“Have you ever seen a ghost up here?” I asked one of the men guarding the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building. It was 1:30 a.m., the air was crisp, and the city’s lights were doing little to break the darkness—the perfect setting for a ghost story.

A figure caught my eye as I passed through one of the supposedly haunted rooms of the supposedly very haunted Merchant’s House Museum in NoHo last week. I gasped, a reflex that was embarrassing even though I was ostensibly alone. “Ah!,” I thought—“Was that a ghost?”