Historical Society of the NY Courts

10/16/2026

Luther R. Marsh trained in Daniel Webster’s law office and became one of the wealthiest lawyers in New York. By 1888 he was elderly, and his Madison Avenue house was filling up with paintings by the dead.

They came through Ann O’Delia Diss Debar. She said the spirits of past artists turned blank canvases into finished work in her presence. The New York Tribune reported that Apelles, court painter to Alexander the Great, had sent medallion portraits of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras and Archimedes. Believers and skeptics crowded into the house to see them. Marsh gave her a few hundred dollars, and then the house and everything in it.

Her own history was harder to pin down than the paintings. She said she was the daughter of King Ludwig I of Bavaria and the dancer Lola Montez. She was probably born Ann O’Delia Salomon in Kentucky, and her family said she had run away to France as a girl. She had moved among spiritualists, including Victoria and Tennessee Claflin, and was a disciple of Madame Blavatsky. When a brother surfaced, she denied knowing him. He said he “would not believe her under oath in any circumstances.”

She went to court in April 1888. The New York Times described her as “the noted and notorious Ann O’Delia Diss Debar, of many aliases, a number of husbands, and several prison terms.”

The prosecution’s key witness was David Carvalho. In front of the court he unrolled a sheet of blank paper, went over it with a wet sponge, and brought up a portrait. “It is merely a chemical change,” he said. “It is no trick.” The Evening World ran the quote on April 26.

In June of that year, Diss Debar was convicted of fraud and sentenced to six months on Blackwell’s Island.

📸: Ann O’Delia Diss Debar, 1909. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Bain Collection.

10/15/2026

P.T. Barnum and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln walk into a Manhattan courtroom. Only one of them took the stand.

The year is 1869. The defendant is William Mumler, a spirit photographer with a studio at 630 Broadway. Mumler started out as a Boston jewelry engraver. In 1861 a faint figure turned up on one of his self-portraits. He told friends it looked like a dead cousin. Spiritualists took it from there. He charged about five times the going rate. Spirits were not guaranteed.

New York’s photographers were not amused. Members of the American Institute’s photographic section complained, and the matter reached Mayor A. Oakey Hall. Marshal Joseph Tooker went undercover as “William Bowditch” and bought a portrait. On April 12, Mumler was arrested for “swindling credulous persons by what he called spirit photographs” and held in the Tombs.

The hearing opened April 21 before Judge Joseph Dowling. Elbridge T. Gerry prosecuted. John D. Townsend defended.

Barnum testified for the prosecution. He had commissioned photographer Abraham Bogardus to make a picture of Barnum himself with Lincoln’s ghost at his shoulder, to show how easily such photos could be faked. He also said Mumler had once written him letters admitting fraud. Unfortunately, the letters burned with his museum. Townsend accused him of lying.

The defense had ghosts of its own. One client identified his late wife in his portrait. Another identified her late son. Former judge John Edmonds told the court the spirits were “charmingly pretty.”

Mumler took the stand and denied any trickery. Judge Dowling said he was “morally convinced” of “fraud and deception.” Then he let Mumler go. The prosecution had never shown how the pictures were made.

Mumler left New York owing thousands in legal fees.

10/14/2026

The Kreischer Mansion on Staten Island looks almost suspiciously well suited to October. Built in the nineteenth century with towers, deep porches, elaborate woodwork, and the kind of asymmetry that practically invites a ghost story, it began as something much more ordinary: a monument to industrial success.

Balthasar Kreischer, a German immigrant who made his fortune manufacturing brick, helped build the surrounding community once known as Kreischerville. The surviving mansion was one of two associated with the family and remains an unusually elaborate example of nineteenth-century residential architecture, with enough Gothic atmosphere to have encouraged generations of stories about who, or what, might still be living there.

Some of those stories grew around genuine family tragedy. Edward Kreischer died in 1894, and later accounts connected his death with reports of footsteps, voices, apparitions, strange lights, and objects moving without obvious assistance. The origins of individual tales are difficult to establish, which is often the way with haunted houses. The landmark record is considerably easier to verify than the ghosts.

The mansion eventually returned to the headlines for reasons that were very real. In 2005, Robert McKelvey was murdered on the property by Joseph Young, who was then living there as caretaker. Young was later convicted in federal court of murder in aid of racketeering and related crimes. By that point, the house had acquired an unusual collection of legal identities: private property, designated landmark, crime scene, and evidence in a federal murder prosecution.

Landmark law can tell us why the mansion matters as architecture and restrict what its owners may do with it. Property law can trace who possessed it. Criminal law can establish what happened there in 2005 and hold someone responsible for it. Those are questions courts and public agencies are quite comfortable answering.

Whether Master Kreischer or anyone else remains in residence without appearing on the deed is another matter.

10/13/2026

Grace Brown has never entirely left Big Moose Lake, at least not in local memory. For more than a century, visitors to the Adirondacks have told stories of a young woman seen near the water, walking the shore or appearing through the mist. She is usually identified as Brown, who was twenty years old in 1906 when she traveled into the Adirondacks with Chester Gillette, a fellow worker at a Cortland skirt factory with whom she had been having a relationship. Brown was pregnant, and when the two rented a boat on Big Moose Lake on July 11, only Gillette returned.

