The Glass Bridge

In December 1891 there was a terrible double murder in the tenement building at 35 Moore Street in Brooklyn: Jewish immigrant Frieda Borchinsky, age about 30, and her five year old son Isaac, were bludgeoned to death in the middle  of the day - with no one, apparently, hearing or seeing anything.

Several arrests were made, and the police suspected that Max Borchinsky, Frieda's husband and Isaac's father, knew more than he was telling, but the case remained unsolved. The Borchinsky funeral took place in a local livery stable; the family was so poor that a collection had to be made to gather the $30 undertaker's fee.

And then strange things started to happen:

In the spring of 1892, a young woman named Bertha Springer went to the police. She told them that she was engaged to Max Borchinsky "but [that] his actions were so strange in her company and he kept telling her in his melancholy moments that if he married her he might immediately after be arrested [and so] she now hesitates about becoming his wife." He told Bertha: "I am on a glass bridge that may break at any moment, and if I was sent to prison you would be so unhappy." Bertha told the police that Max kept talking about the glass bridge. So she came to the station to get some advice. The clerk on duty listened, then told her "to make a careful investigation and question him further about the glass bridge." She said she would, and left.

The summer of that same year, people reported seeing the white ghost face of little Isaac, always on Saturday at dusk at the end of the Sabbath. Men coming home from synagogue saw his "white baby face" at the third story window.The tenants fled; no one would live there, even rent free.  Women covered their faces if they had to walk by 35 Moore Street. The three-story brick tenement house was torn down soon after this because people said it was haunted and no one would go near it. 

Max Borchinsky was arrested for his wife and son's murder two years later, in 1894. He had been engaged to several young women, and one of them (not Bertha Springer) had him arrested for failure to repay a debt of several hundred dollars. During the inquiry, he seems to have contradicted himself and given the police reason to believe that he was the murderer (the papers never specify the evidence, though). Miss Springer seems to have moved on, fearing the man who stood upon the glass bridge.

Ironically, the man who finally bought the haunted tenement, tore it down and would build a warehouse on the site - was, according to the Eagle, a plate-glass importer.

Source: "Wants to Wed," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Apr 22, 1892, p. 6.

[Note: The Borchinsky case has many interesting facets which I have omitted for the sake of (relative) brevity.]

Other articles about the Borchinsky case:

Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
"The Borchinsky Double Murder," Dec. 16, 1891, p. 6.
"In the Dark," Dec. 17, 1891, p. 5.
"Lowly Burial," Dec. 18, 1891, p. 5.
"Not For Money," Jan. 15, 1892, p. 6.
"Waiting to See a Ghost," Jul. 3, 1892, p. 20.
"How Boschinsky [sic] Was Caught," Jun. 17, 1894, p. 24.

New York Times:
"The Bloch Murder Case," Dec. 17, 1891, p. 9 [Borchinsky had changed his name, temporarily, to Black/Bloch, but evidently reverted to Borchinsky later]
"The Borchinsky Murder," Jan. 16, 1892, p. 2.
"For Murders Almost Forgotten," Jun. 16, 1894, p. 5.

Image of people crossing the East River "Ice Bridge" in 1871 from the NYPL Digital Gallery.