Before getting to Ghost, here’s a piece from the Times in 1998, about a person dwelling in Van Courtlandt Park, a place in the far north Bronx, where these types of things can happen.
“The police said Everett Henriquez had gone to Van Cortlandt Park for the quietude, digging a pied-a-terre into the soft earth, stocking it with weapons and furnishing it with a mattress. There was a pond nearby. Everything was rosy, expect for the squawking birds.
This little intrusion proved too much for the 27-year-old Bronx man.
Two days ago, the police say, he took out a shotgun and blasted away at a flock of geese. Horrified workers on a nearby golf course called the police, but the shooter had already scurried back to his underground home. Yesterday he was arrested when he emerged again to shoot at the honking birds, the Parks Commissioner, Henry J. Stern, said.
Waterfowl are now the least of his problems.
After he was arrested, Mr. Henriquez showed the police officers to his hideaway, a 3-by-8-foot cave nestled six feet below ground, between the Major Deegan Expressway and the second tee of the Van Cortlandt Golf Course. Inside, there was a mattress, three bags of marijuana, several pairs of women’s shoes, weight-lifting equipment, a bow and arrow and a sock full of rocks, the police and park officials said.
”He clearly had spent some time there,” Mr. Stern said, adding that he was still confused about the women’s shoes. ”We don’t know if they belonged to an accomplice, a victim, if he is a cross-dresser or a shoe collector,” he said.
Mr. Henriquez now faces a host of charges: criminal possession of a weapon, possession of a weapon in a park, possession of marijuana and stolen property — and illegal camping, Betsy Herzog, a spokeswoman for the Police Department, said.
The Parks Commissioner said that during his 11 years as head of the city’s parks, there had been illegal poachers and a good number of illegal campers. But Mr. Henriquez, he said, was the only person he knew who had been shooting animals and living in a hole on park land.
Mr. Henriquez told investigators that he lived with his grandmother, on University Avenue in the Bronx, but that he spent much of his time in what he called ”his park retreat.”
”I assume he enjoyed the solitude, but he was clearly over the line,” Mr. Stern said, adding that Mr. Henriquez’s penchant for weapons probably left him out of the running for any comparison with Henry David Thoreau.
”You cannot live in an underground cabin in the park,” he said. ”It’s improper use of the land and we discourage that sort of thing.”
New York’s third largest park, Van Cortlandt, lies in the north west section of the Bronx up to the Yonkers border. Each of the large new York city Parks, are defined by their own geography, and, in Van Cortlandt this is probably as close as you can get to landscape that might be similar to something you see in the Hudson Highlands. Cortlandt has its more public sections like the parade grounds and the golf course, but those sizable pieces of land are surrounded by higher ground and it is here that, aside from the traffic noise, one can be in the city, and yet, not feel like it in anyway shape or form.
This isolation, woodlands, hills, cliffs, stones, rocks, boulders and trails, the tracks world class cross country events, and, it’s also a nice place to build a home, or, just to sleep there, and has hosted the nature-loving, camping segment of the homeless population.
Along one of the long trails in the park, that parallels the croton aqueduct tunnels, is a stone construction, similar to aqueduct structures in the park, some quite big, like the aerator building, along the Croton Trail. About a mile from there, along the Joh Muir trail is a stone structure, made of nearby native stone,
An unnamed stream that cuts over the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail, below the Weir, where sections of Van Cortlandt Park, resembles the Hudson Highlands, more than the geography, of most of NYC. The Bronx is the only borough attached to the mainland and not part of an island, it’s western sections – the heights – features geology like the Fordham Schist, unlike the sandy flatlands of Brooklyn and Queens, that can sucumb so easily to flooding.
Along a paved trail before getting to the falls and aqueduct there was a stone and concrete structure, approximately five feet high and ten feet by six feet. The structure was home to a man known as Ghost, and his belongings would be strewn over the stone rectangular box, but I never actually saw him, in all the times, over the years, that I passed by on the trail. He had picked a spot right on the trail, and that’s really unusual. This made me think, even more, that he was, of course, living inside the structure and his belongings simply wouldn’t fit. One day, when all his belongings were with him, I took a look around, and was surprised to see that it was a solid block with no openings, so I decided to pay closer attention the next time his stuff was out, and I was passing by.
One day, was extremely cold the day I was passing his place, stopped, and took a careful look, and there he was, underneath some sort of blanket or rug, with a large cap, and only a small bit of his face exposed. He was simply using the solid stone altar as a hard cold bed, completely exposrd on a ridge above the Mashalou Parkway, and right next to the Croton Viaduct trail.
It’s indicative of the sensitivity that local government has towards the homeless dilemma. Ghost always refused to leave his stone perch for years, until 2020, when he disappeared.
