The haunting of Highland Park

Ghost hunters report seeing a shadowy figure 

like this one in front of the Highland Park 

Post Office.

If there’s one thing I like about Halloween, it’s a good ghost story.

Told well, a ghost story does more than just make the hair stand on the back of your neck. It captures a slice of history and leaves it for the ages. These stories recall great battles, where the valiant perished so terribly that their souls relive their final torment year after year. They remind us of horrible crimes, of unsolved murders whose victims cannot rest until justice is done, the wicked brought to judgment and the innocent vindicated once and for all.

I’d had great success with this sort of thing before. Once I spoke with a woman who claimed the basement of her house was haunted by a malevolent spirit that stared at people when they weren’t looking. Another time I heard tell of the wozzlebug, a monster from Union County that killed chickens and savagely clawed dogs.

So, in a fit of journalistic fervor, I resolved to track down some of Highland Park’s ghost stories. After all, how hard could it be?

Municipal historians usually are a great source for this sort of story. So I wrote to Borough Clerk Joan Hullings and asked where I could find the borough historian.

She wrote back at once: “There is no borough historian at this time.”

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I had learned about that evil spirit in the basement 15 years earlier. At the time I was managing editor of The Manville News and was looking for story ideas by typing that borough’s name into the Yahoo search engine to see what came up. I tried that approach again now, only this time I used Google.

A number of results I found were about haunted places in the Highlands, but I did hit paydirt on one paranormal site. Investigators with South Jersey Ghost Research once had visited a house in Highland Park, from 8:30-11:50 p.m. April 28, 2007.

Their case file revealed the following: “During the course of the investigation, investigators felt the presences of both male and female spirits, some of which are believed to be residual in nature. It was felt at least one female spirit is protective of the family, the children in particular.”

Now this was a ghost story worth writing about. Unfortunately, there is no identifying information on the web site, although it does include two pictures of a finished basement with orbs of light – telltale signs of otherworldly activity, according to paranormal investigators.

Even worse for my journalistic ambitions, the site states point-blank that they protect the privacy of their clients without exception.

My next break in the case came from Ghosts of America, a web site that allows readers to share their own paranormal encounters and experiences. An anonymous visitor reported seeing something strange going on at the Highland Park Post Office, something that had nothing to do with Forever stamps.

“In front of the post office on Raritan Avenue you can sometimes see a strange shadow that is cast by something that is not there,” the visitor wrote. “You can see the shadow moving at the speed of a person walking but there is no person there casting the shadow.”

I visited the post office myself on Mischief Night to verify the phenomenon personally. I did see a shadow there, and more significantly there was a tremendous cold spot where I was standing.

Alas, the shadow moved when I did, and the cold spot seemed to be wherever I walked. I suspect it had more to do with the weather than with anything supernatural.

It was becoming obvious that if I wanted to discover the local ghost stories, I would have to consult with the experts. My daughter’s friends informed me that not only is there a bona fide haunted house in Highland Park, it sits on the corner of Felton Avenue and Harper Street.

“People live in it now, so they kind of fixed it up,” said Isabella, 12. “But before, it was really creepy-looking.”

Sometimes creepy is all it takes. The house in question fell into disrepair during its vacancy. Old pictures of mirthless, unsmiling people filled the windows, and both Isabella and Eleanor, an eighth-grader at Highland Park Middle School, recalled disturbing evidence of haunting.

“If you were walking down Felton you could see a light in the attic,” said Eleanor. More sinisterly: “Someone said that she had seen a six-fingered handprint on the window.”

How the house came to be haunted, neither girl could say, though Eleanor recalled an older sister telling her once that the previous owners had died there. Perhaps their spirits had lingered until new owners fixed up the old house, or perhaps some unclean spirit saw the desolate old house and decided to move in.

It didn’t matter. It had taken me considerably longer than I had expected, but I had done it. I had found a local ghost story. Just to be doubly safe, I talked with Eleanor’s mother about it, to see what she knew.

“Her sister just made the story up to scare her,” she said.

Oh well. Maybe next Halloween.

Thoughts about Halloween as a Christian

In its classic pagan origins, Samhain is a day filled with meaning that finds its ultimate fulfillment in Christ.

At its simplest, Samhain was a celebration of community, a celebration that included members of the community both living and dead. I see in that a shadow of the communion we have in Christ, not just with believers around the world today, but with the entire church triumphant, which spans not only space but time as well. If Christ is the Resurrection and the Life, as he himself attests, our communion includes believers who have died over the two millenia since Christ, and those who awaited his coming.

Jack-o'-lanterns (originally carved in turnips or other similarly sized Old World vegetables) were meant as a ward against evil spirits. As I explained to Rachel today -- and as Evangeline chimed in, since she's familiar with my thinking -- Christ is the one who puts evil spirits to flight, once and for all. So when we carve a jack-o'-lantern, we do it as a statement of faith that Christ has defeated Satan, that Light has triumphed over darkness, and even though autumn is the dying season, we have no need to fear death.

The druids also wore costumes to lead evil spirits away from the towns and villages -- a commendable willingness to embrace self-sacrifice if needed -- by appearing in their costumes to be something other than what they were. And as my girls see it, the Halloween costume functions on two levels: one, it's a game of Let's Pretend, where they look like a witch, Spider-man, or Buzz Lightyear; but two, when we put on acts of righteousness, or we garb ourselves in Christ, God looks at us and sees only his son and his righteousness, not our sins.

