IN a commercial area of Ridgewood, Queens, that is filled with brick warehouses, the white-painted stone house with a wood-shingle roof doesn’t quite fit in. Originally built by Dutch settlers, the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House dates to the early 1700s, maybe even earlier. It’s now a historical museum, but for some local children and perhaps more than a few adults, it’s just a scary old house, and probably haunted.
Inside and out, the historic Vander Ende-Onderdonk House is a tempting target for youngsters.
It’s understandable that the house became the subject of rumors. Several cemeteries are located nearby. And it does not help matters much that a man with long white hair and a Dutch Colonial hat can sometimes be seen wielding an ax and a hatchet in the yard.
But the man in the hat is more affable than terrifying. His name is Arthur Kirmss, and he is the 61-year-old artist-in-residence at the Onderdonk House.
Mr. Kirmss uses the ax and the hatchet to carve objects like wooden spoons and bowls in the same way Dutch settlers would have made them. But given all the creepy rumors that swirl around the house, it was hardly surprising that on a recent afternoon, neighbors saw children sneaking into the museum, which is usually open only on Saturdays, and a curator found the front door mysteriously unlocked.
As is turned out, youngsters had been slithering through the broken fence that surrounds the old house, then making their way toward the garden, where fallen mulberries stain the brick walkway blood-red.
One afternoon late last month, the caretaker of the house caught a group of middle-school boys in the backyard and called the police. “They said they had heard rumors in school that it was haunted,” said the caretaker, Dylan Dougherty, a 36-year-old special education teacher in Sheepshead Bay. “They called it the pumpkin house.”
The boys were released with a warning, and the fence has since been repaired.
Still, the rumors persist. An 11-year-old girl who lives nearby said her friends had warned her that the house was spooky.
“They be like, ‘Don’t go near that house,’ ” she said. “I’m not afraid, though. Not that much.”
But according to Mr. Dougherty, the children’s suspicions are not entirely unmerited. In his three years living on the second floor of the house, he said, he has heard strange sounds with unexplained origins, among them heavy footsteps and ringing bells. “It’s pretty creepy,” he admitted.
Visiting the house that afternoon was Mr. Dougherty’s fiancée, a fellow teacher named Tyiba Rashid. Ms. Rashid was more direct. “It’s completely haunted,” she declared.
