Darla Murray Gordon Linzner, who leads tours of locations that are reportedly haunted in the East Village, with a bust of Peter Stuyvesant.

Have you ever found yourself walking along the Bowery and heard the “clip-clop” of a wooden cane hitting the pavement behind you only to discover no one was there? Or have you developed a photograph snapped at Shelton Cemetery and discovered an unexplained streak of light smeared across it? Or what about a time when you’ve reached down from your stool at McSorley’s Ale House to stroke the cat that brushed up against your leg, then realized the only feline in the pub is asleep twenty feet away in the windowsill?

Phil Schoenberg, a history professor at Queens College by day and a ghost historian by night, can explain.

Mr. Schoenberg and his team of experts offer skeptics and believers 90-minute walking tours of so-called haunted locations of the East Village – an area of Manhattan often overlooked by paranormal enthusiasts who tend to focus on Greenwich Village and Midtown’s Theater District.

“The popular literature will always mention the Merchant’s House,” says Mr. Schoenberg, referring to the oft-cited 19th century red brick rowhouse on East Fourth Street said to be haunted by the former owner’s daughter, “but not much else in the East Village.”
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