Giving Up the Ghost (4 page)

Clinton Road is like that.

I was in a bookstore during a vacation on Long Beach Island in New Jersey when a magazine caught my eye. It was an issue of
Weird N.J
. The issue was entirely devoted to Clinton Road stories. Readers had written in to share their own experiences and those they’d heard. There were hundreds of them. Like many things you buy on impulse, the magazine sat there unread for a long time. Of course, realizing that it was filled with
ghost stories
didn’t encourage me to get to it any earlier. Then, shortly after my dinner with Matt, I saw a segment on TV about Devil’s Alley, a now abandoned housing development located along Clinton Road. After fishing out my copy of
Weird N.J.
, I found thousands of webpages and postings sharing stories of bizarre goings-on along Clinton Road. Some were first-person stories, others were passing along dire tales that “honestly actually happened” to the teller’s cousin, neighbor, or grandmother, or a kid at school. To me, the most incredible part of the Clinton Road mythos is that there is absolutely no explanation as to why all this legendary horribleness should happen
there
. Nothing important ever happened
along Clinton Road. Few people have ever lived in the area. It isn’t particularly beautiful, or ugly, or otherwise notable. Yet it seems every New Jersey resident I meet has something to say about this long stretch of nowhere.

To make things easier for us, I went through every Clinton Road legend I’d come across and put together a master list of all the recurring moral warnings for Clinton Road travelers:

Violate any of these rules, and terrible, awful things will happen.

Whenever I share this list with my friends, everyone trips up on the same item.

“Why can’t you eat bagels?”

“Well, it really isn’t that you can’t eat
any
bagels,” I reply. “You just can’t eat bagels that you find on the side of the road.”

“Who would want to eat bagels sitting on the side of the road?”

“Well, obviously someone,” I explain. “Or the Clinton Road Satanists wouldn’t have anyone to sacrifice.”

Over the years several travelers on Clinton Road have reported seeing large piles of bagels by the side of the road—hundreds of them, just sitting there.
Naturally
, these people assumed this had to be the handiwork of the Devil. It’s said that the satanic cults hiding along Clinton Road will leave stacks of bagels sitting around to lure in passersby. When the unknowing bagel eaters start munching, the Satanists snag them, then cart them off to some awful demise.

Despite the distraction of demonic baked goods and mutant creatures, we have one specific goal here on Clinton Road: to find ghosts. Clinton Road is supposedly filled with hundreds of them. We only need to prove the existence of one.

The outlandishness of almost any story associated with Clinton Road is exactly why I decide to make this my first stop on my ghost-seeking journeys. In some way, the sheer nuttiness of Clinton Road lore makes it seem more accessible, albeit still quite frightening. Goofy danger is still danger.

After Jungle Habitat, we stop at an Italian restaurant near the southern tip of Clinton Road to eat before heading out to ghost hunt. We tell the waitress what we’re doing. She tells us we’re crazy. A few minutes later she returns to inform us that the entire kitchen staff agrees that what we’re doing is terribly unwise. After filling up on pasta and garlic bread, we drive a mile or so around the woods to reach Clinton Road itself. Just before the final turn, we pass a small three-shop strip mall that includes a store called U.S. Bagel.

“Oh, man,” says Curry. “I wonder if that’s where the Satanists get their bagels.”

“That would be very convenient,” Joe replies.

“And very patriotic,” I add.

To be honest, Joe and Curry aren’t exactly my first choices to accompany me on my trip to Clinton Road. They are goofballs. I know they will never do what I ask, will make fun of me endlessly, and will follow every possible tangent like someone waving a set of keys in front of a toddler. Before asking them, I went through several other friends, all of whom turned me down, saying things like “That sounds like torture,” “You know this just provides my wife with more evidence that you are a bad influence on me,” and “So you want me to sit around with you in dark, scary places waiting to be attacked. Why
can’t we just go out for beers like normal friends?” Joe and Curry are here because they’re my only friends who said yes.

Shortly before we left, I had made a rental-car reservation.

“Oh, I almost forgot to ask,” said the agent on the phone in the midst of gathering reams of useless data about me. “Are you interested in any of our supplemental coverage for the car? For only …” As she rattled off all the benefits of this über coverage, my mind was focused on the master list of Clinton Road legends I’d just finished assembling that morning.

“I would like every type of insurance coverage you offer,” I interrupted. “I don’t care what it costs, just add it on.”

I think I blew her mind—or helped her fill her bonus quota for the month or something. All I know for sure is that by the time I’d gotten off the phone, she was very excited and I was paying twice as much money to insure the car as I was to rent it. I could have brought that thing back in three hundred pieces on the back of a flatbed truck and wouldn’t have had to pay a dime or answer a single question.

It’s just a little past 10
P.M
. when we finally turn onto Clinton Road. Our plan is to simply drive up and down the road over and over again until we see something.

Even though it’s only forty miles from Times Square, Clinton Road is, quite seriously, in the middle of nowhere. We can’t even get our cell phones to work. While there are some houses at either end, once you are a half mile in there is nothing except road and a lot of trees. The forest is dense and pushes itself right up to the edge of the road, occasionally causing an errant branch to come within a few inches of the side of the car.