Her death produced one of the most closely watched murder trials of the period. Prosecutors argued that Gillette had struck Brown and left her to drown, while Gillette maintained that her death had been accidental. Brown’s letters were read aloud to packed galleries, newspapers covered the proceedings in extraordinary detail, and courtroom artists recorded the scene. A Herkimer County jury convicted Gillette of first-degree murder, the New York Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment, and Gillette was executed at Auburn Prison in 1908.

The case kept moving outward from there. Theodore Dreiser drew heavily on it for his 1925 novel An American Tragedy, which was later adapted for stage and screen, while publishers had already turned the trial itself into popular entertainment by selling pamphlets that paired accounts of the murder with “Grace Brown’s Love Letters.” Brown, who had spent most of her life known only to family, friends, and coworkers, became part of one of the twentieth century’s most famous American crime stories.

That cultural afterlife eventually produced another lawsuit. Brown’s mother sued over a film adaptation of Dreiser’s novel, arguing that its portrayal defamed her. By then, the events at Big Moose Lake had passed through a murder prosecution, an appeal, literature, film, and another round of litigation.

Local folklore added one more layer, with stories that Grace Brown could still be seen near the water where she died. The courts had determined what happened to her, but New York memory was apparently less willing to close the file.

10/07/2026

How do you regulate telling the future or speaking to the dead?

Under Penal Law § 165.35, it is a misdemeanor to charge someone money while claiming or pretending to tell fortunes, use occult powers to answer questions about personal matters, or “exorcise, influence or affect evil spirits or curses.” The statute is unusually expansive. You do not actually have to predict the future to run afoul of New York’s fortune-telling law. A sufficiently entrepreneurial relationship with curses will do.

The law does, however, contain an exception. Fortune telling performed “solely for the purpose of entertainment or amusement” is excluded from the offense. That means New York law has attempted, with admirable confidence, to distinguish between occult powers offered as theater and occult powers offered as a professional service.

That distinction has occasionally required the courts to get involved. In People v. Ballard, decided in 1988, a defendant accepted money while claiming that he could influence evil spirits and curses. The conviction was upheld because the jury found that his promises were knowingly false and made with fraudulent intent. The court rejected the argument that invoking religious belief insulated deliberate fraud from prosecution.

The statute therefore occupies a peculiar corner of New York criminal law. It is concerned less with whether ghosts, curses, or occult powers exist than with what someone may claim about them while collecting a fee. The law is less confident as to the metaphysics allegedly involved, only their mundane expression.

📸: John Sloan’s 1905 etching “Fun, One Cent” captures New Yorkers gathered around penny fortune-telling machines, where a glimpse of the future could be had for the price of a coin. The scene makes a fitting companion to New York’s fortune-telling law: even the supernatural, it seems, has long had a business model.

10/06/2026

The facts, as courts like to say, are unusual.

Helen Ackley owned a Victorian house in Nyack. She also maintained, publicly and repeatedly, that the house was haunted. Over the years, she described its spectral residents in the local press and in Reader’s Digest, and the house eventually appeared on a local walking tour as a “riverfront Victorian (with ghost).” This was all apparently common knowledge in Nyack. It was not common knowledge to Jeffrey Stambovsky, a New York City man who agreed to buy the house for $650,000.

Stambovsky learned about the ghosts before closing and, perhaps feeling that three bedrooms, river views, and several undisclosed incorporeal occupants were more house than he had bargained for, tried to get out of the contract. Ackley refused. Litigation followed.

The resulting 1991 decision, Stambovsky v. Ackley, is one of those rare cases in which the judicial opinion seems to be enjoying itself almost as much as everyone who has cited it since. New York’s Appellate Division held that because Ackley herself had cultivated the house’s supernatural reputation, she could not deny it when the reputation became inconvenient. Thus, for purposes of the lawsuit, the court concluded that the house was “haunted as a matter of law.”

The judges were not finished. Applying ordinary caveat emptor too rigidly, the court observed, might require prudent homebuyers to arrive at inspections accompanied not merely by engineers and exterminators, but by a psychic or medium. It warned attorneys against transactions that might later “come back to haunt” them and suggested that certain precedents deserved to be exorcised.

Beneath the ectoplasm, however, was a real property-law problem. A physical defect can often be discovered through inspection. A notorious reputation, especially one created by the seller herself, may not be so easily detected by an outsider. The court therefore allowed Stambovsky’s claim for rescission to proceed.

Spectral evidence, regrettably, was not deemed admissible.

10/02/2026

New York needed bodies in the 1780s. Actual bodies, because medical students had a problem: they needed to study anatomy, and the law provided very few legitimate ways to get them. The resulting workaround was not subtle. Students and their suppliers robbed graves, often targeting the burial grounds of poor and Black New Yorkers whose families had less power to object.

