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A SoHo haunting? The country's first murder trial begets a mystery in the men's section.
By
Catalina Gonella
Published Oct 20, 2024
Modified Nov 1, 2024
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Catalina Gonella/Gothamist
By
Catalina Gonella
Published Oct 20, 2024
Modified Nov 1, 2024
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Shoppers perusing the racks at COS on 129 Spring St. in SoHo might not think twice about the cylindrical brick structure in the trendy store’s men's department — after all, exposed brick is in.
But for history buffs and paranormal enthusiasts, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
The structure, a more than 200-year-old well, was part of an infamous murder trial in 1800 — the first murder trial in the United States with a recorded transcript, according to the Historical Society of the New York Courts. It's also said to be haunted by the ghost of Gulielma "Elma" Sands, the woman whose body was found in the well more than two centuries ago.
Historical novelist Lauren Willig, who researched the trial for her upcoming book, “The Girl From Greenwich Street,” said the ghost stories began immediately after Sands’ death.
“When they’re going and collecting testimony about Elma’s murder, there are all of these stories about people hearing a voice in the night from the meadow crying, ‘murder, murder, help me,’” she said, noting that at the time, the well was located outdoors in an area known as Lispenard’s Meadow.
Sands, 22, disappeared after leaving her boarding house on the evening of Dec. 22, 1799. She’d told her cousin she was on her way to marry Levi Weeks, a man who had been courting her. Her bruised body was found in the well about a week-and-a-half later. Sands’ family immediately suspected that Weeks was behind her murder, and a grand jury later indicted him.
Weeks’ brother Ezra was well connected in New York, and retained the services of an all-star legal team consisting of Henry Brockholst Livingston, Aaron Burr, and none other than Alexander Hamilton.
According to the Historical Society of the New York Courts, the state’s case was “entirely circumstantial,” while the defense team produced witnesses who testified that Weeks was with his brother and other friends the night Sands went missing. The jury acquitted Weeks of the murder after just five minutes of deliberation, and Sands’ murder remains unsolved.
“I think the ghost story, in some ways, catches on that sense of injustice and uncertainty, because where there can't be earthly justice, there's still the ghost trying out for some sort of restitution, or just for attention,” Willig said.
A four-story building was built just south of the well in 1817. It eventually came to house the Manhattan Bistro starting in the 1950s, when the well was no longer visible at street level. It was rediscovered when the owner excavated the basement in the 1980s, according to a 2011 Wall Street Journal report. Although the owner said at the time that she wasn’t sure about paranormal activity, she added that bottles had inexplicably shot off the shelves behind the Bistro’s bar on two occasions.
COS moved in after the building was sold in 2015.
The COS store on 129 Spring St. in SoHo in July 2022.
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Manhattan tour guide and “experience provider” Mark Venaglia said he used to take guests inside to look at the well, but eventually stopped so as to not bother the workers — plus, it could be a little underwhelming in its current iteration, with Venaglia saying he thinks "it would be a better museum."
“I would consider it maybe a little antiseptic,” he said. “I would certainly want to buy clothing from a shop that looks like that. It's clean, it's sanitary, there's the well. And you have to really use your imagination to get a sense of the well possibly being haunted again.”
To Willig, the well represents a physical connection to the past, and a reminder of how some things stay the same despite the passage of time.
“It’s a tangible tie between an older version of the city and our version of the city, and it's in many ways a physical representation of the way things don't really change because I feel like we see variants of Elma’s story,” she said. “We have unsolved murders of women even now, and a lot of the time their characters are flattened the way Elma's was flattened in her trial.”
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Catalina Gonella
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