Spooks
As the cult of the Dakota grew and flourished, as the building aged, and as more and more of the first families made their quiet way out the Undertaker’s Gate, it is perhaps not surprising that the building should have acquired its share of ghosts. Long before Roman Polanski used the Dakota’s exterior for his film Rosemary’s Baby, there were rumors to the effect that the building was the scene of all sorts of strange, eerie, supernatural goings-on.
In Ira Levin’s novel, the apartment house in which most of the action takes place was not called the Dakota, but was made to sound very much like it. When the movie crew arrived the Dakota again became quite a tourist attraction. And while one of the film’s goriest scenes—a suicide—was being shot, the carriage entrance and courtyard were used. For several days a mangled and bloodied “corpse” lay in the courtyard, in full view of startled passers-by, many of whom thought the mannequin was a real person.
Some wags have nicknamed the Dakota “the Dracula” because of its ominous and forbidding appearance, and a number of the building’s employees insist that the building is haunted. Chatting with a doorman one rainy night while waiting for a cab, Rex Reed confided that one of the Dakota’s former residents he would most like to have known was the late Boris Karloff. (Mr. Reed thinks that he has Boris Karloff’s old apartment, but he is wrong.) The doorman lowered his voice and said, “He’ll be back—wait and see.”
Aside from this sort of thing, there have been other odd happenings within the building that are harder to explain. Jo Mielziner, for example, was one man who was particularly devoted to the Dakota, and he kept scrapbooks of bits and pieces of Dakota history. He often said he suspected there were “spirits” in the place. He died in 1976 outside the Dakota’s door, in a taxi, on his way home from a visit with his doctor. For several weeks after his death, queer things went on in the building’s cavernous basement. Tenant Wilbur Ross, a banker, was summoned suddenly to the basement by a frightened porter who reported that a heavy snow shovel, which had been hanging properly against a wall, had all at once flung itself twenty feet across the room and landed in the middle of the floor. Later, neatly stacked plastic bags of garbage that had been waiting to go out by the service door similarly flew into the center of the room. Mr. Ross himself, an American representative of the House of Rothschild and a man one would not expect to be impressed by spiritualist phenomena, insists he saw a heavy metal bar make the same uncanny journey through the air and land a short distance from his feet. When he tried to lift the bar it was too heavy for him. During this same period one of the four ancient service elevators, manually operated affairs requiring cables and pulleys, suddenly began to rise from the basement level of its own accord. It took four strong men, wrestling at the cables, to bring it down again. In time these manifestations ceased, but it was widely assumed that they had something to do with Jo Mielziner’s impatience with his new whereabouts.
Then, just as New York has had its Mad Bomber and its Son of Sam, the Dakota for a period had its Mad Slasher or, as he was sometimes called, the Phantom of the Dakota. The Mad Slasher seemed primarily intent upon vandalizing the cages of the new automatic passenger elevators that had been recently installed. He gouged deep, violently angry slashes into the paneled elevator walls. He could not have had anything to do with the ghost of Jo Mielziner because Mielziner himself had designed the new elevators and had been very proud of them. The slashes appeared high up on the elevator walls, so they could not have been inflicted by a child, and the cuts were so deep that a person of some strength seemed indicated. New slashings appeared week after week; the perpetrator had to be someone within the building. Rumors flew as to who it might be, and neighbors looked at neighbors with heightened suspicion. At the same time, strange piles of shredded paper were found in the ninth-floor corridors, as though someone were trying to start a fire. Then, one afternoon, a full gallon can of paint fell—or was hurled—from the rooftop into the courtyard below, narrowly missing a tenant who was walking through. The can exploded on the pavement. No painting had been going on on the roof at the time. Now the suspicion turned to fear. Was there a murderer in their midst? Volunteers posted themselves, hidden with field glasses, to try to catch the Phantom at his work. Though they managed to observe various private diversions in their neighbors’ apartments, they noted nothing untoward. Then, as suddenly as the Slasher’s activities had begun, they stopped. No clue as to who the Slasher might have been has ever been uncovered, though there remain, not surprisingly, a number of theories.
Writer Rex Reed had his own unsettling experience. Shortly after moving into his eighth-floor five-room apartment, he and his decorator, Richard Ridge, began extensive renovations. The work was nearly completed. None of the workmen who had been in the apartment smoked, Reed himself was out for the evening and his apartment was presumably empty. And yet, somehow, a pile of shavings and scraps just inside his front door caught fire. The fire was discovered, but by the time it was put out smoke and water damage required the apartment to be redone from scratch. “It was horrible,” he says. “When I came home, I thought, ‘Welcome to the Dakota!’ My God, this place really is haunted.” The cause of the fire was never determined.
