There is something eerie about Central Park at night, the suggestion of a ghostly mist lingering about its less well-lit corners. And there are many of those. It’s probably just car exhaust fumes, but eerie all the same. Pick up any tourist guide to New York and even the most basic of facts relating to one of its most famous attractions are impressive: over 843 acres (340ha) of man-made parkland augmented by lake, loch (in name anyway) a reservoir, a zoo, a dairy, a sheep meadow and a castle, to list but a few of its features. The park is also a thriving ecosystem, the city’s living lungs, threaded through by skilfully designed sunken roads and pathways; no two of the bridges that straddle them are alike. Central Park is the verdant jewel set in the middle of the bloody great block of automobile-pounded stone that is Manhattan, heartbeat of one of the greatest cities in the world.

Conceived in the 19th century from the visionary “Greensward” plans of Frederic Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the impression of the idyllic bordering on the miraculous has been further enhanced in recent times by a drop in crime, partially explained by former Mayor Giuliani’s city-wide strategy of “zero tolerance” of petty misdemeanours – a policy extended to the park itself. The once notorious nocturnal greensward is now – as our guide, historian David Wise, author of the Central Park Papers website assured us – only marginally more dangerous than the cleaned-up city surrounding it. Nevertheless, Wise’s words didn’t convince me that a night-time conspiracy tour of what was once considered Mugger Central was the best way to make my first acquaintance with the park. Strength in numbers seemed a good idea. With torch in hand, along with two dozen other gaming journalists visiting New York to get hands-on with Alone In The Dark (see review), I duly followed Wise on his breakneck tour of waypoints around the park (nor did I mind the haste; becoming a moving target seemed a sound tactic to me).

This was to be no ordinary tour, either. According to Wise, the park harbours a dangerous secret, intimated by none other than Vaux himself, if a letter apparently penned by him in September 1895 is to be believed. It mentions a secret hidden securely in the park, one which can be discovered only by deciphering the papers accompanying Vaux’s letter. According to Vaux, there are men who wished the secret to remain hidden. And being in possession of the secret, Vaux feared for his life. He didn’t have to fear for long: he died two months later. The circumstances of his death by apparent drowning in Brooklyn were never fully explained.
Tasty stuff. Throw in the misnamed Vigenère cipher – more specifically the tabula recta variant (a cipher originally attributable to the 15th- to 16th-century abbot and occultist Johannes Trithem­ius and adapted by Giovan Battista Bellaso in the 16th century), and a sensational 1874 New York Herald report telling of wild animals broken loose from Central Park’s animal enclosure, of “TERRIBLE SCENES OF MUTILATION” and “A Shocking Sabbath Carnival of Death”. Then, for good measure, add the inexplicable presence of designer and sculptor Jacob Wrey Mould’s bronze cockatrice at an entrance to Belvedere Castle; the multi-mirrored interior of the Tavern on the Green nearby (mirrors are to cockatrices what shiny shields are to Gorgons); and, on the face of it, you have enough intrigue for any self-respecting fortean to romp through. Was it really possible that somewhere in the park, a supernatural creature or cryptozoo­logical throwback was carrying out its own campaign of zero tolerance toward the citizenry? And where did all those sheep go?

Monsters in the park are nothing new. Notwithstanding the mugging, raping, murdering bipedal variety and the supposed 19th-century slaughter by entity unknown, in more recent times there have been apocryphal alligators and the recent discovery (in 2007, when, as part of a ,000,000 restor­ation project, the lake was dredged) of meaty, 3ft (90cm)-long koi carp and 50lb (23kg) snapping turtles. Indeed, Central Park is so expansive, and in some areas so secluded, that there are sectors where, feasibly, humans haven’t trodden since its completion.

The park is populated with statues depicting scenes of natural and fantastical creatures (as well as, appropriately perhaps, representations of Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Andersen); pointedly, the Natural Hist­ory Museum, located on Central Park West, has a mosaic at 81st Street Station depicting existing species in colour, while those gone extinct are shown in grey. Our guide found it surprising that hardly anyone among the group could make ready reference to the tales depicted on the granite statue of a flying Mother Goose located on East 71st Street, (the significance of which, in terms of Wise’s conspiracy theory, now escapes me). Yet some of us made a fairly good stab at identifying Mould’s cockatrice at Belvedere Castle (“griffin,” I ventured; someone else came closer with “basilisk”).

