A Wayward Spirit Finds a Home

"The house is pretty haunted, but it's nothing malevolent." NYU professor and occult artist Jesse Bransford on life inside Catskill's 1860 octagonal house — built by spiritualist Orson Squire Fowler as a lighthouse for wayward spirits, designed around the belief that octagonal structures encourage visitations of spirit, with eight sides facing all cardinal directions and a spiral staircase as a conduit to help wayward spirits pass. When the drop-ins get to be too much, Bransford handles it the way any good bartender would. "I just say: 'Look, we're closed. You can go up or you can go down, but you can't stay here.' Then I direct them to the stairwell. As dumb as that sounds — it seems to work."