Is Staten Island New York’s most haunted borough? The record

Halloween coverage in New York City this week has a new headline: Staten Island, the borough New Yorkers joke about forgetting, is “the most haunted.” Time Out New York published the claim on October 21, 2026, in a piece by Laura Ratliff that rests on remarks Andrea Janes, founder of the walking-tour company Boroughs of the Dead, gave to the New York Post. “It’s wall-to-wall ghosts,” Janes told the paper, and, asked for the single most haunted place on the island, she answered, “the entire island.”

It is a good line, but it is one person’s opinion, as Time Out itself notes; nobody has counted ghosts across the five boroughs. What can be checked is the history the claim is built on. Several of the places named do have dramatic, well-documented pasts. Others carry stories that the record does not support.

The Quarantine: the documented violence

Time Out points to the New York Marine Hospital, known as “the Quarantine,” which opened in 1799 to isolate people with infectious diseases, among them yellow fever. This is the best-documented episode on the list. According to a JSTOR Daily account, the state-run hospital stood on the island’s northeastern shore, a little south of today’s ferry terminal, and could see as many as 8,000 patients in a year. Local residents, who feared the disease it brought to their doorstep, had long opposed it; in 1848 they petitioned the state to remove it.

On the night of September 1, 1858, a mob stormed the hospital and set it on fire, and residents returned the next night to burn what was left. The sources disagree on the human cost. JSTOR Daily, drawing on a 2004 study in Public Health Reports, says shots were fired and two people died on the first night; the Old Salt Blog says that “remarkably no one died.” We could not settle that from the pages we read, so we leave it open. Those arrested for leading the attack were found not guilty at trial, according to JSTOR Daily.

None of this is a ghost story in the record. Any haunting tied to the site is a later layer of folklore on a real episode of fear, disease and vigilantism.

The Conference House: a famous meeting, no murdered servant on record

The Conference House in Tottenville is celebrated for a real event. On September 11, 1776, Lord Richard Howe, the British admiral, met there with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Edward Rutledge in an attempt at peace talks that failed, according to the Historic Districts Council’s landmark description. The same description describes it as the grandest seventeenth-century manor house left on the island and says nothing at all about ghosts.

The ghost stories Time Out repeats are of a murdered servant and spectral soldiers. Time Out itself adds a caution: the alleged killing “hasn’t been substantiated by historical evidence.” That is the right way to read it. The meeting is history; the servant is, so far, legend.

Sea View and Kreischer: real history, unverified hauntings

Sea View Hospital, which Time Out says opened in 1913 to treat tuberculosis, is another site where the history is solid. Wagner College’s library guide gives the opening year as 1912, so accounts differ by a year, and describes it as one of the largest municipal facilities for treating tuberculosis in the country. The same guide notes that from its early years only African American nurses were hired to work there, until the hospital closed in the 1960s. One of its buildings still stands and, Wagner’s guide says, has been refurbished as a catering hall. Tales of voices and orbs there come from visitors and explorers, not from any institution’s records.

The Kreischer Mansion on Arthur Kill Road was built in the 1880s for brick manufacturer Edward Kreischer, who died of a gunshot wound in 1894, Time Out reports. Time Out also notes that a man named Robert McKelvey was murdered at the property in 2005. The reported phenomena there, figures in windows, furniture moving and kitchen clatter, are claims made by tour guides and visitors, and they are unverified.

If you ask me what is the most haunted place in Staten Island, I would say the entire island.

Andrea Janes, Boroughs of the Dead, to the New York Post, as quoted by Time Out (October 21, 2026)

How to read a “most haunted” claim

A National Desk feature from 2023 shows the pattern. Its author toured Fort Wadsworth, Moravian Cemetery and other sites, repeated the local stories, and reported seeing nothing at several of them. At Fort Wadsworth she relayed visitors’ accounts of a glowing figure in a Civil War uniform, and at one battery she described only a feeling of being watched. Those are individual reports, not evidence of a haunting.

Staten Island’s claim to being unusually haunted is easier to explain by its history than by anything unexplained. The island was a quarantine station, a poor farm, a tuberculosis hospital, a Civil War-era fort and the site of 1776 peace talks, and several of its old buildings still stand. Places like that collect stories, and tour operators have a business reason to tell them well. Time Out notes that Janes leaves one site, the former Willowbrook State School, off her tours because its history of institutional abuse is “too sad.” That is a reminder that some of the island’s most serious history involves real people, not entertainment.

The honest summary: Staten Island has a rich, sometimes violent past, and plenty of ghost stories attached to it. “Most haunted” is a marketing superlative, and a good one for Halloween week. For the documented cases we have written up in the state, see our New York page.