Boroughs of the Dead Walking Tours

My wife and I took the Haunted Brooklyn Heights tour and had a ball! Our tour guide, Andrea, was sharp, funny, and knew her history well. We can’t wait to take another tour with Boroughs of the Dead!

I went on the Astoria tour a few days before Halloween — spooky, right? It was really fascinating to get a new perspective on my neighborhood and my borough — our guide was very knowledgeable about both the more well-​known spots (like the Astoria-​Kaufman studios) and the less well-​known. We learned about the history as well as some ghost stories (which often included history!), and it made Astoria feel that much richer. Highly recommended!

My tour of Astoria was awesome — learned so many new things! I highly recommend.

I have been on two Boroughs of the Dead walking tours (Weird West Village and Haunted Brooklyn Heights, both led by Andrea) and they are top notch. Andrea is great at setting the scene and putting you in a particular time and place, and her research is very thorough. It seems like there’s no question you can stump her with on these tours! The selection of locations is great too in that they combine history, myth and literary/​film/​fictive interest spots. Andrea is a very engaging and funny guide, and I always learn a lot. And I did get a genuine chill or two on the last tour I took. Highly recommended.

Had a great time on Leanna’s «Magic and Mysticism of Central Park». I’ve lived and worked in Manhattan for almost 22 years and have been all around Central Park. Not only did Leanna take us to parts of the park I didn’t know existed but she pointed out details I never notices but must have walked by a 100 times. Very interesting, fun and not campy. Recommending it to some friends and thinking about taking the tour again.

Our guide, Andrea, was amazing. We took the Weird West Village tour and loved every minute of it. Andrea is charming, entertaining, and ridiculously knowledgeable. She knew details of every aspect of our tour and was truly delighted to share all sorts of anecdotes with us. She answered every question, and we had many! I felt as though Andrea was enjoying leading us on the tour as much as we were enjoying taking it. Her rendition of «The Raven» was very engaging. I have been on ghost tours all over North America and Europe, and this was truly one of my favorites. I highly recommend this tour to anyone who enjoys their history mixed with a bit of the macabre.

We took the 2 hour long Ultimate Greenwich Walking Tour with SJ– and it was awesome.
You get a good mix of history and the paranormal– we left with a better sense of history from New Amsterdam to New York.
If you’re a local, you pass by these places often, but you’ll see them in a new light. If you’re visiting, you’ll get to see a side of NY not on the Grey Line.

We took the Forgotten Dark History of Lower Manhattan, with Andrea. She is very enthusiastic and a great story teller. I have taken a lot of NYC walking tours, and this one was very different, because it was about strange and some gruesome events that took place in the early history of lower Manhattan.
I highly recommend this tour for history buffs and those interested in the occult — but definitely don’t take younger children!

We did the Magic and Mysticism of Central Park tour with Leanna last night. Leanna was fantastic, she was really passionate about the history of the park and we learned a lot. We thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. My only criticism is that it felt like an excellent historical tour of the Park, but there wasn’t a lot of the occult, mysticism etc. That was discussed, but not to the extent I had hoped for. It wasn’t creepy at all. I would still really recommend it, because the guide is fantastic and I learned a lot, and walking around Central Park at night does give everything a creepy and fun feeling. I definitely want to check out some of the other tours by this company soon.

We had an outstanding time on our Boroughs of the Dead tour! We joined Leanna for the «Weird West Village» event a few days before Halloween. Our tour guide could not have been more knowledgeable or enthusiastic about her subject matter. Over the course of the tour we learned many chilling and intriguing facts about the eldritch history of the West Village in addition to spine-​tingling tales of ghosts and historical facts about the area’s literary history. We can’t wait to try Boroughs of the Dead’s other tours!

I have been on 5 of their tours and all but one were fantastic. Andrea (greenwood cemetery and downtown Manhattan) and the guide who does the Central Park tour are terrific, very knowledgeable and entertaining.
However, stay away from the Hell’s Kitchen tour, which I went on recently. The tour guide, who I believe is named Lauren, was very nice, but didn’t seem prepared at all and didn’t have much to say, which defeated the purpose of going on the tour — I wanted to hear about the history of Hell’s Kitchen and the Broadway theaters, and instead she just recited random stories of ghosts in a few theaters as told by ushers. Unlike the other tours I attended, people actually dropped out of this tour because it was so bad.
Andrea mentions stories about ghosts in theaters in her tours, too, but that is just a small part, she also gives you extensive history on the neighborhoods, including architecture.

