The ghosts that haunt on Halloween are usually put outside with the pumpkins: white sheets with stuffed heads draped across the trees. But real ghosts haunt Passaic County, some residents say. In a house in Little Falls, a baby giggles from inside the walls. In Wayne, a widow looks out the window over her husband's grave, though both have been dead since the 19th century. In Paterson, a murdered man moved in with a family until it was "his time to go." A third of Americans believe in ghosts, according to a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll. And 23 percent of those polled believe they have seen a ghost or been in the presence of an apparition.
Colin O'Keeffe, 32, a landscaper from Little Falls, is one of them. He and his wife, Meghan, 22, were so spooked by the noises they heard in the house they were renting beside the Passaic River that the couple moved out in July. The O'Keeffes said the trouble started after the floods caused by April's nor'easter, when a FEMA employee came to take photographs of the damage to the lawnmowers Colin O'Keeffe stored in a crawl space under the house.
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Meghan O'Keeffe went to Atlantic City over the Fourth of July weekend, and her husband was home alone. "I heard a lady and a guy conversing, real soft, like pillow talk," Colin O'Keeffe said. But when he checked the house and outside to see if someone was there, he found no one. He called his wife, who urged him to call the police. But Colin O'Keeffe refused: "They're going to think I'm crazy," he told his wife.
From there things got spookier. Meghan O'Keeffe returned and heard the same noises as her husband. There was knocking from inside the wall. Colin O'Keeffe, who said his Puerto Rican grandmother had handed down a belief in "good spirits," finally knocked back. "Are you OK?" he asked whoever was inside the wall. Their riverside house had once been a summer cottage for Paterson families. Perhaps someone long ago had drowned there, they thought.
But then Colin O'Keeffe heard a baby giggle, and the sound of someone bouncing a ball, and playing with a child's wooden alphabet blocks. "We had a son that died seven hours after his birth," said Colin O'Keeffe. "Is that you, baby Justin?" he asked. "Hey, daddy," he heard back. Meghan O'Keeffe heard a piano playing, and a woman singing coming from another room. "I'm like, OK, we're out of here," she said in a recent interview. Within a few days, they were packed and moved.
Observers seen as crazy
O'Keeffe's landlord asked him if he was mentally stable, to which he asserted, "I know I am," adding that he's been sober for three years. They're not sure how to make sense of the supernatural experience, but they know what they heard. "In Western culture, we tend to view people who claim to see ghosts as either childlike or mad," said Marlene Goldman, an English professor at the University of Toronto–Scarborough, who has studied ghosts and ghost stories in literature. "But this is simply not the case in other parts of the world, where dialogue with one's ancestors and a belief in ghosts is a legitimate and valuable facet of cultural practice," she said.
For people who have "faced the pain of sudden loss ... ghosts allow us to project our fears and desires," Goldman argues. In other cases, they "serve to maintain a link with the past." "There are many reasons why people would experience this type of haunting, including a sense of guilt and, equally, a sense, often unconscious, of having to ensure that justice is done in the face of some buried, yet 'undead' injustice perpetrated in the past," Goldman said in an e-mail. In Shakespeare's "Hamlet," a ghost returns to ensure that his murderer is punished, while in Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved," the appearance of the ghost of a murdered child "is both consoling and horrific because it serves as a reminder of the uncanny, traumatic and enduring legacy of slavery," she said.
Researching the paranormal
For those who are more interested in proving the existence of a ghost than in interpreting the meaning of its appearance, there is Mark Johnson, founder and lead researcher of North Jersey Paranormal Research. The volunteer group investigates ghosts, hauntings and other "paranormal phenomena" throughout the tri-state area. "There's no sure-fire way to detect a ghost," said Johnson, but the group does measure electro-magnetic fields, and uses audio, video and still photography to detect unusual sounds or images. Their Web site, www.nnjpr.com, contains photographs of light orbs and recordings of "EVP," or electronic voice phenomena, which capture sounds that can't be heard during recording in a room but appear when the recording is played back. New Jersey is "fortunate in that we have a longer history of settlement here, with indigenous cultures and then settlers," said Johnson, who notes that most ghosts are people who have died fairly recently, although some may stick around for as long as a couple of hundred years.
"Eventually they all move on," Johnson said.
That's what happened in the tale Vincent Marchese, 54, of Paterson, and his father, Frank, 92, heard passed down from Frank's mother, Emilia, who was living on Passaic Street in Paterson in the years after 1910. Emilia's story about a ghost that appeared to her friend never changed in all the years she told it, Vincent Marchese said. 'Not my time yet' "At that time most of it was Italian immigrants, and this young fellow was shot and killed in the street," said Frank Marchese. A few days later, the woman heard her name being called from the back of the house, but no one was there. That night an apparition walked toward her, the ghost of the young man who'd been shot and murdered. "He said, 'It's not my time yet, I need a place to stay,'" Frank Marchese recounted. "What could the woman say? You can't close a ghost out of the house. She felt the only thing to do was to accept the ghost as part of the family."
A few years passed, and one night the ghost came to her and told her, "My time has come, I have to leave you." In thanks for her hospitality, he directed her to visit the Paterson "car barn," now the bus terminal, late at night, and to bring three dimes, which she would throw on the ground there. Three coffins would sprout up, and if she kissed all three, she would find two dead bodies but a coffin full of money in the third, Marchese said. On the appointed night, the woman went to the car barn and threw the dimes, but when the coffins appeared, she lost her nerve and could not bring herself to kiss them. At home, the ghost lamented that she could have been rich and then left the house for good. "A lot of these old-time Italians took for granted that there were spirits or ghosts," said Vincent Marchese, a photographer. For him, growing up with such stories "added another dimension and richness to your life. It added a creative side to your living and made you open to possibilities."
Tales that give goose bumps
Manny Nieves, 46, of Paterson, recalled encountering older ghosts near Laurel Grove Cemetery in Totowa on a nighttime drive 25 years ago. He still gets goose bumps when he tells the tale, now a family favorite. Nieves and three friends took Riverview Drive, between the cemetery and the Passaic River in the summer of 1982, primed to see the ghosts they'd heard about from a high school teacher. Suddenly, three boys appeared before them on the road, dressed, Nieves said, "like Huckleberry Finn." "All three of them had straw hats," and wore shirts with suspenders, and dark jeans rolled up at the calf, he said. All were barefoot and carrying branches. The boys approached the car and began knocking at the windows, said Nieves, who broke into prayer and yelled at the driver "They're ghosts! They're ghosts!" "We just sped off," Nieves said. "All four of us were scared."
Sometimes a ghost story makes for a good tale, whether you believe it or not. At the Schuyler-Colfax House Museum on Hamburg Turnpike in Wayne, the ghost of Hester Schuyler reportedly stands by the window of her former bedroom, with its floral wallpaper and wide floorboards, looking toward the grave of her husband, Gen. William Colfax, a personal bodyguard to Gen. George Washington, who predeceased her. Colfax was buried at the family gravesite, behind a Dunkin' Donuts that is now up the road. The ghost has been spotted only by women, said Robert Monacelli, chairman of the Wayne Historical Commission. "She does not appear as a full-bodied apparition," he said. "She is a presence, is what we've been told by the people who have experienced this. The first thing they experience is the smell of wisteria, wisteria being Hester's favorite fragrance. "More than a ghost story, this is a love story if you think about it, because she's watching over the grave of her Billy." But he is open to the possibility that the ghost wanders the house, Monacelli said. "She's been seen."
