- In a part of New Jersey where snakes slither slowly across a road, still coiled and yet somehow still moving; in a part of New Jersey where an insect that looks like a miniaturized bat sits on your windshield, menacing you while you make a sound that doesn’t sound quite like you from inside your car; in a part of New Jersey with a disproportionate amount of road kill in an already highly populated-by-road kill state; in a part of New Jersey where your phone cannot, will not pick up any kind of signal; here, in West Milford, in the county of Passaic, lies Clinton Road, a 10-mile stretch of haunted highway.
Like so many things in New Jersey, the hauntings of Clinton Road are populous and fragmented and mysterious. All around New Jersey, you can mention Clinton Road and people will say, “Yes, the haunted road, right?” And you’ll say yes and ask them what exactly that means to them, and they’ll tell you one of the many stories associated with the place but they’ll be vague: A dead child? A cannibal? A gang? A truck? Nobody has many specifics on the road except the aficionados, just an overall sense of its haunting. But it’s another way that Clinton Road is a microcosm of New Jersey: Its fame as a haunted road, among many haunted roads in a very haunted state, is about volume.
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The pavement itself is innocent enough to look at. It is long and curvy and surrounded by tall trees and it is certainly not abandoned—following the winter, its potholes were filled more completely than on my highly-taxed, not-haunted street. There are hiking paths off the road, and even weirder, some houses. Especially at the opening of the road, some of the houses play up their Clinton Road-ness—a cobwebbed spinning wheel in one window, or a totally bizarre merry-go-round in another. But there’s also an accounting firm, and there’s also just some kids playing outside.
But, also: On this stretch of road, cannibals jump out of the woods to eat innocent passers-by. Satanists sacrifice poultry in the nether regions of abandoned castles. There are men in white hoods, and they are probably KKK, since once one of the hooded men stood in the road and stopped a truck full of stoned teenagers, only letting them pass when he looked each of them over, surely verifying their whiteness, the purity of their blood. The ghost of a dead boy haunts beneath the bridge at Dead Man’s Curve, roughly halfway down the highway; this boy, incidentally, throws your quarters back to you if you drop them in the body of water beneath the bridge. I have read that people know this for sure, that it is absolutely true, though the ghost boy is not your monkey. He will not perform reliably and there are many people who complain that they’ve made this 25 cent investment with absolutely no yield. There is a black pickup truck that will tailgate you out of nowhere only to mysteriously disappear, and I can even tell you that this happened to me several times over the course of my visits to Clinton Road in the last two months. There used to be reports of Clinton Road-specific weather reversals—snow in the summer, but those have dissipated, perhaps since there actually is snow everywhere in the summer because the weather is fucked.
And yet, none of this really drew me to the story. For starters, Clinton Road has had its day. It’s what we in the media industry call “covered”: It has a Wikipedia page, several local TV and news-of-the-weird cable shows. The New York Times weighed in.It’s got a Daily News story, and also a BuzzFeed feature. (In this business, when BuzzFeed has covered you, you are covered.) If you are compelled by the supernatural and super-freaky, there are better and certainly less known places to visit. I could have easily gone with the far less known Shades of Death Road in Great Meadows, or even Jenny Jump State Forest, an actual state park haunted by the girl who jumped off a cliff when goaded by a Native American tribe. Or I could have written an entire book on just the Pine Barrens, where the Jersey Devil roams, cursed by its own mother to spend an eternity as a freak, unlovable to all, no sweet death to anticipate.
So Clinton Road’s cannibals did not frighten me, not even how scary all this is in light of the fact that my car’s hybrid battery is on the fritz, and who knows when it will go. Getting lost didn’t scare me either, even though I had moved to New Jersey from Los Angeles just three months before I was assigned this story. (I had grown up in New York, and so moving to New Jersey would have felt like a terrible fate, except for how much I had hated Los Angeles.) No, it was a simple addendum that I read at the bottom of a very long Wikipedia page that made my stomach go slack and my breathing become shallow.
At the foot of the road is the longest traffic light in the U.S.
2.The Grasshopper Irish Pub & Restaurant sits on the tiny, incidental stretch of road between Route 23 North and Route 23 South; it also sits between the two lights. It’s the first building outside of Clinton Road proper, and the people inside do not seem to possess the anxiety that I believe people should have when they are so close to a haunted highway. It is a regular restaurant with people having lunch, a wifi connection, and flat Pepsi, passed along after I order a Diet Coke without even the perfunctory, “Is Pepsi okay?” (Has there ever been an enthusiastic yes to that?) The Yelp reviews had tempered my expectations. It is, after all, a restaurant named for an insect.
