A ghost and his dog once haunted Clark railroad tracks

It's been years since anyone has seen Henry Shieve walking his dog along the railroad tracks.

Shieve, a land owner with property on Westfield Avenue, and his dog were a regular sight on tracks between Terminal and Central avenues from the 1930s up through the 1950s. That's unusual if for no other reason than Shieve died in 1905.

Clark was a radically different place at the turn of the 20th century. Incorporated in 1864 at the height of the Civil War, local law enforcement in Clark was handled by a horse-mounted constable. The township itself was filled with wide, open spaces and a population that could be measured in the hundreds instead of the thousands.

In the Clark of 1905, there were no indications that in 40 short years the Garden State Parkway would be dumping cars into the streets. The township was a rural farming community visited daily by a train that brought its load of passengers, goods and news from beyond Clark's borders. For Shieve, a retiree in his late 70s, visiting the train when it stopped near Picton Street, was the perfect way to idle away the afternoon.

And so, on Oct. 5, 1905, Shieve bid his wife adieu and took his dog for a walk to the train station. He was never seen alive again.

"He and the dog disappeared," said Municipal Historian Brian Toal.

No one at the railroad station saw him that day, and for two weeks, Shieve's wife and others searched the area for some sign of what had happened.

"They eventually found his body in the woods, down near the railroad tracks," said Toal. Although there was some speculation that Shieve might have been hit by the train, authorities finally decided he had died of natural causes, probably heart failure.

The story includes a touching note about the depth of loyalty a dog has for its master. Unable to rouse Shieve, the dog stayed by his side, barking and baying for help that never came. When the train arrived, it hit the dog and killed it, throwing its body into the woods some distance away.

If that were all, the story would be a sad incident of too little note to warrant even a footnote in Clark's history. One of his daughters, Sue Shieve, had married Benjamin King, the son of former Mayor Benjamin King, but that was as close as Shieve comes to prominence in local history. His death does not even serve as a warning about walking along the railroad tracks, since he died of natural causes.

About 30 years after Shieve's death, people started seeing him again.

"The legend is that there was always a man and a dog walking by the tracks down near the Central Avenue bridge," said Toal, who also serves as 4th Ward councilman. "The people on the trolley, when they were going over the trestle, would always say, 'There's a man and a dog down there.'"

The first eyewitness accounts of Shieve that we know about today are from the 1930s. Those reports continued for the next two decades, and finally dried up sometime in the 1940s, during World War II.

Paige Deacy, a paranormal investigator who lives in Clark, considers the ghost story to be credible, given that Shieve died without, warning in the middle of something he loved to do.

"It could be it was such a sudden death that he didn't realize he had died," said Deacy. "He's walking his dog, doing his routine, and has a heart attack and dies. Maybe he enjoyed walking his dog so much that he 'stayed behind.'"

Sightings of Shieve's ghost stopped around the same time the Garden State Parkway connected Clark with its neighbors to the north and south.

Perhaps the increase in traffic along Central Avenue and Raritan Road has made Shieve feel out of place in a Clark he no longer knows, or perhaps with the demolition of the Picton Street train station, his destination is lost and he has gone to a final resting place.

Or maybe, some October evening, Shieve and his dog will walk the tracks, someone will spot them, and the legend will begin again