The practice was widely known and deeply resented, but in April 1788 that resentment finally exploded. According to the story that spread through the city, a group of boys peered into an anatomy room at New York Hospital, where a medical student held up part of a cadaver and joked that it belonged to one boy’s recently deceased mother. The boy told his father, who reportedly checked her grave and found it empty.

Within hours, a crowd had descended on the hospital. They searched its rooms, found human remains, and turned their anger on the doctors and students responsible. Some of the medical men fled; others were taken to the city jail for their own protection as the crowd grew into the thousands and the disturbance spread across two days.

The city’s political elite were dragged into the effort to restore order. Alexander Hamilton and John Jay were among those who confronted the rioters, and Jay was struck in the head with a stone. Eventually, militia fired into the crowd, killing several people and bringing what became known as the Doctors’ Riot to an end.

The legal response came soon afterward. In 1789, New York prohibited the unauthorized removal of bodies from graves and allowed judges, in certain criminal cases, to add dissection to a sentence of ex*****on. It was an early attempt to regulate anatomical study by giving doctors a lawful source of cadavers, while also making grave robbing a crime.

Not an elegant solution, perhaps. But after two days of riots over stolen corpses, elegance was probably no longer the Legislature’s first concern.

📸: “An Interrupted Dissection,” William Allen Rogers, Harper’s Magazine, October 1882. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

10/01/2026

In the 1790s, Lanah Sawyer, a young sewing girl, did something extraordinary. After surviving a violent assault, she took her case to court. And she won.

Her courage became one of the earliest documented examples of a woman seeking and achieving justice in a system that was not built for her. Today, her story continues to illuminate how the courts have responded to violence against women from the Revolution to the present day.

Join us for “One Woman’s Voice for Justice: How the Courts Have Responded to Violence Against Women from the Revolution to Today.”
📅 October 28, 6:30 PM
📍 New York City Bar Association (42 West 44th St., NYC 10036)
Also available via livestream, this event is free & open to the public. NY CLE Credits Pending, available only to Society members.

Presented by the Historical Society of the New York Courts, this program features John Wood Sweet, author of The Sewing Girl’s Tale, sharing Lanah Sawyer’s remarkable story.

A distinguished panel featuring Roberta A. Kaplan, Esq., Prof. Kate Mogulescu, Hon. Michelle Weber, and Susan Harper, Esq., moderator, will examine how far the law has come since Lanah’s case and what challenges remain. Opening remarks will be delivered by Presiding Justice of the Appellate Division, First Department Dianne T. Renwick.

A powerful story. A crucial conversation. We hope to see you there!

https://history.nycourts.gov/events/one-womans-voice-for-justice/

Presented by the Historical Society of the New York Courts HYBRID EVENT • FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC At New York City Bar Association (42 … More One Woman’s Voice for Justice: How the Courts Have Responded to Violence Against Women from the Revolution to Today »

09/29/2026

In March 1965, Irma Vidal Santaella traveled to Washington with a delegation representing 125 Puerto Rican organizations from New York City and across the state. Their argument before Congress was direct: thousands of American citizens in New York were being denied an effective right to vote because they could not pass the state’s English literacy requirement.

Santaella knew the issue as an organizer and as a lawyer. Born in New York City and raised in Puerto Rico, she returned to New York as an adult, attended Hunter College and Brooklyn Law School, and in 1961 became the first Puerto Rican woman admitted to practice law in New York. The following year, she founded the Legion of Voters and became its president.

Testifying alongside Herman Badillo and Gilberto Gerena Valentín during congressional consideration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Santaella helped make the case for protecting Puerto Rican voters educated in Spanish-language schools. Congress ultimately enacted Section 4(e), which prohibited New York from using an English literacy test to deny the vote to citizens educated in American-flag schools, including those in Puerto Rico.

Santaella continued working in civil rights and public service after 1965. She served on New York’s Human Rights Appeal Board, including as its chair, and on the New York City Commission on the Status of Women.

Then, in November 1983, New Yorkers elected her to the State Supreme Court. She became the first Puerto Rican woman to serve as a Justice of that court. More than twenty years separated Santaella’s admission to the bar from her election to the bench.

📸: The Hon. Irma Santaella, seated lower right, second from the right.

09/28/2026

Audiences enjoyed a series of engaging presentations at our public event America 250: The Bronx Perspective last Thursday at the Bronx Hall of Justice. Hon. Yadhira Gonzalez-Taylor opened the event with welcome remarks, followed by Hon. David L. Goodwin, who introduced our speakers.

Robert Pigott, Esq., Vice President & General Counsel at Phipps Houses; Antonio Pacheco, PhD candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); and Angel Hernandez, Bronx Borough Historian, guided attendees through the Bronx’s past, from its legal monuments and neighborhood transformations to the legal battles that helped shape the borough as it stands today.

Special thanks to the New York State Unified Court System's New York City Criminal Court, Bronx County, and the Bronx County Supreme Court, Criminal Term, for collaborating with us for a wonderful event!