Some of Brooklyn’s darkest secrets lie in its hippest neighborhoods.
The borough’s scariest tales involve everything from a ghostly mansion in Park Slope to forgotten church cemeteries under a hip bar in Williamsburg to a buzzy but reputedly haunted Trader Joe’s in Cobble Hill — and you can learn about them on an offbeat, macabre history tour.
Allison Huntington Chase, the 38-year-old founder of Madame Morbid’s Trolley Tours, is tooling around droves of New Yorkers and tourists to the creepiest spots in town in a replica Victorian-era funeral parlor retrofitted onto a trolley.
Allison Huntington Chase founded Madame Morbid’s Trolley Tours eight years ago as a means to share the strange history and lore she dug up about the Borough of Churches. William Miller
Some tour-takers pass ”these sites every day, and now they know what it used to be,” Chase told The Post.
“They get a kick out of exploring their own neighborhood and being a local tourist.”
The 90-minute jaunt from Williamsburg to Park Slope contains a medley of trivia, comedy, videos, music and artifacts as roughly two dozen local tourists learn about Brooklyn’s 400-year-old past — consisting of “90%” true crime stories with “paranormal sprinkles” along with it, according to the guide.
“To me, the events are scarier than a ghost haunting,” she said, before listing off some of the tour’s stranger-than-fiction stops:
An illustration of the deadly fire at the Brooklyn Theatre in 1876 depicts its deadly chaos. De Agostini via Getty Images
New York City’s deadliest theater fire
Before fire regulations, nearly 300 theatergoers died in a blaze at the Brooklyn Theatre at the site of what is now Cadman Plaza downtown.
The fire started on the evening of Dec. 5, 1876, during a performance of “The Two Orphans.” At least 278 people — many of which were sitting in cheaper seats with limited access to exits — were melted together before they could escape, Chase said.
The disaster was the greatest loss of life in New York City until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to reps from Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, where more than 100 of the deceased are laid to rest in a mass grave.
The Adams House at Carroll Street in Park Slope is reportedly haunted by Irish former workers. Beyond My Ken via Wikipedia
Park Slope’s ‘haunted’ mansion
A massive Romanesque Revival mansion on Eighth Avenue in Park Slope was built by Chiclets gum inventor Thomas Adams Jr. in 1888, featuring one of the borough’s first private elevators.
Legend has it that the building is haunted by the ghosts of a handful of Adams’ former servants — Irish immigrant workers who tried using the elevator when the entrepreneur was away, Chase said. The elevator had stuck, and their bodies were only discovered after Adams had returned.
“Residents of the building have claimed to hear voices crying in an Irish brogue, ‘Mary, Mother of God, help us!’” reads a Brooklyn Public Library post detailing the urban legend.
The landmarked mansion was converted into apartments before it was restored back into a single-family home in 2016.
Tens of thousands of corpses were once buried under Barcade in Williamsburg, Chase said. NY Post Brian Zak
‘Haunted’ Trader Joe’s
The historic South Brooklyn Savings Institution building on Court Street in Cobble Hill may be home to a popular Trader Joe’s grocery store, but it was once the site where George Washington is said to have witnessed the bloody Battle of Brooklyn in 1776.
“It’s the most haunted place in Brooklyn — and the most haunted Trader Joe’s in America,” too, Chase said.
Most of the store’s unexplained activity happens in the basement’s employee locker room, with eerie bubbling paint and lava-hot walls left unexplained since the store’s 2008 opening, she said.
Burial ground under Barcade
One piece of Brooklyn trivia that always gets a reaction from tourists is a two-block stretch under what is now Williamsburg’s popular Barcade drinking and amusement spot, Chase said.
Originally known as the Old Methodist Burying Ground, the massive cemetery under Union Avenue and Lorimer Street served two churches in Williamsburg and hosted roughly 30,000 bodies before it closed in 1856.
Though many of the remains were moved to Cypress Hills Cemetery, it’s believed there are still unaccounted bodies lingering under Pac-Man arcade machines, Chase said.
Chase, 38, hands out Halloween candy to customers. William Miller
Gowanus Canal
The borough’s famous canal landed a spot on the tour given the slew of dead bodies found in its waters – infamous as one of the most polluted stretches in the US.
“It’s one of our biggest embarrassments in Brooklyn,” Chase, a newly minted Gowanus resident, said of the EPA superfund site, adding the canal was “so dirty it [once] killed a whale.”
The canal’s sludge-filled waters – polluted for years with industrial waste – tested positive for cholera, typhus and even gonorrhea in the 2000s, Chase said.
She noted that a 12-foot minke whale nicknamed “Sludgie” died within a day of entering its waters in 2007.
Brooklyn Naval Cemetery
The former Brooklyn Naval Hospital Cemetery in the Brooklyn Navy Yard was active from 1831 to 1910 and is the final resting place for more than 2,000 servicemen near Flushing and Carlton avenues.
While the Navy relocated the dead to Cypress Hills National Cemetery in 1926, an investigation in the 1990s found that hundreds of burials were still unaccounted for – and corpses are possibly still buried at the site.
The cemetery reopened to the public in 2016 as the Naval Cemetery Landscape, a plant meadow with a raised walkway so as not to disturb the hallowed ground.
The tour uses a trolley fashioned into a Victorian-era funeral parlor to ferry around customers. William Miller
Chase founded Madame Morbid’s Trolley Tours eight years ago to share the strange history and urban legends she had dug up about the Borough of Churches, she said.
“I just love history,” the guide said. “I want everyone to feel like a mini-historian when they finally leave the tour, and also I want other people to look at death differently. … Death is a part of life.”
With the help of her father — who operated his own haunted house in Chase’s Connecticut hometown growing up — the history buff outfitted the trolley with Model T-pattern seats, chandeliers, a fog machine and “Gone With the Wind”-inspired green drapes.
Chase quickly discovered the tour was a hit among Brooklynites looking for an off-the-beaten-path activity, especially around Halloween.
“The community and everything, they go spooky 365 days a year,” she said.
“I really admire it.”
She said the borough is special for other reasons, too.
“With Manhattan you can only focus on neighborhoods one at a time: In Brooklyn, you’re able to see multiple neighborhoods,” Chase said.
“Brooklyn, there’s something magical about it – I want to haunt this place.”