The Egyptian author Miral al-Tahawy includes a short epigraph in her 2010 novel Bruklin Hayits (Brooklyn Heights) from the Iranian poet Furugh Farrukhzad’s posthumously published poem “Iman biyavarim bih aghaz-i fasl-i sard” (“Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season”; 1974 [first drafted in 1965]). The novel’s epigraph provides a comparative starting point to explore a reciprocal haunting between the two texts. While Farrukhzad’s Persian poem remains haunted by premodern Arabic poetic form in the shape of the 'arud (prosody), her lines also haunt and thereby shape our understanding of al-Tahawy’s protagonist, an Egyptian immigrant to New York City named Hend, as a flaneuse, a female urban walker. In both poem and novel, the flaneuse figure operates in the background of urban space like a ghost and as a witness to a particular moment in history. Starting from al-Tahawy’s citation of Farrukhzad’s melancholic poem, this paper approaches the flaneuse in Brooklyn Heights in terms of Derrida’s concept of hauntology from his lecture Specters of Marx (1993). The argument builds by analyzing how Hend, as a flaneuse, crosses the boundary between the public and private spheres as well as how Hend’s walks through Brooklyn open up New York’s Arab past to her. I situate Hend’s experience of exile in relation to the history of the Arab world during the twentieth century and explore how memories about early Arab immigrants to the United States and the loss of Palestine, along with the contemporary immigrant experience in America as presented in al-Tahawy’s novel, lend themselves to hauntological study. Guided by Derrida’s comments on the persistence of Marxism even after Fukuyama’s “end of history,” the paper shows how the ghosts of impossible futures persist in Hend’s world as she explores the past, both that of her own family and of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries more broadly. Overall, the paper reads al-Tahawy’s novel in terms of hauntology to offer a way out of the contemporary Western neoliberal consensus through the flaneuse figure’s recognition of ghosts and these ghosts’ continued insistence that history has not yet ended.