If you walk in New York City’s NoHo neighborhood, you might come across a building that is unlike any on those blocks. The brick and marble row house on Fourth Street has an ornate iron fence, elegant columns framing the door, and bold, green shutters. But everyone who’s ever lived there has also died there, and all of their furnishings are exactly as they left them .

This is the 1832 late-Federal and Greek Revival Merchant’s House, and it is “a designated landmark on the federal, state, and city level.”

Foreign Press Correspondent Matthew Deming observes that “walking through the home is like being in a time-capsule.” They go on to explain a bit of its history:

“Seabury Tredwell had a successful hardware store business in the early 1800s in New York City. He and his wife Eliza Parker had seven children prior to buying the house, now named the Merchant’s House, in 1835. Their eighth child, Gertrude, was born in that house in 1840. Seabury died as the Civil War neared its end in 1865; his wife Eliza remained at the house until her own death in 1882. However, their three daughters, Phebe, Julia and Gertrude remained at the house for the rest of their lives.”

Editor Tom Meyers and journalist Greg Young, who co-produce the podcast The Bowery Boys, says that “strange experiences have been reported by employees, by volunteers, and visitors to the Merchant’s House since it opened as a museum in the 1930s.”

“Now one can choose to believe what one chooses to believe, but I can actually tell you there are some things that have actually happened to me.” Carl Raymond, one of the Merchant House’s Docents, says: “Now Gertrude, we know, loved her life here. We certainly believe that she did, and some people say she really never left when she died in 1933…Gertrude loved to play the piano, and over the years, people have commented on hearing piano music throughout the house , including me when I was leading a tour here as a tour guide back in 2012.”

In contrast, another one of “the city’s biggest haunted attractions” is Blood Manor, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Anne Kadet, for the Wall Street Journal, says that “Jim Faro, a property attorney and co-producer of Blood Manor…got started when he turned his suburban colonial into a haunted house for the neighborhood. Every year, he cleared his downstairs of furniture, installing animatronic monsters, smoke machines and spooky lighting. One Halloween, an event planner pulled up and started asking questions. Within a year, Blood Manor was born.” She describes it as “the most traditional of the city’s major haunted houses.” And by traditional, she means what most people might first think of as a ‘haunted house’: “just your usual killer clowns, 3-D effects, cockroaches and ghouls jumping out of the woodwork. The scariest room: the dimly lit, mirrored meat locker. Nothing beats flailing around for the exit while dodging crazed killers and swinging cadavers.”

I had the chance to speak with one of these ‘ghouls,’ Nicole Goldstien. She is a professional actor and singer, who has also been known to host a magic show or two, who worked at Blood Manor as a Scare Actor: a performer who interacts with guests in frightening ways. She recalls some of her experiences with a bit she often used about being sacrificed. “I can’t tell you the amount of couples that came in…and the amount of guys who tried to sacrifice their girlfriends. It was, telling.”

When I asked if she believed in ghosts, she said “I feel like I’m open minded about it, don’t feel strongly either way, but I think these types of stories are really interesting. They told us Blood Manor was definitely haunted. And there were things that we couldn’t explain. Like random things suddenly falling in the room I was acting in.”

But when I asked the scare actor what she thinks people get out of haunted attractions, she spoke of something very different. She said that “the sense of the supernatural is intriguing, and scary…there’s something cool about ‘there might be more out there’ or the possibility of an afterlife. Now reincarnation, like how some kids tell stories from their past lives. That’s super interesting. That I believe in a bit more.”

Colloquially, we might call these attractions “haunted houses”. But I think a true haunted house is just that: a house that is haunted. Blood Manor serves to scare, but Merchant’s House serves to connect. Connect us to the history and lives of those who have passed.

The ghost of the Merchant’s House Museum is presumed to be Gertrude Tredwell, the Seaburys’ youngest child, who was born in the home in 1840 and died in 1933 near the bed she was born in, “because she is thought to be the only family member with a grievance deep enough to last beyond the grave,” as reported in Liesl Schillinger’s Haunted.

