Haunted place · New Jersey, United States

Clinton Road

Updated November 20266 sources How to visit

2 archive documents

A remote public road in West Milford, New Jersey, known from Weird NJ lore. One documented case, a body found in 1983, and many legends we could not date.

The story

Clinton Road runs about 10 miles (16 km) through West Milford, in Passaic County. Homes are scarce along it, and woodland belonging to the Newark watershed or the state forest covers much of what lies beside it. It has two narrow lanes, sees little upkeep and carries little traffic, and the county does not count it among its routes.

Several real things sit near it. The Clinton Furnace was built in 1826 and is on the National Register, listed in 1976. Cross Castle, built from 1905 for Richard James Cross, who died in 1917 (a weak source, The New Jersey Digest), was demolished by the Newark water authority in the 1980s, in 1988 according to Wikipedia.

One crime is documented. On 14 May 1983 (per Wikipedia's Kuklinski article; the Clinton Road article says 18 May) a cyclist found a man's body on the road, wrapped in green garbage bags with vultures around it. The forensic file left the cause of death undetermined, with signs consistent with poison and strangulation. Richard Kuklinski was arrested on 17 December 1986 and in March 1988 a jury found him guilty of two murders, including this one, with a minimum sentence of 60 years. According to the same Wikipedia page, the killing took place in an apartment in Bergenfield, so the road was only where the body was left. In 1998, as quoted on Wikipedia, a local police chief called it "a long, desolate stretch" that "makes the imagination go nuts".

The legend

The tale Wikipedia credits to Weird NJ (which we did not read) is Ghost Boy Bridge. The story goes that a coin left on the road at one of the bridges over Clinton Brook at midnight is returned by the ghost of a drowned boy. In some versions he is seen, and in others he pushes the person into the water. Weird NJ readers are said to describe other ghosts: two park rangers said to have died in 1939, and a phantom Camaro driven by a girl who supposedly crashed in 1988. Other stories mention red eyes, glowing orbs, meetings of the Ku Klux Klan and Satanists, and hired killers dumping bodies.

When do these appear in writing? We cannot name a clear start. The earliest date we found attached to the place is 1905: the New Jersey Digest says the author J. Percy Crayon warned that year that the woods, then known as the "five mile woods", were home to robbers, counterfeiters and even witches, and it adds, with no date, that early travelers told of strange lights and figures. We could not find Crayon's work, so it is a single, unverified source. After that the trail goes to Weird NJ, whose book appeared in 2003 and which devoted a whole issue to the road (date not found), and to television in 2009, as Wikipedia lists it. The Ghost Boy Bridge story is credited to Weird NJ without a date. We found no identified drowned boy and no record backing any of these legends. A search of American newspapers to 1963 found a "Clinton road" in a village column unrelated to New Jersey and nothing on a haunted road.

The rumor that professional killers dump bodies here has one recorded case behind it, the 1983 body. Kuklinski claimed 100 to 200 murders, far more than were ever proven. Paul Smith, a member of the arrest team, said in 2006 that he checked the murders Kuklinski claimed and found none of them true, and the undercover agent on the case said in 2020 he would go as high as 15, maybe. We found no evidence behind the Ku Klux Klan and Satanist tales. The long traffic signal at the highway crossing, which can cost drivers up to five minutes in total, is a traffic-planning choice that favors the highway and has nothing supernatural about it.

What remains today

The road is open and public. The Clinton Furnace survives, and Cross Castle does not.

Visiting

This is an ordinary public road, not a site, and it is narrow, with little traffic. We give no stopping point and recommend none, and nothing we read describes a safe place to do so. The legends are better explored through Weird NJ's pages than at night on the road.