Not long before the process began, it was widely reported that Wall Street and the Republican donor class were becoming

“I kept on going back to the doctor and he kept on giving me loads and loads of tablets. He thought I had pelvic inflammatory disorder,” she told me. At the hospital, a nurse smeared cold gel onto her stomach, and applied an ultrasound wand. The nurse saw the issue: “You’ve got a five-and-a-half-month-old baby in there.”,Mitchell was relieved when Kirtly’s boyfriend Jim moved into the Cage. “He didn’t believe in ghosts or the paranormal,” Mitchell wrote, but after several months in the Cage he “flatly refused to be left alone inside the house.” The three roommates made a pact: “Under no circumstances would we leave any one of us alone inside the old prison, for any reason at all. We began to plan our lives and daily schedules around that single, unbreakable rule.” But in October of 2006, Kirtly told Mitchell that she and Jim were moving out. They were expecting a baby. “I couldn’t blame them,” Mitchell recalled. The Cage was no place for children. By then, she was slowly accepting that it might not be a place for any living being.,While the lengths the President was willing to go in order to preserve his own power and avoid paying the debt that he owes were certainly unnerving, the decision of the Michigan state legislature to certify their states’ election solidified that his efforts would ultimately be unsuccessful. While I and I’m sure many others made the assumption that it was the certification of Michigan’s election that ultimately prompted Trump to begrudgingly allow the transition of power to Joe Biden to begin, I’ve begun to realize there was — at least in his mind — an even more significant factor at play in his decision.,It’s tempting to crack wise and say, “If that’s so, then I’ve been seeing a lot of dead people these days.” Except that nearly 24,000 New Yorkers have died from Covid-19, making Donald Trump’s trash-talking even more gruesome.,The vicar recited some prayers, Mitchell recalled. Then they took a second walk around the house. Everything was quiet until they reached the upstairs bathroom. Both the bathtub faucets were gushing water.,I learned this one the hard way. At the time of booking, a guest may communicate the purpose of their visit. “It’s our anniversary!” “Me and my partner want to get our kids into the woods.” “Meeting my two best girlfriends for some skiing on the mountain.”,After two years in the Cage, Mitchell had given up searching for rational explanations for the strange activity. Cell phone towers, electromagnetic fields, and practical jokers were no longer feasible. She had come to terms with living alongside the spirit of “one or more witches.”,Mitchell’s friends started to feel uneasy about visiting the Cage. “There was another incident,” Williams told me. “Vanessa felt what she described as something, or somebody, biting her ear!”,A running joke on social media among New Yorkers who stayed put for the pandemic roller coaster ride these last seven months is to match evidence of joyful city life that has exploded everywhere against proclamations of the city’s death. “New York Is Dead!” run the headlines next to photos of streets teeming with outdoor diners and shots of Central Park’s Great Lawn full of masked New Yorkers socially distanced in the late autumn sun. This outcry kicks into overdrive every time the president gets in on the doomsday action, as he did again during Thursday’s debate: “Take a look at what’s happening to New York. It’s a ghost town. It’s dying.”,Everyone panicked as Mitchell searched for a credible explanation: “The first thing we’re thinking is shit, somebody has a door open, or a window open, and a cat’s come in that’s injured.” Maybe it was one of the crows that often flew inside the Cage and smashed against its windows trying to escape. But they found nothing. Mitchell took it as a warning.,“I’m going to tell you this,” Mitchell remembers the Vicar saying. “‘I’ve been in lots of parishes…but never since I’ve come to the parish in St. Osyth have I had so many people coming to me in private, and coming to me in church, saying I need you to come to bless the house, I’ve got a haunted house.’ I can tell you of at least four houses up this road I’ve been into. I’m not going to tell you what houses they are, because that’s private.’”,Despite the horrors at home, things were looking up for Mitchell’s love life. While she was selling caravans in nearby Seawick one day, a customer arrived from London with a friend, named Jay. “He was very handsome, very funny…I fell for him,” Mitchell admitted. Soon Jay was living in the Cage. “He didn’t believe in ghosts or anything like that at all,” she said. “And I remember we were sitting in bed one evening watching TV, and he had a Coke can by the side of his bed, and it literally flew off and smashed on the other side of the room.”,To avoid being alone, Mitchell filled the Cage with visitors. One afternoon, she invited Kirsty Williams and her husband Neil for drinks. Neil, who was serving in the British Army, was the first to see the blood. Twenty or thirty droplets of deep red blood splattered the floor, as if dropped from a pipette, or a bleeding nose. Williams told me: “I’m a nurse. I work in cancer, in hematology. I definitely knew that was blood, but couldn’t explain it…it wasn’t there when we arrived.”,During a whirlwind romance, they decided to get married in Las Vegas, but Mitchell got cold feet. What if she was jumping into something that would become a nightmare, like her current real estate investment? “I cancelled it a few days before. He wasn’t the right person,” she said. They stayed in touch, but Mitchell was sleeping alone again. “I was sleepwalking,” she recalled. “Same time every night…I ended up waking up every night in the hall. By the hanging place where [the previous owner] had hung himself,” she said. It felt like the house was goading her. She’d hear voices in her head that whispered: Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself.,And yet, despite the stories of an exodus from New York, real life in the city remains on the rebound even as the days grow colder. The move to outdoor dining has left parts of the city feeling like Paris (perhaps even more so than the City of Lights itself, which is currently under curfew as a second wave of the virus hits the city). There is live music to be found in pockets everywhere. A few weeks ago, I biked across Terrace Drive in Central Park at 11 p.m. and jumped off halfway to join in an impromptu, and socially distant, dance party. Museums have opened and, absent the tourists, can actually be enjoyed on the weekend. Wherever you turn, there is a pervasive feeling of residents doing their best — to be safe, to keep others safe, and to enjoy themselves however they can. To live.