A FEW DAYS BEFORE HALLOWEEN, a crumbling 5,870-square-foot single-family home was listed for $2.6 million in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ditmas Park. Realtor photos lit creepily by flashlight showed a grand staircase with carved balusters falling out like teeth, a wood-paneled parlor flanked by an ornate fireplace, and a taxidermy Canada goose frozen midflight above a trove of antiques on the floor of a forgotten library. The New York Post called the six-bedroom, one-bathroom Colonial Revival, formerly owned by a Mr. and Mrs. George Van Ness, “one of Brooklyn’s few surviving Victorian-era homes” and lamented its “tragic” state of disrepair. A March New York Times feature cast the “once-majestic mansion” at 1000 Ocean Avenue as “a temple of profligate neglect” with a “murky” past and “even murkier” future. To the locals quoted in the article, the house’s deterioration was “an absolute tragedy”—and just plain spooky.
The mansion was designed by George Palliser, an English architect who emigrated to New Jersey in the mid-1800s, best known for his firm’s pattern books o…