Trick-or-treating? The Celts would leave offerings of food and drink out for the spirits of their departed loved ones, to make them feel welcome. Practically speaking, this was a way of ensuring that the needier members of the community would have food and drink in the coming weeks. I hope to perpetuate that attitude in later years by taking the girls to Elijah's Promise when Halloween isn't on a school night; in the meantime, I also remind that that the search for candy brings fleeting pleasure, but the search for Truth brings lasting joy.

Like any of our other holiday traditions, there is no meaning intrinsic in our Halloween customs beyond what we give them. I really don't understand why evangelicals prefer to live in fear that having fun trick-or-treating or carving faces in a pumpkin is going to set their children on the road to perdition.

At their simplest and most basic, these are harmless and essentially fun distractions when the weather starts getting cold; but when we take the same attitude toward them that Paul took toward actual idolatry on Mars Hill, we can find ourselves involved in the community surrounding us rather than deliberately isolated from it, and we can teach our children some valuable spiritual lessons that will serve them in good stead in situations that have nothing to do with a Superman costume.

halloween sells out

I was complaining at work Monday night that everyone has forgotten the true meaning of Halloween, and it's all become commercialized. Nowadays the Great Pumpkin rises from the pumpkin patch and starts doing endorsements for one brand name after another.

Aside from that, it's just a fun and harmless children's holiday. When it ceases to be fun because of vandalism or recklessness, it needs to be reined in, but I really don't worry that my daughter is going to run off and join a coven because we made paper jack-o'-lanterns yesterday for homeschool crafts.

I did explain to her the history of jack-o'-lanterns, and told her that people used them before they knew about Jesus to keep themselves safe from scary things. (Evangeline has an active imagination, so I didn't see a need to start filling her idea with notions about ghosts, goblins and demons in the hours just before bedtime.) I told her that now that we know about Jesus and don't need to be afraid of those things, we make jack-o'-lanterns because they're fun to make and because they also can remind us that Christ is the one who frees us from fear and from our sin.

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

The wozzlebug that once stalked Clark Twp

It slinks about on four feet, leaving tracks that resemble a bear's whenever it passes through mud or snow.

It has a long tail sharp teeth and cruel claws, and, if that's enough, at six feet tall, it towers over its prey when it stands on its hind feet. Children, understandably, are terrified at the mere sight of it, as are a few adults.

"It" is the wozzlebug, Clark Township's once-feared but now-forgotten bogeyman that was blamed for the bloody deaths of chickens, rabbits and other small farm animals and wild game at the turn of the 20th century.

The wozzlebug scare, recounted in the writings of Emma T. King, ran from 1901 to 1907. The monster was said to frequent the area near St. Mary's Cemetery on Madison Hill Road.

The wozzlebug drew professional investigators and reportedly brought the attention of reporters from New York newspapers.

Serious-minded adults and skeptical children find it easy to scoff at the idea of a wozzlebug, but monsters like it fill an important role in our culture.

"Monsters have always been with us," said Susannah Chewning, an English professor at Union County College. "Monsters always represent what we fear most."

In that sense, the wozzlebug, despite its humble roots in a turn-of-the-century farming community, belongs to a long and proud tradition of things that go bump in the dark.

Among the wozzlebug's more noteworthy compatriots are shapeless menaces like the dreaded "black man" whom Puritans believed lived in the forests of Massachusetts and led the godly into sin and witchcraft, and Grendel, the monster defeated by the Anglo-Saxon hero Beowulf.

"They don't respect the things that we define as civilized," Chewning said of these monsters — hence the wozzlebug' s association with a cemetery, or Grendel's forays into Heorot to eat people as they slept.

"The whole concept of the bogeyman is that universal monster we're all afraid of," said Chewning. "What they represent is our fear of the unknown, our fear of nature, the things we can't control."

The legend spawned by the wozzlebug survived another 20 years, only to vanish amid the economic hard times of the Great Depression, when life seemed hard enough without needing a bogeyman to spice things up.

That hardly seems fair when you consider the enduring life of the New Jersey Devil. Not only does he have his own hockey team, the New Jersey Devil still has ardent believers who claim to have seen him lurking about the Pine Barrens.

"I think the ones that persist are the ones that have the least shape, because everyone's got different nightmares," said Chewning.

Chewning believes the wozzlebug might have met its end at the hands of another creeping monster: development. As more farms disappeared, the horrifying empty spaces between homes shrank to cozy quarters.

The Pine Barrens, of course, is still wilderness.

The inspiration for the wozzlebug finally came to light in 1907 when authorities discovered it was nothing more sinister than a hobo who was stealing food to take back to his "home" — a hole he had burrowed out under the O'Donnell mausoleum in the cemetery.

The self-appointed keepers of Clark's folklore and heritage introduced a new generation to the wozzlebug and other Clark legends in the 1960s, but it failed to endure.

A wozzlebug revival is not beyond the realm of possibility, said Chewning. Although the legend is not widely known, she considers it likely a few parents still trot out the monster when they share scary stories with their children.

The thought of the wozzlebug gaining new notoriety is one Municipal Historian Brian Toal finds amusing, and he plays into the idea at once.

"The children should be aware of the wozzlebug," he said. "Be aware, be warned. The historian has spoken."