seamless delivered. The only people I was talking to were my upstairs neighbors who broke up a month into the pandemic, and my downstairs neighbors, who I couldn't talk to because, you know, she was going for a custody dispute and he was saying, you know, I was a threat, because of the Covid in the air, and they couldn't talk to me.

00;08;12;12 - 00;08;35;23
Finola austin
And so to keep fit, I would be on YouTube doing workouts. And that really wasn't enough. So I decided it was time to venture out and go on some walks. So just after sundown each night, I would take to the streets of Clinton Hill, walk around, cross the street to avoid other humans, smile at them nervously, and feel like we were living in a zombie apocalypse.

00;08;35;26 - 00;08;55;27
Finola austin
And I don't know if anyone is super local here. Lives in Clinton Hill. But you might know there's a small playground called Underwood Park. And you might remember if you were in Brooklyn in that period that in the first lockdown, even all playgrounds were closed. And so every night on my walk, I would go past this playground.

00;08;56;00 - 00;09;18;22
Finola austin
It was entirely chained up. It would look really sad. No kids, on the swings or slide. The chess tables were bare and empty. The fountain was off and it just looked desolate and like many of us were feeling at that time. But one night, as I walked past, I was really surprised to see somebody on the swings.

00;09;18;24 - 00;09;38;02
Finola austin
They were just in the distance. I couldn't really make out this person to start with, but I thought, oh, the city must have open the parks, right? Or else someone's broken in. And so I called out, but the person didn't turn, didn't seem to hear me. So I decided they must have gone through the next gate because the one I was by was clearly locked and still chained.

00;09;38;04 - 00;09;56;22
Finola austin
So I walked in the next gate and that one was chained as well. So I called out again a little more loudly. I can now see that the person on the swing was a woman, and she looked like an older woman from what she was wearing a cardigan. You know, a long skirt kind of reminded me of what my grandma used to wear.

00;09;56;24 - 00;10;17;07
Finola austin
But she didn't turn, so I thought, oh, well, she must be a little deaf. So I went round the edge to the third gate, which must have been where she went into the park. Right, because the other two were locked, and I found that one was chained as well. So I was about to call out a third time, thinking, you know, she probably doesn't have the best hearing.

00;10;17;07 - 00;10;37;06
Finola austin
She looks pretty ancient. But then I thought, oh, wait, I don't have a mask on. She doesn't have a mask on. Maybe she's just nervous. I should let her be. So I went back home, but I was feeling a little bit unnerved. So the next time I walked by, the woman wasn't there. The playground was empty.

00;10;37;06 - 00;11;01;11
Finola austin
All of the padlocks were on. But I started looking for a fourth gate. And for the first time, I paid attention to the large red brick building that's beside under work park. There's an inscription on it. It says Graham's Home for Old Ladies, incorporated, 1851. And so I went home. I did what every good historical novelist should do, which is research, right.

00;11;01;14 - 00;11;28;19
Finola austin
And I found that. Yes. Now it's just condos. But that this was a house where the impoverished but respectable ladies of Brooklyn, could go and live out their later years. In the 19th century, some of them were thrown out for bad behavior, even when they were in the 80s, 90s or well over 100. There was even one woman, Rachel Fayette, who was a descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette, who was always knitting.

00;11;28;21 - 00;11;46;15
Finola austin
I didn't go past the park much. I don't know, I was a little unnerved by the whole experience, despite being deeply rational because of my early years not seeing ghosts, but then one day I got that text. I'm sure most of you're familiar with Covid updates from the city, and it said that the playgrounds were open, so I thought, this is my night.

00;11;46;21 - 00;12;09;07
Finola austin
I'm going to go. I'm finally going to get to swing. I'll go in the evening once the kids are in bed. So I went to the park again. It was just after nightfall. This time there was no padlock on the gate and it opened when I touched it, there was still nobody at the chess tables. The fountains were still quiet and the swings were utterly still.

