The Manhattan Well

You are on a shopping street in SoHo. Nothing gives it away, but beneath the building at 129 Spring Street survive the brick remains of a well with a sinister story. In 1799 this was open countryside, Lispenard's Meadow, and the well belonged to the Manhattan Company, the water company founded that same year by Aaron Burr.

1The disappearance of Elma Sands

On December 22, 1799, Gulielma «Elma» Sands, a young woman of about twenty, left the boarding house where she lived. According to her cousin Catherine Ring, she was going to marry another boarder, the carpenter Levi Weeks, in secret. She never came back. On January 2, 1800, her body was found at the bottom of this well.

2Hamilton and Burr on the same side

Weeks was charged with murder. His family hired three of the best lawyers in town: Brockholst Livingston, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, political rivals who years later would face each other in a fatal duel. The trial, in the spring of 1800, is one of the first murder trials in the United States whose full proceedings were published. The jury deliberated for about five minutes and acquitted Weeks. The crime was never solved.

According to tradition, one of Elma's relatives cursed Hamilton after the verdict; no record mentions it.

Over the years, stories of apparitions in the building took root and are repeated in guides to haunted places. They are legends, not facts.

3What to look for

• The facade of number 129, beneath which the well survives.
• The line of Spring Street, which already existed when all this was meadow.
• The cast-iron facades of SoHo, built after the crime.