I am here to meet Dina Chirico. I will know Chirico when I meet her there, she told me over email, because she will be wearing her New Jersey Ghost Hunters shirt, which is a black shirt with a picture of a cartoon ghost wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat and looking through a magnifying glass at the state of New Jersey. She will know me, she said, because she is an empath.
Chirico started seeing dead people, or just hints of them, shadows and parts, when she was very young, and when she was a teenager, she learned how to manage this particular gift: She could turn a ghost away, or she could talk to it. She is not afraid of ghosts. How could you be afraid of something that isn’t trying to hide from you? Currently, she is a nurse, and also head of the Northern New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society, which is not the same as the Chuck’s Paranormal Adventures and is not the same as East Koast Ghost and is not the same as the more than 50 other societies devoted to paranormal research that I was able to find with a perfunctory Google search. She’s in it for the research; she doesn’t take money to do investigations. And she doesn’t ever use her gifts unless she is employed to. As a nurse, she does not tell the dead when they will die. She does not tell them what it will be like when they do. I have to beg her to tell me something about myself, because I can’t resist. But when I do, she is correct. More later.
I was introduced to Chirico by L’Aura, the head of the state’s Ghost Hunter Society, who explained why so many ghosts gravitate to New Jersey. It’s the water in the state that keeps the place so haunted, L’Aura told me. Water is a conductor for energy, and what are ghosts but energy? In certain places, certain matter keeps the ghosts well populated. For example, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania is a torrent of supernatural activity. You’d think it was because of all the deaths there, but no, really, Chirico told me, it’s actually because the layer beneath the dirt there is composed of quartz, and quartz, when it shifts, gives off a spark, and the spark conducts the ghost energy. Here in New Jersey, though, it’s the water and the lightning from the storms that keep the place just crawling with what the ghost hunters refer to, simply, as “activity.”
And it’s true. There is water everywhere, a cosmic joke, no a heavenly relief to my eyeballs after living for a decade in Los Angeles, a city that cracked and gasped with dryness. Clinton Road is surrounded by lakes and reservoirs, and that, L’Aura had told me, is probably what got it so haunted, and kept it so haunted, in the first place.
Ghosts are everywhere, but not everyone becomes a ghost. There are a lot of reasons that a soul might “stay,” as they put it, and here are some: There is unfinished business; there is someone still living who needs looking after. And the third one, which I will warn you caused me to take a deep breath and put my hand over heart, so staggering was this notion: “They just don’t know they’re dead,” she told me. “They just keep going about their business, unaware that things around them are changing.”
Is this as devastating to you as it is to me? Does this cause you, whatever your beliefs, to look at your hands and wonder if you’re really typing? If you’re really talking? If you’re really having sex and complaining about the TV noise in the next apartment and making grocery lists? What if you don’t know that you don’t need to be bothered by the TV noise anymore. What if you don’t know it’s ended and still you’re buying groceries?
What if you’re dead and still you are dieting?
I was raised religious, and when children are introduced to religion too young (this is now my working theory), they are stuck with the belief that anything is possible, and that’s not a great belief to have as a journalist who is investigating a haunted road. Religion in the hands of a hyperactive imagination isn’t a good thing. Once you place God into the mind of a child, once you set no limits on the possibilities, from burning bushes to archangels, you can never truly regain the skepticism that should have been taught to you when you first regarded the world.
It is because of this that I have to keep reminding myself that there is no such thing as ghosts, that there is no such thing as an empath, but the longer I spend with Dina, the harder it is to remember this, especially when I suggest we take my car for a drive down Clinton and Chirico is game but she also wants to know if we should take her car, since, she says, she senses I’m having car trouble.
3. Before Clinton Road was haunted, it was just criminal. It started in the 19th century as a dirt road whose utter geography allowed nefariousness to fester. The road is lined with thick woods, and bandits waited behind trees for travelers to rob and harm. There was industry a few miles in, a hike’s down from the road—a productive iron works that made cannonballs—and so people traveled to and from the site with money.
Clinton Road’s more modern history can be found in a list of testimonies from a magazine called Weird NJ. Most of the stories have a breathless dude-you’ll-never-believe-this tenor, and they often begin with a bunch of bros going to Clinton Road to intentionally become scared after filling up on weed and beer. In an issue of Weird NJthat is dedicated completely to Clinton Road (later collected into a book, published in 2000), the editors suggest that Clinton Road, with its few landmarks and long stretch of blank pavement, is an empty canvas upon which to paint your worst fears.
