Gertrude Tredwell's House on East Fourth Street

At 29 East Fourth Street stands a brick rowhouse finished in 1832, the only nineteenth-century family home in Manhattan preserved inside and out. The merchant Seabury Tredwell bought it in 1835, and his family lived here for almost a century. His youngest daughter, Gertrude, was born in an upstairs bedroom in 1840. She never married, outlived her siblings, and spent her last years keeping the house much as her father had left it. She died here in 1933, aged 93. A relative saved the house from auction, and it opened as a museum in 1936 with the Tredwells' furniture, clothes and dishes still inside. Since then, staff, volunteers, neighbors and passersby have reported sounds, sightings and smells they could not explain, and many put them down to Gertrude. The New York Times once called it Manhattan's most haunted house. None of it can be proven. Each October the museum leads candlelight ghost tours through the rooms.