Upper West Side Ghosts? Please — Have You Met Real Life?

By Yvonne Vávra

Ghosts, ghouls, the return of the dead? Sure, sure, sure. Bring it on. I’ll take on the spider darting out from a corner of my building’s lobby, and I’ll deal with all those severed, bloody limbs on your stoops. Decaying bodies swinging from the trees? Fine by me. None of it compares to the horrors of real life.

It’s Marathon Day tomorrow. Terrifying crowds, barricades everywhere, every escape route a dead end. I’d rather deal with a monster; at least I’d have a chance to run away.

What about scams, package theft, rats? Just a few weeks ago, I came across a post on a neighborhood message board about an Upper West Side man who’d found a rat sitting on his toilet seat and asked everyone what on earth he should do now.

Then there’s AI, and war, and authoritarianism, and deepfakes, and hair-raising corruption, and ghosts of the future swinging by with brutal summers, blizzards, and wildfire smoke the color of hell. Legionella lurking in the water system, falling tree branches every time the wind picks up, and ghosts haunting empty storefronts (probably, right?).

A tall building might rise in front of our best window. Our neighbor might embark on a lengthy drilling project. Or this might be the year when, come lease renewal time, we get priced out of belonging, out of the life we’ve built, out of the neighborhood we’ve helped make what it is.

How horrifying is the thought of failing as a parent, a friend, a human. Of losing your income, or everything and everyone dear to you, or your mind while waiting in a USPS line.

And Election Day is coming up. What if it turns out that all the things that should matter don’t?

Or what if a worm thingy drops out of a tree and into my hair? Because it happened once, and you know it probably happens all the time.

I should stop before I really get going. Oh, no, wait. What about the excruciating terror of realizing that life is happening now? That we’re not in some kind of pregame to the real thing, where we’re getting everything in order, clearing the decks, getting ourselves ready for that point in the future when life finally feels less out of control and more the way it’s supposed to.

But no. Nuh-uh. This is it. This is already it, and this is how it’s going to be until the end. Because there’s no getting around the fact that NOW always seems to be a little … problematic. Now, what about the horror of that existential twitch?

Also, how spooky is it to be watched all the time? My phone is alive, listening, turning my every mutter into an ad. Wherever I look, there’s the black eye of a camera, knowing I was here. My algorithm knows what I like, what I believe in, where I stand, what makes me laugh and what makes me cry.

I grew up in East Berlin under Stasi surveillance and, boy, would they have given their eye teeth for that kind of access. That third man we used to hear breathing on the line during our phone conversations surely spent an awful lot of time listening to an awful lot of nothing.

And let’s not forget the surveillance we inflict on ourselves. Once, I was scrolling through my feed when my former neighbor popped up, screaming at people clogging the sidewalk in front of Fred’s at 83rd and Amsterdam. She was going semi-viral, becoming the Karen of the hour.

What’s there to say? Looks like she lost it. One of those days.

But while people were there to record her at her worst and broadcasting it to tens of thousands, only a few of us knew that the person she’d become on the internet had little to do with how she showed up in the world the rest of the time. Frightening.

One of the scariest things of all is change, and it always means loss. The store owners we’ve bought our snacks from for the past decade close up shop, friends move away, we grow older and increasingly invisible, the neighborhood’s vibe changes, and are we still clicking?

After tonight, we’ll have to say goodbye to all those spooky creations that made October feel special, including that spectacular display of the New York Knicks’ game-winning shot at 150 West End Avenue. Too bad it all has to go. Just imagining all the quirky thinking and care that went into creating it makes me happy.

I’ll especially miss walking 82nd Street, having watched a video of Hillary Wallace of 153 West 82nd Street telling the story of how she bought 4,000 pumpkins at an auction for the pumpkinpalooza that is her “Chic Gothic Manor”-themed stoop.

4,000 pumpkins.

It gives me endless joy to imagine what she did with them all, because not all 4,000 made it onto her stoop. But, oh, the ones that did! My favorites are the ones with faces. I don’t know how they tracked down my dead grandpa, but that’s definitely his face on that pumpkin. Even spookier are the snake pumpkins, which I didn’t even know existed. They can grow up to five feet long, twisting and curling. Charming.

Oh, my ghost, I just had a truly terrifying thought: imagine being stuck on 82nd Street behind a truck unloading 4,000 pumpkins!

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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