Orson Welles made an appearance on the tour, too. It is at this point that the ‘Carnival of Death’ in the Herald report and the Martians come together. Welles’s infamous radio broadcast of his near namesake’s The War of the Worlds (see FT120:40–43; 199:42–47) ends in Central Park, in an area which, for no apparent reason, as correspondence involving Welles evidently relates, is no longer accessible to the public. In fact, the Herald report is itself a hoax, the 19th-century equivalent of Welles’s panic-inducing enactment of invading Martians in 1938.

At one point, Wise noted that the rich owners of the buildings fringing the park have done a pretty good job of ensuring that nothing (Martian or otherwise) really spoils their view by day or night. Perhaps that’s it, then? More scandal than conspiracy: the most expens­ive piece of real estate in the world remaining virtually untouched since its inception. Before the park’s Olympian creation, the poor – mostly free African Americans and immigrant Europeans – were evicted, Olympics-style, from abodes situated on designated park areas. Ironically, the park later became a daily haven for the poor living in the crowded tenements and wanting to escape them for a while. In a city bulging with metal and concrete, apart from the huge, inviolable park area, the only way to build is up. Which is probably the direction the balloon of the conspiracy tour had gone after the revelation that the Herald story was nothing but a hoax. It was all starting to look like smoke-and-mirrors to me, and without forking out to read the Central Park Papers themselves, I confess I’ll remain none the wiser.

We blundered our way through the dark in more ways than one during that night. Given the option to reach the next waypoint via the road or by the park’s ‘Ramble Way’ (which I honestly misheard as the ‘Rambo Way’), we chose the latter and suddenly, upon a rise, three gentlemen loomed into view above us by some bushes. They looked as surprised to see us as we were alarmed to see them: we did a Mulder and Scully with our torches, while three casually dressed, rugged looking gentlemen stood by the bushes in the ‘Rambo Way’, enjoying the night air, in Central Park, in the dark. New York! New York! As another fictional creation who once stalked the city said: all the animals come out at night.

My reference point for the city and the park, as for so many around the world, is cinema; and both places are as fantastic in reality as they had been to me as I grew up living them on celluloid. Dustin Hoffman made Laurence Olivier swallow diamonds in Marathon Man by that reservoir; Woody Allen courted Mariel Hemingway on a horse and carriage ride around the park in Manhattan; and more recently a monster less shy than our cockatrice rampaged through the park in Cloverfield, reducing Vaux’s uniquely beautiful bridges to rubble. A similar thing happened after a badly organised Diana Ross concert in the park on 21 July 1983, when hundreds of youths rampaged through the area afterwards, vandalising and attacking anyone who got in their way. ‘Steaming’ on a supreme scale, indeed. They had a good go at The Tavern on the Green, too, climbing onto the roof, then descending upon and assaulting diners seated in the patio. It came to be known as ‘the night Central Park got mugged’. It happened. The park itself got mugged! Fact and fiction can often be hard to distinguish in such a remarkable place. Remember those sheep? There were actually sheep on the meadow until the early 1930s. They were ultimately moved to pastures new when the authorities feared that needy, Depression-era New Yorkers would eat them. And what, finally, of Vaux’s myst­erious death? It was foggy that day and he was an elderly man; a prosaic misstep and he most likely simply fell into the water and couldn’t get out again.

On my last day in New York and with a few hours to kill before the flight home, there were many sights in the city that I still wanted to see. In the end, though, I settled on none of them. Instead, I went back to the park, to enjoy the beauty of it by daylight. There were still traces of snow. I sat on one of the endlessly long benches for a couple of hours, comfortable with the Atlantic Ocean between myself and my cares back home for a little while longer at least, watching the lunchtime joggers and the roller-skaters and the perambulating mothers go by. Apart from a brief sprinkling of March rain and two park workers shredding fallen branches, all was peace and calm. And maybe the secret to any threat in Central Park was right in front of me, or rather all around me: a rectangular strip of greenery corr­alled on all sides by the most dangerous species on the planet.

Behind me, the Dakota Building loomed, where one of said species gunned down John Lennon and Rosemary gave birth to her satanic baby and Boris Karloff once lived. Fact and fict­ion. The stuff of a conspiracy theorist’s dreams.

If it’s eerie by night, sitting in the park by daylight is restorative. The presence of the Angel of the Waters is fitting. The Bethesda Fountain, over which she watches, is named after the pool cited in the Gospel of St John, blessed by an angel and where invalids would gather, waiting for a miracle. In the absence of miracles, we tend to see the world – and the conspiracies – that we need.