Helayne Seidman
New York can be a scary place — to use the bathroom.
Ahead of Halloween, Gotham residents shared with The Post eerie encounters they’ve had in some of NYC’s spookiest places. And, strangely, several of the ghost stories took place in the toilet.
So make sure you look before you go.
The Bronx — Fordham University’s Martyrs’ Court
A decade ago, on the eve of Halloween, freshman Monica Fafaul found out why Fordham is ranked No. 1 as the most haunted university in the nation.
She woke up in her dorm room in Martyrs’ Court and couldn’t move.
“I was laying in bed face up, and on the ceiling, this white, long figure appeared with no face, and white, long clothes and long hair. And I felt like I was being choked. I remember trying to scream my roommate Emma’s name and I couldn’t,” Fafaul, now 27, recalled.
The apparition vanished but days later, one of her dormmates “was alone in the bathroom on our floor and a piece of toilet paper started floating on the ground in a circle and slammed back down,” she said.
Fafaul and her friends were so “freaked out,” they alerted their resident assistant, who promptly called campus ministry.
“They sent a resident minister to have a bathroom blessing on our floor. We said prayers and walked up and down the hallway and through the bathroom throwing holy water on all the doors,” she said. “After that we had no more issues.”
Before it was a university, Fordham, where parts of the 1973 horror classic “The Exorcist” were filmed, was a private residence called Rose Hill Manor, built by Benjamin Corsa in 1751 — and some believe it’s haunted by one of Corsa’s descendants.
Queens – Sac’s Place in Kaufman Astoria Studios
The Astoria eatery Sac’s Place, for which the “Soprano’s” character Johnny Sac is named, is housed on the lot of Kaufman Astoria Studios — and a woman believed to have died there allegedly haunts the restaurant.
Co-owner Anthony Sacramone had his first run-in with the ghost while the restaurant, housed in the movie studio’s former commissary, was under construction.
“I go into the girls bathroom, and I smell a specific brand of cigarettes [Chesterfield] because my father used to smoke those cigarettes in the old days,” Sacramone, 68, recalled.
“So I ran out and said, ‘Who’s smoking in here?’ I’m looking around and there’s nobody here. I’m talking to myself. Then I find out that there was a young lady in her 20s that passed away in there and the brand she smoked was Chesterfield.”
A month later, he smelled the cigarettes again, and customers confirmed the odor.
Kaufman Studios first opened in 1920 under Paramount Pictures. Scaramone said he asked a medium who frequently visited if the place was haunted.
“Anthony, this place is loaded with ghosts,’” she said, adding, “Everything’s cool. They like you guys.”
Brooklyn – Kings County Distillery in East Williamsburg
Employees of Kings County Distillery, which owns the 1896 gatehouses which served as the entryway to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, have reported frightening encounters in the basement of one, once a holding cell for prisoners, which is now their bathrooms.
“We hear doors slamming a lot when there’s absolutely no breeze. Myself as well as some of my staff have felt cold breezes passing through the space very randomly. Lights flicker on and off constantly,” said Melissa Meier, the distillery’s director of visitor services.
The distillery itself operates in the Navy Yard’s former Paymaster building where sailors received their checks, and may still be coming back to collect.
“We’ve definitely seen what looked like visions. A lot of my staff claims to have walked down the stairs and they think they see the outline of a person sitting . . . It’s very creepy,” she said.
Meier, 42, recounted the history behind the shipyard which operated from 1801 to 1966.
“It was a site of prisoner ships and those prisoners were eventually set on fire by the British killing over 11,000 people .. . in the Revolutionary War, and then the bodies were just laid on the street or left in Wallabout Bay,” she said.