Almost forty years ago, I owned a small house in the Greenwich “backcountry” just a few miles from the Westchester County Airport. One morning, I was talking on the phone with a friend whom I would see later in the day at an event he had organized in Miami. I was one of the speakers.
“Don’t you have to be at the airport?” he asked after a while.
I was very late, but luckily, this was before 9/11, and one could be on the plane within 10 minutes of arriving at the airport. And the roads between my house and the airport were sparsely settled.
I drove at ridiculous speeds along little winding roads. I was rushing down a narrow, twisting street on a steep hill when I saw a house out of the corner of my eye. “What was that?” I said to myself, out loud. “Someone evil lives there.”
I continued on to the airport and forgot about the house. A few months later, I was driving down the same road, not thinking about the house, when I rounded the corner, saw the house, and had a similar strong feeling.
This time, I decided to find out who owned the house, so I stopped, looked at the mailbox, and wrote down the address. When I got home, I called a friend and asked about the place. “That’s Roy Cohn’s house,” she said.
Say what you want about that story. It happened.
Postscript after the photo of Roy Cohn sitting in the backyard of his Greenwich house.
Similar Experiences
The year before, I was living in Munich. Walking near the University, I crossed a street that was one end of a long block. “There’s something bad down there,” I distinctly said to myself. A few weeks later I had a similar feeling, and I realized I was crossing the same street, but at the other end of the block. This time, I walked down the street to investigate. I followed my feeling and found myself standing in front of an occult bookstore. I did not go in.
In Greenwich, I went out for a walk and passed a wooded lot that felt strange. “There’s something going on there,” I thought. Looking at the lot, all I saw were trees and a parking lot partially hidden by the trees. Some construction equipment was visible. A few months later, the Greenwich Police swept in and arrested a group that was stealing construction equipment and keeping it on the lot before selling it.
I was in Greenwich because of the following experience: back from Munich, I had to decide if I was going to stay in New York, and if so where I would work and live. I borrowed a car and drove towards Bedford, New York, which is the nearest you can live to New York City and feel like you’re in the country.
I got off Interstate 684 and cut through the northwest corner of Greenwich. Heading in the general direction, I turned down a street that seemed right and looked at the street sign, which said “John Street.”
“John Street,” I said to myself, “That’s my street.
I drove down the hill, over a stream, and up a hill. I passed a tiny little house on the left, right on the road, and a little rundown. I was almost past it when I said out loud to myself (there was no one else in the car), “What was that?”
It was so striking that I stopped the car and backed up, going back to the house. It was 77 John Street (my new phone number in New York was PLaza-1 2277). Two days later I made an offer on the house, and a week later I owned it. After a year and a small amount of work—nothing more than clearing out the brush in the landscape and painting the exterior, I sold the house to a man named John Badman, who tore it down and built a MacMansion. But that’s another story.
In writing this up, I wondered if the stream in the photo of Roy Cohn was the same as the stream behind my house. My stream came from Close’s Pond (near the house where Glenn Close grew up). The stream tumbled down a steep hill behind my house, making a wonderful small waterfall. But looking at the map, I see that my stream was a tributary of the East Byram River, while Cohn lived on a tributary of the Byram River. They only came together a few miles to the south.