The Dakota’s elevators have always occupied a special place in the building’s history. When first installed they were original Otis hydraulics and they were the first elevators in New York to be placed in a residential building. For years they were operated by a team of Mary Petty-type, white-haired Irish ladies who wore dresses of black bombazine—a fabric unheard-of since the turn of the century—relieved with touches of white lace at the wrists and collars. Even after the elevators were automated in the early 1960’s, they made their journeys between floors with agonizing slowness and had a persistent habit of stopping at the wrong floors.
An odd report once came from a group of men who were doing some interior painting in the building. A beautiful little blond child had suddenly appeared in the corridor, wearing high white stockings, patent-leather shoes with silver buckles and a dress of yellow taffeta that seemed to come from another century. She was bouncing a red ball. “It’s my birthday,” she said and, still bouncing her ball she disappeared down the corridor. The description of the little girl in the yellow dress matched no child then in the building, and she has never been identified. Not long after that, one of the painters slipped from a scaffold and fell through a stairwell to his death, and the little ghost girl was regarded as a messenger of ill omen.
For years Mrs. Henry Blanchard was convinced that the Blanchards’ fifth-floor apartment was haunted. All sorts of strange rumblings, creaks and mutterings seemed to emerge from the vicinity of her pantry. Finally, however, a plumber convinced her that these noises were caused by air bubbling in the water pipes behind the plaster. “I’m a little disappointed,” says Mrs. Blanchard, “to find out that my ghost was air.” On the other hand, Frederic Weinstein, a writer, and his wife Suzanne are not at all certain that the noises they hear in their third-floor apartment have a natural explanation. In their dining room they often hear footsteps, restless pacings back and forth. Weinstein, furthermore, has noticed that, though he is usually not clumsy, an unusual number of accidents have befallen him in the dining room. He has tripped and fallen, skidded on floors and rugs, slipped from stepladders, had chairs slide out from underneath him. The accidents keep happening, just as the sound of footsteps continues to be heard. Not long ago Frederic Weinstein had a most curious experience. He was walking home to the Dakota and, before crossing the street, paused to look up, as apartment dwellers often do, at the windows of his apartment, which faces both Seventy-second Street and the Park. He was startled to see, through the windows of his living room, an enormous crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling, ablaze with light. He checked the windows again, counted the floors. It was obviously his apartment; no other apartment occupies that particular third-floor corner. And yet he knew that his apartment contained no crystal chandelier, nor had it as long as he had lived there. Of course when he got upstairs the crystal chandelier had gone. But there was, as there had been from the time the Weinsteins had taken the apartment, a round nipple protruding from the center of the living-room ceiling from which, once upon a time, a chandelier of some sort had clearly hung.
If it had not been for these weird events, Frederic Weinstein would have paid little heed to another odd thing that happened in his apartment not long ago. He had been playing a Ouija-board-type game with his children—one that involved lettered tiles that spelled out the board’s answers. During the course of the session the spirit-messages appeared to be coming from a little girl. When he and the children had finished with the game, Weinstein stacked the lettered tiles neatly and put them on a bookshelf. Several days later, however, he discovered that two of the tiles had made their way into pockets of one of his suits. A third turned up in his eyeglass case. As he withdrew them, one by one, the letters were “I,” “C” and “U.” This, he feels, was intended to convey to him that someone in the apartment was saying, “I see you.” It is, he assumes, the same party that is causing him to stumble in his dining room.
One of the most bizarre supernatural experiences at the Dakota involves the John Lennons. The Lennons have become the Dakota’s Mystery Couple, though when they first expressed an interest in the building, there was no small amount of resistance to them. They were assumed to have an unconventional life-style. It was feared that they would have large, noisy parties with music and amplifiers. As a result of some drug-related charges in England, there had been a period when the United States State Department had wanted John Lennon out of the country, and there were those at the Dakota who felt the same way about him. But after moving into the Dakota the Lennons kept to themselves, gave few if any entertainments and expressed a wish for absolute privacy. At the same time, when they emerge from the building in their unusual costumes (Lennon in blue jeans, a long black cape, a Mexican sombrero, often sucking a baby’s pacifier; his stocky little wife, also in jeans, in one of a variety of fright-wig hairdos) and step into their His and Hers chauffeur-driven silver limousines, they are a bit conspicuous. In their disguises, however, the Lennons are seldom recognized on the street and are usually dismissed as run-of-the mill New York eccentrics.
