A fun tale from Trainjotting goes something like this…
The story starts with Manhattan native Ezekial Marcus, the West Side Cowboy, who patrolled the dangerous street level railroad tracks on horseback warning pedestrians that a train was approaching and who eventually fell to his death from the High Line in 1934.
The story continues with Friends of the High Line cofounders Joshua David and Robert Hammond, whose efforts started the project that transformed the abandoned raised railway into a public park. Both David and Hammond say they were visited on separate occasions by the ghost of Ezekial Marcus, warning them not to continue with their plans to make the High Line into a public park.
Hammond, a painter, said he was on the phone with the actor Edward Norton, an early champion on the High Line, in his apartment when the ghost of Marcus slipped through a heating duct in his kitchen.
“He told me the same thing he told Joshua–leave it alone,” Hammond told a class studying the paranormal at Penn State in 2006. “He said he’d make it rain every day if the place of his death was trampled upon by the masses. I dropped my damn cellphone and had to wait about 20 minutes before I collected myself enough to call Edward back. Even then, I was shaking like a leaf.”
We tried reaching the pair for confirmation of this story to no avail. We will say that it is sunny in New York at this very moment, but it has been weeks since we’ve left the house with out an umbrella. It’s raining. So, the story continues.
PS. We saw a ghost named Otto Ottobie and he said that if we don’t bring our readers news and inspiration, he’s going to make the internet crash every day. Spooky.
[images via the NY Times]
