OLD MERTZ APARTMENT HOUSE

Location: The old apartment house is located on the East side of Manhattan at 623 East 68^th Street.

Description: The building is a four-story re-converted brownstone with sixteen full apartments linked by an antedated boiler system for heat and air-conditioning. One of the better apartment houses in its day, it was already starting to fall into decline in the Late Sixties. Today, graffiti and vandalism have nearly ruined the structure and only a few apartments show a trace of the prominence they had in their prime.

Ghostly Manifestations: From the exterior, the Old Mertz Apartment House might not look like much, but to fans of the late Ricardo Desidero Ayacha Ricardo, it’s a prominent place. Nicknamed Ricky by all who loved him, the nearly forgotten Cuban bandleader lived here for ten years while he was starting out in show business. Today, many believe that Ricardo’s spirit never left the building.

“I don’t doubt he’s still with us.” Stephen Appleby is still a good friend of Ricardo’s son, Ricky Ricardo Jr. Still in possession of his parents’ old apartment, he has fond memories of the Cuban bandleader from when he was growing up. His own father, Charles Appleby, played local TV pitchman Freddy Freeman, when he wasn’t running the local CBS TV Station. “Ricky Senior was a personality larger than life. He was meant for the entertainment industry. I can’t conceive of him letting a little thing like death to hold him back.”

“Since I moved in,” He continues. “It seems as if Apartment 1-A is constantly empty. No one stays there for long and I don’t know why. It’s a nice apartment with a brick wall facade in the living room and the back bedroom overlooks the rear of the building where you can’t hear the traffic out front. Last year when it turned out available, I recommended it to this friend I knew from the Upper West Side who was looking for an apartment. He stayed in it for about three to five months and then moved away again. I never knew why, but when I finally asked him, he said he couldn’t stand the sound of the couple arguing next door. The problem is that there was a nurse on one side and two guys living on the other side and no one ever heard them argue.”

Maggie Trumball inherited her grandmother’s apartment after the old woman passed away. A nurse at the local hospital, she was coming home late after the graveyard shift when she was accompanied by a handsome figure of a man in a tuxedo who escorted her to her apartment and then let himself into 1-A. He was very friendly and very cordial and spoke with a Latin accent. She respected him by speaking in Spanish and he corrected her a bit on her syntax. She never saw him again, but about a year later as she was shipping her grandmother’s belongings to her family in Delaware, she caught a picture of her mother holding Ricky Ricardo Jr. as a baby. With her was Ricky Sr., the man she had seen in the hall.

Another tenant in 1974 screamed that two green Martian-looking things were staring at her from over the top of the third floor landing. Shortly thereafter, another tenant called an electrician because all his electrical appliances were going nuts. A pipe in the basement that burst one winter suddenly shut itself off just before the plumber arrived. The water valve to the building is in a hard to reach place in the basement and it is hard to find even when you know where it is, yet somehow, it was turned all the way to the left by time someone arrived to fix the pipe. Others tenants complain of someone knocking on the doors of the apartments. Within a minute, everyone will come out and look around for the person rapping on the doors on a given floor.

“In October of 1986,” Stephen Appleby reports in a newspaper article. “The local Fox station ran a story on the ghosts of Manhattan for Halloween. The stories got many of the tenants in a party to start talking and comparing experiences and we started coming to the assumption that, yeah, we might be haunted too. One person reported a shadowy bald figure lurking around the boiler downstairs and turning it down. Sometimes the smell of steaks cooking up through the system and it drives everyone hungry, but no one is ever cooking steaks. There is an old dilapidated freezer down there that the kids in the building play around. Several of them were shooed away by a red-haired lady they had never seen before. Laughing and giggling echoes up the stairway at night in the summer, but no one is ever there. Doors in the basement slam open, the door to the roof opens up in the winter and the distant sounds of people singing have been heard from somewhere in the building. Sometimes you won’t see or hear anything for a week to a month and then something happens to remind you that there are ghosts here. Do the tenants leave? Some do, but most stay. Do you know how hard it is to get a decent apartment in Manhattan?”

“In 1993, after years of hearing ghost stories,” Stephen continues. “Ricky decided to visit and check out the likelihood of the place being haunted. He had been talked into allowing a séance be filmed in Apartment 3-D which was empty at the time. There were three so-called ghost experts, this psychic, several reporters and about a hundred or so witnesses, but nothing ever happened. The crowd thinned as they got in the way of the tenants trying to stay out of the way and some jerks started insulting witnesses. It was a mess. Nothing even happened. The so-called psychic screamed at some kids to be quiet and when they didn’t, she left in an angry huff. The reporters got bored and then the ghost-hunters wandered up and down the stairway with their electrical devices. Ricky and me drank coffee in my place as we wiled away the night reminiscing. He finally left sometime after three in the morning. As he started to leave, he suddenly stops and looks up to the staircase up to the roof. There in the shadow we saw his late father standing there as bright as the day in a tuxedo and staring proudly at us with that big beaming grin of his….”

History: Not much history is known about the old brownstone. It was built either in or around 1940, but its history really begins when Fred Mertz purchased the building as an investment. A former Vaudeville star, he acquired the place in 1945 as he struggled to stay in show business, but soon the demand of managing the place as a landlord took all of his time. Ricky and Lucy Ricardo who moved in to the place on August 4, 1948 became two of their greatest friends. They stayed first in Apartment 4-A and then moved after the birth of their son into 3-B (At some point, Mertz redid the lettering on the apartments. 4-A on the first floor became 1-A and 3-B on the third floor became 3-D). Some say Mertz wanted to ride Ricardo’s shirttails back into show business, but from people who knew them, they were really as close as brothers and their wives even closer. After Ricky finally got his own TV series, he moved to live in Westport, Connecticut and invited Fred and his wife Ethel to live out there with them. Completely retired by now, Fred did scant farming chores to keep himself busy until a stroke put him in the hospital in 1966. After his death, he reportedly lamented no having a son and bequeathed the apartment house to Ricardo’s son, Ricky Ricardo Jr. Today, working behind the scenes in the television business, the now grown young man still manages the place and trying to keep it running “a little bit better than when his Uncle Fred ran the place.”

His mother, who lived alone out in Westport until her death in 1989, published her memoirs in 1975 about being married to Ricky and the stunts she pulled to get into show business alongside him: “That Crazy Redhead” by Lucille Esmerelda McGillicudy-Ricardo.

Identity of Ghosts: Theories abound that Ricky, who passed away in 1986, and his wife, Lucy, and their longtime friends, Fred and Ethel Mertz (who died in 1979), continue to return because this was where they experienced the greatest joys of their life. When alive, they had wonderful memories here and abroad on trips together. Even their fights were some of the most incredible stunts to watch, but despite how bad things became, they always remained good friends after all..

Comments: I Love Lucy TV Series (1951-1961), Hauntings based loosely on the Bay Ridge Apartment House in Brooklyn, New York