00;12;09;10 - 00;12;29;16
Finola austin
There was no one. There was a very quiet night. So I walked up to the swing, put my purse on the ground, and started swinging, feeling a little childish for somebody who just turned 29. But enjoying the sight of the tops of the trees, the lights of the airplanes in the air, and just feeling free again after a horrible few months of very little activity.

00;12;29;18 - 00;12;54;13
Finola austin
And as I was swinging high, I had a sudden compulsion to look to my left. And there was the woman again. On the swing. I called out to her. Hello? But she didn't respond. She was looking down in her lap and I noticed that she was knitting. I let the swing slow until my feet trailed in the gravel, and I called out to her again.

00;12;54;15 - 00;13;21;12
Finola austin
But still she remained focused on what she was doing. And then I jumped off the swing and walked towards her. And then I saw that she didn't have a face at all. She didn't even have feet. And then, well, I just grabbed my bag and I ran.

00;13;21;15 - 00;13;49;06
Sasha Graham
No face and no feet. I would have run to vanilla. Our second tale takes a deep dive into the seedy, criminal underworld of mob malls and sharkskin suits. This story was told by Alex Haskell, the bar manager of the Barrow's intense tasting room, on August 3rd, 2022. It is one of the most unique stories I have heard to date.

00;13;49;08 - 00;13;59;03
Sasha Graham
Here is Alex Haskell with the Rat King of Brooklyn.

00;13;59;05 - 00;14;24;09
Alex Haskell
My family, going back 3 or 4 generations on both sides was somehow involved in organized crime. My grandfather there, on the legitimate side of my family, was, my lansky's entertainment lawyer. So all those horrible things that you heard about, like, the awful deals that people were forced to sign, he wrote those contracts. He was a great grandfather.

00;14;24;16 - 00;14;50;14
Alex Haskell
Might not have been a great person on the other side, my uncle Jerry, my grandfather Jerry. Sorry. If you Google his name. There are about 20 different instances of the United States versus. So I grew up with a lot of stories. If you ever read the book Tough Jews, it's about the Jewish mafia, you know, between the world wars.

00;14;50;16 - 00;15;17;10
Alex Haskell
And there's a section of photographs in the middle. And my great uncle Sid Levine said, Read Levine. There was a picture of him getting a haircut that went horribly wrong. So growing up, I heard the story of the rat King of Brooklyn. There was this one guy, and he had a crew. And, you know, they were, you know, Italian math mob.

00;15;17;12 - 00;15;39;29
Alex Haskell
They were all basically from the campo down to the just above, like, you know, the guy who would beat you up on the street, informants. And they were informing on each other, and none of them knew except the guy who ran the crew knew they were all informants because he was working with the FBI at the time, and they had their social club.

00;15;40;02 - 00;16;03;26
Alex Haskell
It was in the Gowanus. So I fourth Avenue and 17th or something like that. You know, you've got to imagine it's not that nice now in the 50s, like it was. I mean, in the 80s it was really shitty. But like in the 50s it was pretty shitty, because there were still factories there. When I first moved to Brooklyn, I got lost working for the subway.

00;16;03;26 - 00;16;28;18
Alex Haskell
I was very drunk and wandered around. My friend who lived on Fourth Avenue and like 16th or 17th, had this way really kind of rundown but amazing duplex with a garden and all that. And like, we fried catfish and drank Jack Daniels out of a bottle. As I'm leaving my friends like, hey, do you need like, do you need me to walk into the train?

00;16;28;18 - 00;16;47;00
Alex Haskell
Or like, how are you getting home? I'm like, I'll grab a cab. And she's like, This is Brooklyn. There are no cabs. So I'm like, yeah, all right, fine, I'll find the subway. How fucking hard can beat him? Find subway. So I'm walking down and I'm apparently wandering for hours, and I end up in one of those social clubs.

00;16;47;00 - 00;17;20;13
Alex Haskell
Which do they even exist anymore? Do you all know what a social club is? So they're these storefronts that don't have a business, but they have a constant activity. And the constant activity is low level mobsters playing dominoes or watching TV, generally just hanging out, doing nothing all day long. And then the boss comes by to collect his, you know, portion of the events, once a week.

