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The White House by Moonlight is a classic text written by Walt Whitman.It begins “A SPELL of fine soft weather. I wander about a good deal, sometimes at night under the moon. To-night took a long look at the President’s house. The white portico—the palace-like, tall, round columns, spotless as snow” Ghosts of Albany Blog…

Senator Harry S Truman was such a hard worker that he set a demanding pace that few subordinates could match. Senator Truman arrived at the Capitol so early that the cleaning staff gave him own set of keys so he could get into the building. Secret Servicemen found it hard to keep up with his…

One of the most intriguing stories in Charleston, South Carolina is the mysterious disappearance of Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of former Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr. She was married to Governor Joseph Alston, one of the most wealthy and powerful men in South Carolina in his day. The deed in her name…

The Albany Free Library was founded in 1900 and became the Albany Public Library in 1922 following a merger with a publicly-fu8nded branch.  It moved into its current main building in 1977, a former facility operated by the IRS.  It serves to coordinate library resources for the capital region and upper Hudson River Valley area….

I have been doing ghost walks since 2005 and started an all-year-round ghost company in 2006.  In all these years, I remained a skeptic of the ghostly experience except on two occasions. In 2005, when I first started doing ghost walks and I still did them personally, I ended a tour at the cellar of…

NYC Walks Blog 17 Harry Houdini in NYC © 2018 by Philip Ernest Schoenberg, Ph. D. Introduction When his father’s rabbi gig ended in Appleton, Wisconsin, the family returned to Lower East Side of Manhattan.  One of the many jobs that Harry did was working as a locksmith.  He commenced a career in show business…

Ghosts of New York Blog 16 Is Grant’s Tomb Haunted? © 2018 by Dr. Philip Ernest Schoenberg. Ghost with a Blog #ghosts Far to the south of Albany overlooking the Hudson River is haunted site in New York City. Ulysses S. Grant, the leading Union General, was considered the greatest American on the Union side…

Ghosts of New Haven Blog 14 Sergeant Stubby Gets His Own Animated Adventure © 2018 By Dr. Philip Ernest Schoenberg, Ghost with a Blog It is not often you get a local hero glorified and it a dog no less! Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero is a 2018 computer-animated adventure film centering on the real-life Sergeant Stubby, a stray Pit Bull Terrier mix who becomes a hero during World War I. Directed and co-written by Richard Lanni, it features the voices of Logan Lerman, Helena Bonham Carter and Gérard Depardieu. The film was released in North America on April 13, 2018 by Fun Academy Motion Pictures, and received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised it for its “sensitivity and charm” as well as the realistic tone, accuracy, and voice performances of Lerman and Depardieu. The cinematic cartoon manages to…

Ghosts of Albany Blog 12 The Ghost Ship of the Hudson River © 2018 by Dr. Philip Ernest Schoenberg, Ghost with a Blog #ghost It was noised about New Amsterdam, in the days of Governor Peter Stuyvesant of yore, that a round and bulky ship flying Dutch colors from her lofty quarter was careening up…

Ghosts of Albany Blog 7 Charles Hoy Fort © 2017 by Dr. Philip Ernest Schoenberg, Ghost with a Blog #ghost Perhaps not coincidentally, Albany was the birthplace of Charles Hoy Fort, an American writer and researcher into “anomalous phenomena” – that is, the unexplained. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various…

  Among the many handsome old houses on Arbor Hill’s Ten Broeck Avenue is one tall brownstone that is the site of a very unusual haunting, the Ten Broeck Mansion.. The ghost that walks its uppermost floors seems to have no connection to the building itself. A gentleman named George Dawson built the house, with…

Abraham Lincoln’s death train has been reported inside New York City’s limits, even inside Grand Central Station, though it did not exist at the time. Before there was a Grand Central, there were rail tracks on Fourth or Park Avenue. In April 1865, Abraham Lincoln’s body began a funeral journey from Washington, D.C., via New…