Clear Comfort and the Alice Austen House Ghost Stories

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 9, 2026 · How we verify

A one-room Dutch Colonial cottage put up on the shore of New York Harbor in the 1690s does not usually survive to become a National Historic Landmark, but Clear Comfort did, and it did so in one of the busiest corners of New York. The Alice Austen House ghost stories attached to it are older than the museum and thinner than the documented record: chains heard clanking in the cellar after midnight, and a British soldier said to have hanged himself in the parlor. Both are neighborhood tradition, repeated for generations, and neither is supported by anything more than that.

Quick Facts on the House at 2 Hylan Boulevard

The address is 2 Hylan Boulevard, in the Rosebank section of Staten Island. The core of the building went up in the 1690s or early 1700s as a single room. It was the home of the photographer Alice Austen for most of her life. It is now a museum, a member of the Historic House Trust, and is administered by a volunteer group called the Friends of Alice Austen.

The Johnson Brothers, and a Woman Tried for Witchcraft

The likely first occupants were brothers Jacob, Lambert and John Woulter, or Johnson, who bought 120 acres of land from George Brown in 1698. One detail from that early period feeds the house’s darker reputation without ever quite touching the ghost stories. Jacob Johnson’s mother-in-law was Winifred King Benham, who was tried for witchcraft in Wallingford, Connecticut, and who may have lived in the house after her acquittal and virtual banishment. That is a documented life, not a haunting, and the sources put it no more firmly than “may have been a resident.”

The building was remodeled and expanded several times through the 1800s. The most consequential of those changes came in 1844, when John Haggerty Austen, Alice’s grandfather, purchased the property, renamed it, and remodeled it. The name he gave it, Clear Comfort, has outlasted every other label the house has carried.

How Berenice Abbott Helped Save Clear Comfort

By the middle of the twentieth century the house was a demolition candidate. In the 1950s and 1960s the photographers Berenice Abbott and Philip Johnson led a group of historic preservationists who fought to save it. The campaign worked, and then some: the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, became a New York City Landmark in 1971, was purchased by New York City in 1975, and opened to the public in 1985. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993 and a Historic Artist Home and Studio in 2002.

Alice Austen, Gertrude Tate, and the Museum’s Reinterpretation

The museum has spent recent years widening the story it tells. Its reinterpretation brought in Gertrude Tate, Austen’s long time life partner, along with a podcast, My Dear Alice. In March 2016 the Whitney Museum hosted New Eyes on Alice Austen, a panel discussion for Women’s History Month marking Austen’s 150th birthday, featuring scholars, academics, and historians who had investigated her work and unconventional lifestyle. That work led to the museum being designated an LGBT site by the National Register of Historic Places. In 2021 Clear Comfort was documented by the LGBT Historic Sites project, the first New York City site dedicated to a woman to be recognized in that way.

Chains in the Cellar, Boots in the Parlor

Two stories circulate, and the sources are candid that both are folklore. The first is an old neighborhood tradition that after midnight you could hear the clanking of chains coming from the cellar. Local telling attributed the sound to the ghosts of enslaved people held there during the American Revolution.

The second is described plainly as apocryphal: a British soldier is said to have hanged himself from a beam in the parlor over a broken heart. The tradition holds that the sound of his military boots and the clinking of his spurs can be heard in that room after midnight.

Neither account comes with names, dates, or any documented incident behind it. What they have is longevity. They are the sort of stories that grow around a house old enough to predate the neighborhood that surrounds it, and they say more about how Rosebank regarded the building than about what happens inside it.

Visiting the Alice Austen House Museum

Clear Comfort has been open to the public since 1985 and operates as a museum with a real program behind it. It takes part in the Smithsonian’s Museum Day events, and in 2016 it presented its first juried triennial exhibition, Staten Island Unlimited, featuring 35 photographers from three boroughs of New York, alongside Triennial Talks on Staten Island as place and as community. Hours and admission are set by the museum, so check before traveling out.

Come for Austen’s photographs and for the shoreline view she spent a lifetime pointing a camera at. The ghost stories are best treated as what the sources call them, tradition and apocrypha, and the parlor and cellar close well before midnight anyway.

Address: 2 Hylan Boulevard, Staten Island, New York City, New York

See Alice Austen House for Yourself

Sources

• Weekly List of Actions Taken on Properties: 3/20/2017 through 3/24/2017 (National Park Service)
• Alice Austen House
• Living In Rosebank, Staten Island: A Quiet Slice of New York Waterfront (The New York Times)
• Alice Austen House celebrates photographer's queer identity as "essential to understanding her work"
• The Austen Family and Their Home
• Wikipedia: Alice Austen House

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