Like many places across the nation, the Township of West Milford in Northern Passaic County has its share of Halloween Goosey Night legends that pop up annually in late October.
The Tintle/Kochka family can recall stories of a friendly older woman ghost in their homestead on Sawmill Road and the Mathews/Struble/Gormley generation of Echo Lake remember a ghostly tale told by Hollywood film director Cecil B. DeMille to Mathews family descendants. Clinton Road is known as one of the most haunted roads in America and the neighboring town of Ringwood is the site of paranormal legends, such as the ghost of Robert Erskine seen at the Manor and surrounding mines. There’s a report of a boy ghost appearing on Deadman’s Curve and Peter Vanderhorst’s experience of hearing ghostly sounds of thundering horses hoofs on a dark night where the majestic Cross Castle stood.
Christine (Chris) Deery Page, who grew up at Farm Crest Acres, Oak Ridge helping her dad (Joe Deery) create and publish Aim Action Ads and Aim Community News heard the local ghost stories too and continues to hear about sitings in Ashville, North Carolina where she and her husband Phil Page now live. Chris, a graduate of West Milford High School, has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Utah and later she studied fine arts and photography at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. She retired from a long career as a flight attendant for American Airlines and is following a passion to write children’s books.
After successful publication of her first two books about the adventures of her mother’s cat Noel, she created a history lesson through an educational eerie adventure through the mystical world of Riverside Cemetery in Ashville, in “All Hallows’ Eve”, her newest children’s story book publication. The book is illustrated by Dana Margaret Irwin. In it, a group of costumed children play hide and seek among cemetery gravestones while visiting graves of well-known Ashville people. The kids learned about people in generations who had lived before them and left the world with stories to tell. The youths found information about real life people and could do follow up research to learn more about their interesting lives. West Milford has many old cemeteries, certainly with interesting stories about people who lived here long ago These stories are waiting to be uncover by anyone who likes Chris’s Halloween story idea of teaching, learning and discovering information about past residents and their contributions while they were living on Planet Earth.
In West Milford, the family of John F. Mathews, share the story of “Smith’s Ghost” as told by the late Hollywood film director Cecil B. DeMille. It has already passed through a couple of generations. When DeMille was a small boy, his family rented the Smith house (later owned by the Mathews family) for their summer residence. John and Cecil were about the same age and stayed close friends, even though they physically did not see each other much after Cecil became famous and moved to Hollywood. By the time Cecil was older and retired, John had already died around age 63 after becoming ill and coming down with pneumonia while working in all kinds of weather to build Van Nostrand Lake in Apshawa.
Cecil kept in touch was John’s daughter, Verina Mathews Genader, visited once in the early or mid 1930s when he came East, and they then stayed in contact by letter. He was invited to her wedding when she married Arthur Genader and sent a telegram to his old “childhood playmate” John Mathews, saying that only the fact that he was on the high seas filming a movie, “The Sign of the Cross” kept him from attending. In a letter that is part of the mail correspondence they shared prior to DeMille’s death in 1959, Cecil wrote about the “ghost” in the Smith house where he spent his early summers, spending time with his young friend John F. Mathews. This is where Cecil listened to his mother’s daily Bible stories that probably influenced his choice of story themes for his Hollywood movies. Cecil’s letter later in life said he was not sure if the victim was Daniel Smith or not, but it was one of the Smiths, probably Daniel. The man was so “henpecked” by his controlling wife that he apparently found his life unbearable and chose to end it because of the unreasonable pressure he was forced to live with.
“His wife’s nagging had trained him so well that when he decided to open a vein in his leg, he sat in a tub to do it, so that his blood would not run on her clean floor”, DeMille reported in his letter.
Another version heard on occasion was that it was believed that Mrs. Smith was having an affair with an area doctor and when the husband found out he was so distraught that he decided to do himself in. With the history of her well-known nagging, the latter allegation does not seem credible.
