CBH Talk | Haunted Brooklyn: Ghosts, Folklore, and the Stories We Tell

Just in time for Halloween, enter the shadowy world of gothic Brooklyn, where haunted houses, restless spirits, buried secrets, and unsettling legends speak to far more than a taste for the macabre.

At the center of the conversation is Melrose Hall, the fabled Brooklyn mansion whose dark history has inspired tales of imprisonment, violence, and ghostly encounters for generations. Andrea Janes, founder of Boroughs of the Dead and an expert in New York City’s haunted histories, is joined by a formidable panel to bring the lore of Melrose Hall and other Brooklyn ghost stories to life. Leila Taylor, author of Darkly and Sick Houses, considers how race shapes what and whom we fear. Colin Dickey, whose work Ghostland and other investigations centering the strange and supernatural, looks at why haunted places and the stories attached to them persist in our collective imagination. And acclaimed novelist Victor LaValle, whose fiction uses horror and the fantastic to probe race, family, violence, and American society, explores what the gothic can reveal that more conventional storytelling sometimes cannot.

Together, they move between folklore, literature, history, and the gothic imagination to consider how tales of the supernatural expose very real anxieties about race, gender, sexual violence, social order, and power, and what Brooklyn’s ghosts might have to tell us about the world of the living.