In the spirit of Halloween, Food & Wine wanted to put together a slideshow about America’s Haunted Restaurants and Hotels. I headed down to Manhattan Bistro in SoHo and was welcomed by a few surprises. When I met with the owner she asked if I wanted to see the well in the basement. Since I had just received the shoot list for the lineup and had not reviewed any text yet I wasn’t exactly sure what a well had to do with the story. She informed me that the well (above) was from the 17th Century, back when SoHo was just a field, and that a woman had been murdered and thrown into it. She then escorted me down the basement stairs to the well. It was creepy just knowing that I was photographing an object that someone had been murdered in, even if it was hundreds of years before I was even born. I quickly snapped a few shots and returned upstairs where I took a few general interior images to round out our collection. Though the holiday gives Food & Wine a reason to branch out into a bit of a different territory, I’d prefer avoiding all murder scenes for future shoots.