00;17;20;15 - 00;17;53;13
Alex Haskell
So I end up hammered playing pool in this social club until the sun comes up. And so I leave the social club, and I get back, and I find the train, and I'm still vaguely hammered and I wake up the next day and my friend calls me, and so I. Did. You get home okay? I'm like, well, this I have this whole weird, weird interaction, ended up in the social club hanging out with all these, like, old school mafiosos.

00;17;53;15 - 00;18;10;01
Alex Haskell
And it was this, like, amazing night about a week later. And this is, like two blocks away from where she lived about a week later, I'm back out in Brooklyn. I'm scouting apartments. I'm like, end up having a drink with my friend. I might have had too much strength. And let's go hang out with the mobsters. This is me.

00;18;10;01 - 00;18;41;17
Alex Haskell
Awesome. We get to the building and it was a vacant lot. And yeah, I was drunk, but I had a pretty good eye. Like, I've got that New Yorker sense of like, where the hell I am? And I'm like, that is really fucking weird. So I googled them, the address, and it turned out that it was the social club of the Rat King of New York, who also happened to have been responsible for my great uncle's assassination while getting a haircut.

00;18;41;19 - 00;19;02;13
Alex Haskell
I don't know if that was like some kind of like I was just really drunk and imagined the whole thing because, like, I and I remember from that night, like, these guys were all wearing suits and like, we've all seen The Sopranos and, you know, the idea of a mobster wearing an actual suit, that's not it doesn't have jogging as a prefix.

00;19;02;13 - 00;19;27;15
Alex Haskell
It's like, oh, and, you know, I called my my aunt and I'm like, you know, do you know anything about this? And so like and that social club was like part of the family history. And I'd never heard about it. Like I'd heard like snippets of like this happen that happened. But I had never heard that, like, great Uncle Sid would occasionally swing by to pick up money for whoever his boss was.

00;19;27;15 - 00;19;48;06
Alex Haskell
He would swing by to pick up the vig, and I ended up hanging out with people who've been dead for about 70 years. And that is my creepy, freaky story.

00;19;48;09 - 00;20;21;21
Sasha Graham
Yes, Alex, that is creepy and freaky. My favorite pairing. The key to my like, ghost story events is getting the audience to come on up to the stage and share their stories. I often have to bribe people to come up, as you'll hear in our final bloodcurdling Brooklyn story recorded on April 7th, 2023. First, you'll hear me, then you'll hear Robin with her story.

00;20;21;23 - 00;20;27;19
Sasha Graham
Welcome. How?

00;20;27;21 - 00;20;29;29
Sasha Graham
My husband and I have 100.

00;20;29;29 - 00;20;38;09
Sasha Graham
And 40 year old farmhouse that we live in. It is very haunted. Almost everyone I have ever.

00;20;38;09 - 00;20;39;20
Sasha Graham
Met.

00;20;39;23 - 00;21;15;00
Sasha Graham
Has some really good haunted house stories. Especially if you have little children, right? Because kids can really, you know, honey, what are you looking at? That lady in the window. What lady in the window? The one who wants her house back. Mommy. The one who wants to know why you moved all the furniture. So I would love to gift this haunted house tarot deck to anybody who would like to come up and tell us a haunted house story, I think there, I think you guys, would you come up?

00;21;15;00 - 00;21;26;10
Sasha Graham
Would you share? Come on up. And here you go. What's your what's your name? Robin. Everyone, this is Robin.

00;21;26;12 - 00;21;56;03
Robin
Thank you. I'm so excited. Well, my house is haunted. In Brooklyn, of all places. So my husband and I were looking for a house, and no matter what we did, we couldn't find anything that was in our price range. And it didn't look like shit. So we were kind of, like, stuck. This was like about 20 years ago, and we didn't know if we were going to ever find anything, and I really didn't care.

00;21;56;03 - 00;22;22;02
Robin
I liked my apartment, but my husband wanted to buy. And one day he just called me and he had found something. He says, come quick and and I've got the perfect house. And I, I knew where we were going. I'd worked on that street before. It was a shitty street. It was a nasty neighborhood. Was exactly where he never wanted to live.

