Illustration: Michelle February
close your eyes. What do you hear? Maybe your neighbor is talking on the phone while walking by your apartment door. Maybe it’s Mister Softy’s jingle. Or maybe a woman yells “Blood of Christ” outside your window at eight in the morning. Noise, whether from machinery or man-made, is one of the unavoidable facts of city life. Most of them are fairly harmless. But then there are the horrors—sounds so loud, so persistent, so eerie that they can completely drive even the most sane among us. This is an anthology (lightly edited and condensed) of New York horror and noise stories.
my dad: My partner and I moved into our current place in Bay Ridge about two years ago, and we have a neighbor — several afternoons a week, often for longer than an hour at a time — who likes to listen to a recording of the kids singing the national anthem. It’s the same recording over and over, literally back to back. The speaker is on his way to escaping from the fire. He pointed out. We joke that this is a monkey paw swap for a balcony. It’s not the worst song it could be – it’s a treble, there’s no bass, no electric guitar solo or heavy drums – it just kind of… goes on.
Cassandra: This started last year when we moved into our apartment. We are on the first floor, our bed is right next to the window, the window faces the street. So when people are standing on the sidewalk, they are standing right outside our window.
There’s this woman with a microphone — and she’s flipping that thing all the way. At first, she kind of hopped about different parts of our street, but then she started to stand continually outside our window in the summer, every morning at 8:50, to give these pesky clerical sermons. “If you do not repent, you will go to hell!” Or “Blood of Christ! Blood of Christ! Blood of Christ!” Repeat literally for two minutes in a row. During the month of June, she’d say things like, “This Pride Month, the LGBT community, we have to remember where they’re going.”
Another person in our building tried to talk to her. He works in restaurants and doesn’t come home until four in the morning, and he tried to explain to her that he needed to sleep all day. And she said, “Well, God will protect you.” So you weren’t listening for any kind of reason or logic.
One day, it was my first day at my new job, and I was so excited. I had the most peaceful sleep of my life when you woke me up. It was like waking up from some kind of strange nightmare for a children’s show – Botanical Tales In Hell. I opened the window and shouted, “Shut your mouth!” on her. So that worked for a few days. But then it started coming back. I think the conflict was fueling it. It has turned into screaming matches between us at least once every few weeks or so. She would be like, “Do you guys hear this? There are sinners all around me! Do you hear the prejudice I face as a Christian?”
Finally, my fiancé came over with a megaphone and started playing death metal, almost as the background to her service. As if he was specifically looking for the Devil’s Death Shouts. He only had to do it twice and she would leave immediately. Since then she has been preaching across the street. Finally I can sleep.
the above: Before the pandemic, I lived in this beautiful, stable-rent apartment in Williamsburg, and the lady next door passed away. So her family came to town and sold it to a developer, who proceeded to demolish the building. And it wasn’t like that, one day there was a big boom that I took from top to bottom – it was very noisy all the time. For eight months, there were incessant sounds of jackhammers, blows, and trucks. Since we shared a wall, he walked straight into my apartment. I felt like I was constantly shaking.
And then when the demolition stopped, they obviously started building again. So it’s not like I got any respite. The last straw was that they came to remove the gates once or twice a week. My bedroom overlooks the street. And suddenly there was the loudest of all voices blaring right outside my window at 5 am, many hours before the New York legal building. I looked out the window, and there was a dump truck that was pumping out all the rubbish from the building site. It’s incredibly noisy – like a giant pipe marching, whack whack whack whack whack whack whack whack whack. And it lasted for 20 or 25 minutes.
Then it came back the next week – same time. So I got dressed and walked to his truck. I was like, “It’s five in the morning.” I was trying to smile. Then he said, “Sorry about that! Do you want to find a solution?” I obviously did. I asked him if he could come back later. He said, “Usually people would come out and yell at me, but you were so sweet, so you know what, yeah.” We dealt with 8am so I thought my takeaway would be good for the junkyard guy.
Carmine *: This school is housed in my building and, in the last 15 years, there have been two major renovations. Well, it’s a school, I’m a good citizen, and I’m glad they’re fixing it. But the problem is, when the school is in session, they don’t want people working in the building. So they’ll start doing all the drilling and all the whacking and all the whacking around 4 or 5 in the afternoon. And it will last until 12, 1 or 2 in the morning. There were shipments of major equipment waking up the entire neighborhood at two in the morning.
I can be civilly involved, so at this point, I called one of my representatives. They looked up noise codes for me, and it turns out that for schools, there are no ground rules—they can get permission to fix them at any time of the day or night. I ended up voicing a complaint to the foreman, and then they kind of stopped working after the first hour, I don’t know if that was organic or if other people complained or maybe a phone call was made. But still, it lasted until 11 pm, until midnight. And I would say this has been going on for five of the last 15 years.
Layla: Three roommates and I moved into the apartment above Clandestino Bar mid 2020. This was a truly stunning duplex apartment with all these quirky touches – custom made bar, large mural in the bathroom. Because of the pandemic, we got a really great deal. We probably should have known what we were getting into, living above a bar, but this was my first place in New York. For the first year this wasn’t really an issue because of the curfew and it was outdoor seating only.
When the COVID restrictions were over we realized Clandestino is open every day until 4 am. But at least we had a good relationship with them, and so we were sometimes able to ask them to turn it down, and they would. But when Le Dive opened next door, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
Basically, the way they did their speaker system, you could feel the bass in our apartment. It felt like a train was running through the apartment – the table was shaking, the paintings on the wall would shake. We tried using white noise or brown noise machines, and even noise canceling headphones, but they don’t mask the vibration, because the frequency of those sound waves is different. We tried talking to them ahead of time, and they were on our faces like, “Of course, text us anytime, don’t worry about it.” But then there will be times when we’ll text them, and I swear they’ll turn up the music.
It got to the point where I slept over at my boyfriend’s every night because I couldn’t sleep at home. We moved out when our lease expired last August – 100 percent due to the noise.
on me: At some point in December, I started to hear this weird noise—thumbs really—that was happening intermittently through the night. He will move back and forth along my apartment. I thought it was pipes, so I called the owner who brought a plumber. The plumber thought it was something with the ceiling. I also began talking to my neighbors about it, who told me this old lady in the building had some kind of injury, and they thought that might be the sound. And at first, I didn’t believe them because it was so loud and so powerful – you had to hit the floor with a stick to make that noise.
But then I remember running into one of my neighbors below me, and she seemed to really believe there was a demon in the building. So at this point, sleep disturbances were getting to people – everyone seemed really nervous about it.
In the end, it got so bad that I went and spent ten minutes knocking on her door. They have a reputation for being quite ornate and for, like, attacking people for different things. Like, sometimes I use a fan in my bathroom, and she was bugging me about it. Anyway, she finally got to the door and she told me that her new medication made her use the bathroom more frequently, so finally the noise she was hitting her with her stick while she was going back and forth to the bathroom in the middle of the night. She tried to fund her walks with the other neighbors, thinking that might be quieter, but she didn’t want to.
In the end, we agreed that if you stop using the fan, you will stop banging. Then the beating stopped. Now she even knocks on my door sometimes just to hang out.
*Carmine and Jane are pseudonyms due to privacy concerns.
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