Still, the Lennons continue to amaze. In the elevators, in front of other tenants, John and Yoko Lennon openly discuss their finances, reportedly saying such things as, “Well, we fooled them, didn’t we? It wasn’t thirteen million dollars they were offering—it was only three.” The Lennons’ immediate neighbors on the seventh floor were not too pleased when John Lennon crisscrossed the staircase balustrade in the elevator entrance with twine, ostensibly to keep the Lennons’ young son Sean from falling through the railing. Lennon also keeps a studio on the ground floor, where he plays his guitar, and neighbors were put off to see that he had scrawled HELTER-SKELTER in large letters across one wall (forgetting that “Helter-Skelter” had been the title of a Beatles record long before it became associated with the Charles Manson family.) Later, HELTER-SKELTER was removed, and the walls were painted to simulate blue sky and clouds. John Lennon, when he encounters his neighbors, is usually pleasant and friendly; his wife seems less so. As a result of the Lennons’ presence in the building, the Dakota switchboard has had to handle as many as thirty calls a day from fans trying to be put through to one or the other of the Lennons. At times, small groups of fans gather outside the building, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Lennons as they come or go. The fans may not always recognize the Lennons, but they know their cars, and each time a silver limousine appears there is a small, collective gasp. Occasionally photographers lurk as well, in which case—alerted by José, the doorman—the Lennons trick them by using the basement service door. Unsolicited gift packages are always arriving for the Lennons, either through the mail or delivered by hand, and when one of these was found to contain a chalky substance that did not quite look like talcum powder, John Lennon ordered that all such gifts be placed immediately in the garbage can.
At times, too, Lennon fans have succeeded in slipping past the security guards and gates, and getting into the building. There they become nuisances, ringing doorbells trying to find the Lennons. A number of people in the Dakota were rather amused when, at the inaugural reception for President Carter, John Lennon stepped forward and introduced himself to the President. The President looked blank. “I used to be a Beatle,” Lennon explained, a trifle lamely. The President continued to look blank.
When the Lennons moved to the Dakota, they took the apartment that had formerly belonged to the actor Robert Ryan. Robert Ryan’s wife Jessie, to whom he was devoted, died of cancer at the Dakota, and because of the unhappy memories and associations the apartment held for him, Ryan moved out soon afterward—to 88 Central Park South, which has become sort of a haven for ex-Dakotans who, by reason of divorce, widowhood or other change of circumstance, have felt it necessary to depart from their beloved building. There, Ryan himself later died.
Before settling in the Ryans’ old apartment, the Lennons decided that it would be wise to hold a séance to see what spirits might be inhabiting their new home. A medium was summoned, and she very quickly made contact with Jessie Ryan. Mrs. Ryan informed the Lennons that she considered their apartment her home too, and that she intended to stay there. She would not, however, disturb them in any way. They could lead their lives as they wished. Jessie Ryan was apparently as gracious and charming from the Beyond as she had been in life.
Yoko Ono Lennon then telephoned the Ryans’ daughter Lisa to tell her that her late mother was still happily at home in the Dakota. Lisa Ryan was not particularly pleased or amused at this news. “If my mother’s ghost belongs anywhere, it’s here with me—not with them,” she said.
Perhaps the most interesting ghost, however, was the “man with a wig” who appeared in the late 1930’s to an electrician named John Paynter, who was working in the building at the time. Paynter had become fascinated with the building’s wiring, and some of the pieces of circuitry were so antique and unfamiliar to him that he frequently had to take them home with him to take them apart and study them to see how they worked. Late one evening he returned to the Dakota and descended to the basement to continue tinkering with wires and fuses. All at once, out of the shadows, appeared a small man in a frock coat and winged collar. He had a short beard, a large nose and wore tiny, steel-rimmed glasses. The man glared fiercely at Mr. Paynter for several moments, then reached up, snatched off the wig he was wearing and shook it angrily in Paynter’s face. Then, just as swiftly, he disappeared. The “man with a wig” appeared to Mr. Paynter on four subsequent occasions, each time pulling off the wig and making the same angry gesture.
Mr. Paynter had never heard of the first Mr. Edward Clark. But Clark had a short beard, a large nose, wore small, steel-rimmed spectacles and a wig. If the apparition was indeed Mr. Clark, the angry gesture might have been Mr. Clark’s way of expressing his feelings about the fact that the building was losing money.