The Dakota, one of the earliest apartment buildings on Central Park West in New York City circa 1890. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division
under the digital ID hhh.ny0360
Have you ever been to the Dakota in New York City? It’s a gorgeous building with a dark past.
John Lennon was famously murdered in the Southern archway in 1980. Some residents claim his ghost still haunts the grounds. One even said that he came home one night to find the ghost of John Lennon playing his piano😊
When Lennon was alive, he claimed to have seen ghosts in the building. He said he’d repeatedly seen the ghost of a woman crying in the hallway.
The building itself was constructed in the 1880s and was one of the earliest apartment complexes in the area. Many residents have lived and died there. Construction workers who did some work on the building in the 1960s said they’d occasionally see a ghostly figure with the body of a man and the face of a young boy wandering the grounds. Even now, some say they sometimes see the ghostly image of a young girl standing in the lower windows.
A resident named Frederick Weinstein claimed he’d sometimes see the lights of a chandelier in his apartment through the windows when he was on the street. The only problem was that he didn’t have any chandeliers in his apartment.
Residents left their apartments only to come and find large furniture and rugs had been rearranged. A porter at the building said a metal bar that was too heavy for him to lift flew through the air at him when he was in the basement and crashed at his feet.
No wonder this was the perfect location to film the famous movie, Rosemary’s Baby. That movie was said to be cursed with some of the people involved in the film suffering terribly after its release.
The composer who wrote the theme for the movie, Krzysztof Komeda, died after suffering a head injury from a fall a few months after the movie was released. He was only 37 years old.
After the movie’s release, the producer, William Castle, became consumed with worry and developed kidney stones. While delirious in the hospital, he would call out lines from the movie like “Rosemary, for God’s sake, drop the knife!” He was never involved in a successful movie again.
I don’t think I need to say what happened to Roman Polanski. Most people know about the Mansion Family murders.
The writer, Ira Levin’s marriage, fell apart soon after the movie’s release. In addition, he was harassed for demonizing religion in the book.
I recently read the book. I’d seen the movie many times but had never picked up the novel before. It’s definitely worth a read. Even though I knew what would happen, I was sucked into the story.
If you’re interested in reading about an unusual pregnancy, you might like my novella, Perfect Family. It’s not horror, but it is strange… as are many of my books😉