00;22;22;04 - 00;22;49;06
Robin
And as I walk down the street, that's exactly what it looked like. It was really ugly. All it looked like every house was falling apart, and, that there was junk on the street and trash on the street. And I walk up and I'm so excited. I don't want to hurt his feelings or anything. And, I go in, up the stairs and I start to open the door.

00;22;49;06 - 00;23;20;21
Robin
And that's when I knew the door opened as if I wasn't pulling it. And as soon as I walked in, it was as if there was a big embrace just like this. And I could feel something around me saying, welcome your home. Something. And oh, man, I'm crazy. I don't want to live here. But I kept feeling it so it didn't matter.

00;23;20;21 - 00;23;51;03
Robin
I, I went into the place. It was really even worse than I imagined. Went up the stairs. The there had junky like wallpaper. It was falling apart. It had nasty plush, piles. And no matter what I looked, it was bad. The windows, you name it, everything was out of date. At least 40 to 50 years. And, I'm thinking I really can't live there.

00;23;51;03 - 00;24;22;11
Robin
But still, over my shoulder was this. You do want to live here? And Tom and I went and looked around and we were in the living room, and he put his arm around me. We look out at what is a jungle of native Brooklyn flora and fauna, going up as high as the second floor. And that's when we both got it.

00;24;22;14 - 00;24;50;28
Robin
This was going to be our home, so we bought the place and everything that could go wrong went wrong. In the first year that the ceiling leaked, the boiler. I never knew what a boiler was that fell apart, exploded. The doors stuck. There were holes. Oh, this was a great one. Did you know that floors can sink?

00;24;51;01 - 00;25;19;17
Robin
It just went on and on. But one day my husband was out with his son playing basketball, and I'm alone at night, and I got my two cats. I'm in bed by myself, and I'm reading. And the two cats are, you know, cats come. They're both right up against me. And, everything is nice. And then all of a sudden it gets really cold, like, really freezing cold.

00;25;19;17 - 00;25;51;22
Robin
And my cats have just pushed up against me, and they're staring. And I'm thinking, what is going on? And that's when I see the cigar smoke. Exactly like my uncle said. He used to smoke real cheap cigar, a sweet and fruity kind of nasty at the very end.

00;25;51;24 - 00;26;14;15
Robin
And I was so scared, I, I, I didn't know what to say except get out of here. But I couldn't say it. I couldn't even find that ice, you know, along the lines of, I'm scared of you. Please leave. And it did for the moment. And all of a sudden the heat came back and the lights went on.

00;26;14;15 - 00;26;37;29
Robin
Oh, I forgot to tell you. The lights had gone out. The door opened. The door had closed. And that was that. And my husband thought I was crazy. Absolutely crazy, you know? But that was until he saw his father in our backyard, in his father's face, in one of the birds in our backyard. And his father started talking to him.

00;26;37;29 - 00;27;03;22
Robin
So now I'm officially not crazy. We have somebody named Chester that walks in our house. And according to a friend of mine, a couple of my friends who are Santa is they said they really like what you've done with the house and so fine, they're welcome in. So that's a story to come to. My house is my friend over there has she'll tell you it's it's true.

00;27;03;22 - 00;27;18;12
Robin
It's a very friendly spirit. It likes us and it will like you to see.

00;27;18;15 - 00;27;49;19
Sasha Graham
Here's to friendly spirits and the homes they haunt. I love a good haunted house. So much so that I created the tarot of the haunted House, which was released by Los Caravaggio in 2018. I created a YouTube series explaining the deck card by card. So if you want to check it out or learn more about the art of reading and interpreting tarot cards, check out my website, Sasha graham.com or my YouTube channel.

00;27;49;25 - 00;28;20;14
Sasha Graham
Sasha Tarot Diva. Do you have an interesting ghost story? I'd love to hear it and maybe have you on the show. Drop me a line Sasha graham.com and put ghost stories in the subject. That's all for now. Until we meet again. This is Sasha Graham signing off on a starry night. Stay spooky, stay cozy. And don't be afraid of the dark.