“When we lived there, every time the old house (held together by wooden pegs rather than nails creaked or any strange noise was heard, everyone said,’ Smith’s Ghost,’” DeMille wrote in his letter. “The fact that the house was supposedly haunted was the reason my parents were able to get it for a rent they could afford in those days.”
Years later, new renters living in the old colonial house decided to find out where the strange noises were coming from. Their investigation found that the invaders were not ghosts – but squirrels. The agile tree-dwelling bushy tailed rodents had found a safe place to store their winter supply of nuts and seeds in the attic. With winter coming, they apparently were somewhat noisy during their trips back and forth into the top floor of the house. The squirrels were chased out, never to return – and neither did Smith’s ghost.
The Smith graves are on what is now a piece of watershed property off Macopin Road (originally also a section of Echo Lake Road to Hamburg Turnpike in Butler). This land was part of a very large tract that the Smith owned. The woods are located just before the first driveway on the left side of Macopin Road after passing the Echo Lake Road intersection. It is also the location of a very tragic incident that I have written about in earlier columns. Locals refer to the small lane off the main road as” Murder Lane.” This was a “Lover’s Lane” originally but that changed 85 years ago on July 4, 1930. As the story goes, originally it was thought that a young couple, kept apart by society mores, joined each other in death on the peaceful lane in the woods. Robert Merkle, 28, who lived in Ridgewood with his parents, was conductor of the Paterson Philharmonic Orchestra. His father was a prominent Paterson banker.
Jennie Brauer, a two-year immigrant from Germany, lived with her aunt and uncle in Brooklyn after leaving her parents’ North Haledon home because of disagreements they had about her constant party-going. The young couple met at one of those parties and fell in love, but Robert’s secret wife refused a divorce and his parents continued to disapprove of the affair. Robert and Jennie went to Niagara Falls for a week and decided instead of returning to a life apart, they would end their unhappiness in the wooded area turnoff where Roderic had played as a boy.
“Fate denied us the privilege of happiness in life. So, we go happily to death,” said the letter written on Hotel Niagara Falls stationary that they both signed. Another note on stationary from Robert Treat Hotel in Newark to Jennie’s aunt and uncle said, “I am going away forever tonight. Please I ask you very nice to send my things to Hilda Polockstr. I got some things in Nanuet.” She said keys were in her suitcase and the trunk and money in the bankbook is Hilda’s. “You know the reason we are doing it,” Jennie wrote.
After leaving the notes in the Cadillac that took them to this place, Roderic shot Jennie in the head and then turned the .25 caliber automatic to his own head and pulled the trigger. The next morning a 21-year-old West Milford Special Police Officer (part-time policeman) was driving past the site and wondered why the parked DeSoto was there from 7 a.m. until 1 p.m. and stopped to investigate. He found the girl slumped over the wheel with a bullet hole in her temple with blood all over the floor. Fox called police headquarters for backup and the State Police from Pompton Lakes station arrived at the scene to look for Roderic Merkle. Eventually, Roderic emerged from the woods and collapsed into arms of the police, after showing them where the gun was. St. Joseph Hospital in Paterson, was the nearest hospital at the time, and police waited there by Roderic’s side for him to regain consciousness so they could charge him with the girl’s murder. Controversy about the Love Pact continued with the prosecutor contending that Markle killed the girl because he was jealous of her attentions to other men, then shot himself out of remorse. He claimed the young man forged the note to his lover’s relatives. But a nurse at the hospital said she overheard Roderic mutter, “She made me do....”
Roderic’s parents insisted he and Jennie must have been shot by a third party. Later, they tried to prove Jennie was a devotee of the philosopher Schopenhauer’s gloomy teachings, and implanted thoughts of death into their son’s introspective mind. But Jennie’s mother insisted her daughter would not want to die. Newspaper headlines that raged for a week finally ended when Roderic died of pneumonia July 10. The love pact that became legend still lives on in Murder Lane – with another legend – the Smith suicide and family bodies buried in the ground a bit further into the woods.