I’ve lived in NYC for 10 years, and loved the two Boroughs of the Dead tours that I’ve been on.
It turns out that there’s a dark, macabre history behind the places I walk by every day. That restaurant I like for brunch? Near the old slave marketplace. The park where I’ve drank beer and attempted to charm dates: full of corpses ravaged by cholera and yellow fever.

There’s really nothing to be said about this type except «do it!!». I did the downtown tour, starting at the Museum of the American Indian.
Andrea is a trove of information, personable, and does a magnificent job of exposing things you’d never, ever know about the underbelly of NYC.

I took Andrea Janes’ Greenwich Village Ghost tour. Andrea tells her stories with style as well as a passion for irony and veracity. I never considered myself a fan of the Ghost Tour genre, but the couple of entertaining and informative hours I spent with Andrea have made me a convert.

Took this walking tour because I read her book. The tour is great, and she really knows her stuff. You could hear a pin drop while she told her stories and to be at the actual location where history happened made the tour that much better. Highly recommended.

I have been on quite a few historical walking tours, but the two Boroughs of the Dead tours I did have been by far the best. Andrea is amazing with the perfect balance of history and story. I was very impressed with how much she knew, even in answering questions unrelated to the theme of the tour.
If you like historical walking tours I’d highly recommend any of Andrea’s.

Last night, I took part in the Dark Histories tour and it was fantastic! As a native New Yorker, who works two blocks from the meeting point, it was fascinating to learn the gruesome history of colonial New York. I enjoy history overall, but after discovering the Bowery Boys years ago, I’ve become especially intrigued about New York City history. Andrea is a great guide. She has personality and is truly a history nerd. Her love of the subject comes out, and she really knows how to pick a perfect spot for some spooky tales. I highly recommend this tour, especially on a crisp autumn evening. I will definitely be checking out some other tours.

I took the Greenwood Cemetery «Off the Map» tour and it was awesome! I have visited Greenwood many times over the 13 years I’ve lived in Brooklyn, but heard history on this tour that I had no idea about before. This is not a tour to see the major monuments (which are very easily accessible and widely written about) but a tour to see things that one could only find through extensive, passionate research into the depths of NYC history. Greenwood already has an incredibly rich history, as it is the resting place for many notable New Yorkers, but Andrea has gathered the extremely compelling stories that the books don’t always tell. She’s always adding new stops to the tour, and we were lucky enough to visit some of the new ones, such as the unmarked grave of of Rufus Griswold (and we learned how he unwittingly made Poe famous). We learned about how interwoven many characters were in history, and how double sided many of these characters were, from beautiful, murderous women, to businessmen who moonlighted as heretics, bandits, and rebels. Highly recommend this tour!
Bonus-​after the tour, we ate at the nearby Sea Witch-​yummy burgers, super delicious «buffalo fried oysters», great cocktails, very friendly staff. Also highly recommended, a great way to replenish after walking up and down the hilly terrain.

I took the Ghosts of the Lower Manhattan Tour and it was excellent. The stories were incredibly compelling, well-​informed and scary as hell! Andrea is smart, funny and knows how to tell a great ghost story. I already signed up for her Greenwich Village tour and am really looking forward to it.

Meh. The tour guide seems nice enough and seems really into what she is doing. However, the stories just didn’t really capture my curiosity very much. It seemed, at times, that she was just verbalizing things that she memorized word for word. It wasn’t spooky at all. I’ve been on a few ghost tours in the past and whether the stories were true or not, I was definitely spooked and/​or disturbed. These sites and stories just didn’t capture my attention at all. One bonus is that I got to explore more of the city that I had never seen before.
I wish her luck with both her business and her writing though. I’m sure as time passes and she performs more of these, it will get better and she’ll inject a little of her own personality into it and maybe learn a few more spooky or disturbing stories to share along the way.