Grisly, gory streets of Old New York

From left, the headstone of Harvey Burdell at The Green-Wood Cemetery, Harvey Burdell, Stanford White and Albert Anastasio

Murder, mystery, blood and gore!

Around Halloween, the city is crawling with creepy haunted houses rigged with ghastly special effects and grisly tricks guaranteed to jolt you out of your skin – or at least make you scream. But many a ghoulish deed was done on the streets of the city and these true crime scenes are as chilling as any imagined with costumes and make-up, once you know the tales that lurk behind them.

In fact, you may plod past one or more of them in the course of a daily commute. We've picked out some of the more infamous and crafted a gruesome city ghost tour. Join us, if you dare.

Park Central Hotel, 870 Seventh Ave. at 56th St.

This hotel in the heart of midtown played host to two high-profile murders, Arnold Rothstein in 1928 and Albert Anastasia in 1957. Rothstein was the real life "Mr. Big." He inspired the Meyer Wolfsheim character in "The Great Gatsby" and was also rumored to have engineered the notorious rigging of the 1919 World Series.

On Nov. 4, 1928 the well-known gambler was at Lindy's when he got a call from a bookie -- George McManus -- to whom he owed a big lump of cash. They arranged a meeting at the Park Central Hotel in Room 349. When Rothstein arrived, he was shot in the stomach and later found bleeding in the hotel's service stairwell. He died in the hospital two days later. McManus was acquitted of the crime and it remains unsolved.

Anastasia's killing was a case of so-called "mob justice." On Oct. 25, 1957 Anastasio, acting head of the Mangano crime family, went to the barbershop at the Park Central Hotel (at the time called the Park Sheraton Hotel). So the story goes, the Genovese and Gambino families had hatched a plan to rub him out as capo. As Anastasia sat in the barber's chair, eyes closes, two armed men muscled in, opened fire and killed him on the spot. The bloody slaying was chalked up to the boys of Murder Inc., the gangs of contract mob killers of the era. The murder remains officially unsolved.

Old Madison Square Garden, (Now the New York Life building)
On June 25, 1906, renowned New York architect Stanford White – builder of Astor and Vanderbilt mansions – attended the premiere of a new musical review atop the old Madison Square Garden roof theater. White, a married man, was an eccentric known keep company with a number of very young Broadway chorus girls. He kept an apartment at the theater, and had infamously installed a red velvet swing to entertain his nymphette visitors, including 16-year-old Evelyn Nesbit. As the story goes, White wooed Nesbit with drugged champagne one night and "ruined" her. A rival suitor, Harry Thaw then enters the story with a sexual proclivities of his own, including a liking for dog whips. Thaw finally married Nesbit and that fateful night as White sat watching the chorus girls perform, strode through the audience, drew a pistol and shot White three times in the face at close range. Thaw was tried and found not guilty on grounds of insanity.

31 Bond Street
The year was 1857 and this sensational murder and ensuing trial has been called the O.J. Simpson case of its day. The setting: the cobbled streets of Greenwich Village complete with eerie, flickering gaslights. The key players are Dr. Harvey Burdell – dentist by day and carousing lowlife by night – and his landlady and estranged mistress Emma Hempstead Cunningham. Burdell was found bound around the neck and stabbed a vicious 15 times in his Bond Street office. Cunningham was tried and acquitted amid swirling rumors of a pregnancy ruse and attempts to force a marriage to Burdell that captivated an audience of newspaper readers for weeks. Cunningham died 29 years after Burdell. Their newly unveiled gravestones are now featured on the Green-Wood Cemetery ghost tour and their stories told in the book, "Butchery on Bond Street," by Benjamin Feldman.

129 Spring Street, (Now Manhattan Bistro)
Few may know the swanky, SoHo shopping strip takes its name from a grisly murder at the turn of the nineteenth century. According to tales from the "Crimes of Old New York" ghost tour given by the group Street Smarts N.Y., in 1800, the body of the young and lovely Juliana Elmore Sands was found at the bottom of a well where the Manhattan Bistro now stands. According to popular murder myth, the well still exists in the basement of the bistro. News of her murder flew around town and the then-unnamed road with the well became known as "the road to the spring" and later, Spring Street.

123 Nassau Street (now Petland Discounts)
July 28, 1841, the badly beaten and barely recognizable body of Mary Rogers washed ashore off the Hudson River along the New Jersey Coast near Hoboken. Mary had gone missing from her boarding house on Nassau Street (now the site of a Petland Discount Store) a few days before her body was discovered. She worked in a Liberty Street tobacco store frequented by reporters and famous writers, such as Edgar Allen Poe. Her brutal killing emblazoned the headlines for weeks. Her murder went unsolved, but the cold case stays alive in the form of Poe's story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," a chilling tale set in Paris, but inspired by the Mary Rogers murder.

731 Degraw Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn
This was a murder so notorious the street name was changed to its current name, Lincoln Place, after Abraham Lincoln, himself and infamous murder victim. On March 20, 1873 Lizzie Lloyd King, known as Kate Stoddard, shot and killed her lover Charles Goodrich, a widower who'd attempted to break off their affair. According to Brooklyn historians Leonard Bernardo and Jennifer Weiss, after the murder, Stoddard cleaned up the body, changed Goodrich's shirt and went back to her job in Manhattan. Stoddard was on the lam for three months, and in that time the police manhunt for the murderous spurned lover was front page news. She was finally arrested and put in jail before being transferred to the State Lunatic Asylum in Auburn, N.Y.

Related topic galleries: Crimes, Park Slope, Jennifer Weiss, Defense, Tourism and Leisure, O.J. Simpson, Madison Square Garden