I grew up in a haunted house. The house was built fifty years before my family moved in with what my sister and I are certain were ghosts—ones that were particularly fond of the basement and attic. We felt things there, musty things, old things, trapped things. It was in that basement that I would become familiar with the invisible-fingers-on-the-back-of-the-neck sensation I would come to associate with the presence of the no longer living.
It didn’t help that the house was just off Buckout Road… Google it, you’ll see what I mean. [Side note, I once spent a terrifying evening babysitting a toddler named Bruce in a house on Buckout Road, one whose back windows looked out into pitch blackness.]
Our basement had several rooms, including a maid’s room and a barroom—all of which our parents used for storage. There were a lot of corners where things could lurk. There was, if memory serves, a mirror behind the abandoned bar, and of course ghosts love mirrors.
I didn’t give too much thought to ghosts for years after leaving that house. Then in 2001 I moved to Ninth Street, right down the block from what was then Village restaurant. It, too, is an old space with a storied history seeped into its bones.
Village became my regular hangout. I got friendly with the staff, witnessed how they interacted as a loving and occasionally dysfunctional family. Some of them were typical hospitality folks—actors and writers and others who’d come to New York to do one thing, taken a job that was meant to be temporary, and stayed long past their expected expiration dates. Around the same time, I started having what my sister and I call “the vapors.” Reclaiming the phrase from its Victorian origins, we used it to refer to that back of the neck feeling, and on more than one occasion, mine proved insightful. I walked into the home of someone I didn’t know for a daytime party and got the tingly feeling—asked if someone had died there and learned that the host’s roommate had recently passed. I was apartment hunting and had a foreboding sense about an otherwise quite decent place; turns out the previous tenant had not moved out. And finally at Village, where the ladies’ room is on the second floor—one day as I climbed the stairs the feeling came on so viscerally that I couldn’t bring myself to open the door. This went on for weeks until I finally asked the bartender if the ladies’ room was haunted. “Yeah, a lot of people say that it is,” he said.
It was the combination of learning the staff’s dynamic and experiencing the haunted ladies’ room that percolated and became the basis for The Coat Check Girl. Recently, I’ve returned to the restaurant (pictured above), which has gone through several iterations since Village closed. We asked the bartender whether he’d experienced anything paranormal there, and he nodded. “I hate closing this place by myself,” he said. We asked the same of our server, who looked nauseated and didn’t want to talk about it. And that ladies’ room, which is largely unchanged from its Village days—it still doesn’t feel quite empty.