Clinton Road’s supposed wickedness doesn’t stop with the outright bizarre and outlandish. Even the few artifacts of real life along Clinton Road have been given nefarious alternative
backstories. An imposing and crumbling furnace left over from an eighteenth-century iron smelter is rumored by Clinton Road enthusiasts to be part of the ruins of a Druidic temple where human sacrifices and rituals were conducted. In 1905, a man named Richard Cross built a castlelike mansion on some high land overlooking the reservoir. It eventually fell into disrepair and burned down. Its partial shell has been rumored to be the remains of a satanic castle where more rituals and sacrifices take place. Most of the traffic signs along Clinton Road are spray painted with pentagrams, skulls, and words like
fear, rape
, and
death
, complete with arrows pointing the way down some footpath toward their suggested awfulness.

For all our goofing off, all three of us are completely silent as we head up Clinton Road for the first time. From photographs taken during the daytime, Clinton Road just seems like an unassuming, unremarkable, and more than slightly under-maintained country back road. But at night it feels cloistered, dark, and suffocatingly empty. The moonlessness of the night doesn’t make it any more welcoming. It feels unfinished, like it was abandoned. I find myself resisting going above twenty-five miles per hour. It’s like we’re traveling down a stranger’s driveway rather than along a public road.

We’re on the road no more than ten minutes before Curry, jumping up from the backseat, slams his hand into my headrest.

“Oh my God, there’s a frog!” he screams. “Stop the car so I can chase it.”

“I am not stopping the car so you can chase a frog,” I say.

“Tell me again, why are we coming here to chase things if you are too scared to actually get out of the car and chase things?”

We drive up and down the entire ten-mile length of Clinton Road eight times. Our evening’s tally is embarrassingly slim: Cop cars: 6; bags of trash: 5; deer: 3; frogs: 1. Satanists, mutants, albinos, and ghosts: 0. Before leaving we make one last stop: the reservoir bridge, approximately halfway down the road. This will be our real moment of truth, as a lot of Clinton Road’s suggested nonsense takes place close to the reservoir bridge, where the long-gone original town of Clinton once stood in what’s now a thin clearing in the trees between the road and water. There are differing legends about a boy who died on the bridge. According to most versions, a boy was struck by a car and thrown into the water. Supposedly if you stand by the edge of the bridge, the ghost of the boy will materialize and push you in.

We find an old trailhead just north of the bridge and stash the car there. Almost as soon as Curry is out of the car, he takes off into the darkness.

“Let’s run down the path. We aren’t supposed to do that, right?” he says from ten yards down, before even looking back to see if we’re following.

“No way,” I say.

“Why not?”

“He’s scared,” says Joe.

Of course I’m scared.

“Have you been ignoring everything I’ve told you about this place? You have no idea what or who is down there.”

“I thought the point of this trip was to do things we shouldn’t be doing,” Curry replies.

“He’s got a point,” says Joe, joining Curry farther along the path. No map. No idea where they’re going. No means to find their way back.

I wave my flashlight down the path, illuminating huge patches of poison ivy dotting its entire length. “If you get stuck, don’t expect me to come rescue you.”

“Okay, Eric,” Curry replies as he and Joe start to fade into the woods. “You stay right there … by yourself … alone in the dark. Maybe the ghost boy will show up and keep you company.”

They’re quickly out of sight and I’m there alone.

Am I scared?

Well, it’s more like terrified. An adrenaline knot in my stomach keeps growing and growing as I realize how intensely and amazingly dark it is. Unless you’ve been out in the country on a dark night, it is almost impossible to imagine how oppressive and complete darkness can be. It’s like being blind, but worse. Blindness means you can see nothing. However, being out on Clinton Road at night means sensing just enough form and motion around you to wonder what’s causing it and why, yet having no way to figure it out. A flashlight makes it worse. While it illuminates part of your surroundings, it renders everything else around you pitch-black.

I can hear myself breathing and feel my heart beating in my throat.

While I stand there, in the dark, listening to Curry and Joe fade away into the distance, I make myself shut my eyes.
I’m going to close my eyes
, I say to myself.
And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again
.

Since I started repeating these words to myself as a child, I’ve always referred to this as “calling out.” I bargain with the ghosts, offering a simple proposition: If you exist, I’ll see you when I open my eyes. Even though it is probably complete nonsense, calling out always gives me a weird sense of relief, as if I’ve proven to myself that it’s safe to walk around, sleep, or
do whatever. I’ve done this hundreds, probably thousands of times in my life, and I’ve never seen a ghost. You could take this as evidence that ghosts don’t exist—or you could take it as evidence that the ghosts are simply not interested in taking up my proposition.

Before Clinton Road, the last time I remember calling out was a few years ago at my parents’ lake house.

A few days before I arrived, a bunch of kids had decided to go on a late-night boat ride for some moonlit waterskiing. Except there was no moon. And the boat didn’t have any lights on it. And the first dude on the skis didn’t even know how to swim. And both he and the boat driver were drunk.

I’m sure I don’t need to give too many details, but the boat hadn’t even made a single loop around the lake before the boaters realized that the drunken novice skier wasn’t there anymore. They circled around to pick him up.

No sign.

They kept looking for hours and didn’t bother to call the cops until the morning.

The police searched and searched.

Nothing.

When I arrived at the lake and found out what all the activity was about, I started making light of the apparent Darwinism at play. I stopped joking when I noticed the boy’s father sitting in a picnic shelter near the shore every day watching the increasingly desperate search effort for his son. He just sat there, day in and day out, waiting.

They started out with divers and quickly moved on to large hooks. After a few days they took cadaver-sniffing dogs out in rowboats. Then came additional divers with more-expensive-looking equipment. There was even talk of using explosive charges.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the boy, especially at night when the searchers went away and the moon reflected off the still lake, with the boy’s body hidden somewhere underneath.