Gertrude’s father forbade her from marrying or seeing the man she loved because of a difference in religion, and she had no choice but to stay an unmarried woman in the house for the rest of her life. Between the upstairs bedrooms there is a trapdoor to the basement, where some believe she crept out to the garden to spend time with her secret lover.

Schillinger goes on to say “it was a sad affair; so sad that many people think Henry James used it as the basis of his novel Washington Square; so sad that, more than 150 years later, Gertrude has not yet gotten over it.”

This follows Avery Gordon’s thoughts about trauma in Death and Haunting. They say that haunting is rooted in fear and “always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present… the domain of turmoil and trouble…”

Carl Raymond, one of the Merchant House’s docents, describes in a tour just how little has changed in the house: “This was where Gertrude was born. In that bed, in that very space in 1840. The beds have never moved. We know that because of the soft wooden floor and the indentations the bed has made here. But let me take you to the room just less than a hundred feet away where she died…so it’s extraordinary that the bed where she was born and the bed where she died are so incredibly close to each other, and she died in the same bed that her father had died in all those years before”.

Marisa Karyl Franz argues that the fact that Gertrude barely updated the material things in the house is the reason visitors to the museum have such an intimate connection with her. “The material effects of the ghosts are narrated in the stories that are told about them and through the affective relationships that configure the liminal space of home and museum as vital. This haunted intimacy rejects the death frame of the historic house, and instead invites an affective relationship with the deceased family.”

But this connection is at risk. A developer, Kalodop II Park Corporation, wants to demolish the one-story garage on the lot and construct a new eight-story building. The museum has been successfully fighting off this potential development next door for over a decade. But in December 2023, “the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) — the city agency responsible for preserving historical buildings — approved development plans for the neighboring lot” reports Washington Square News’ Emma Grimes.

Grimes goes on to relay that “the Merchant’s House Executive Director Margaret Gardiner said that she is worried that the vibrations could collapse the ceiling and damage the original furniture inside. In preparation, museum employees plan to transfer the interior collection into storage and temporarily close the museum, which will cost an estimated $5 million. Gardiner said she had been trying to come up with an alternative plan, but was unsuccessful in finding a preventative solution.”

New York’s Landmarks Conservancy declares that Merchant’s House Museum is “New York City’s only family house preserved intact – inside and out – from the 19th century.” But 19th century plaster walls, and especially ceilings, were strong for the time, but are extremely vulnerable to modern-day construction vibrations, relays Artnet.

The New York City Council had been voting down the development in the past, but “the current plan does not require action by the Council because it does not involve zoning waivers, as the earlier one did,” describes The New York Times. About a week after that article was written, the LPC wrote in a status update letter that the “LPC and interested parties will be notified in real time of any breach of the vibration threshold.” But if the vibration threshold is breached, damage will have already been done. Andrew Berman, Executive Director of Village Preservation, adds that “we’ve had multiple experiences with the city where precautions that were supposed to be taken never happened and buildings were damaged as a result,” he told The New York Times.

And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. New York has been struggling with new developments for a long time, but Berman has noticed a pattern: “We’ve seen an ever-increasing rash of vulnerable historic buildings in our city and neighborhood suffer serious damage from work next door. The Merchant’s House Museum must not be allowed to be the next victim of a system of failed governmental oversight.”

Carl Raymond, one of the Museum’s docents I spoke of earlier, shared some of the symbolism in the House’s plaster work:

“Life and death was so close to people in the nineteenth century. We don’t think about that today because of our modern medicine. In fact, if you look at the top of the room, you’ll see the original plaster from 1832, and the design in the middle is called egg and dart. And you see the shape of the egg next to the dart, that represents life and death. So even in people’s living spaces, they were constantly reminded of that.”

Now, development next door threatens these architectural artworks of this historic institution. To fight back, the Museum is asking people to take the time to sign their letter to the Mayor’s office, and to consider donating to their legal fund.