NOW

“Where are the ghosts, Eric?”

“We aren’t looking for ghosts right now, Curry. We’re looking for mutant wild animals.”

Pause.

“Where are the mutant wild animals, Eric?”

Neither my friends Curry and Joe nor I honestly expect to find any mutant wild animals. But you never know. It only takes one tale to be true for us to end up shredded, eaten, or running for our lives.

In 1972 Warner Brothers decided to break in to the theme-park business by opening Jungle Habitat, a combo zoo, drive-through safari, and entertainment complex located in rural Passaic County, just outside of West Milford, New Jersey. It was once home to more than fifteen hundred animals, including lions, giraffes, rhinoceroses, tigers, camels, monkeys, and even a few dolphins. Almost from the beginning, things started going terribly wrong. Within its first month of operation, an Israeli tourist was mauled to death by two lions. A woman was grabbed and bitten by a baby elephant. Rhinoceroses slammed into automobiles. Animals began preying on other animals in front of carloads of children. Tons of animal waste started to leak into the town’s water supply. Several creatures escaped into the surrounding communities.

After operating Jungle Habitat for four years, Warner Brothers had had enough. Ticket sales were down and the problems inherent with combining humans and wild animals in a contained area weren’t getting any better. So they came up with what they thought was a perfect solution: Make it even bigger. They wanted to add roller-coasters, a log flume, a merry-go-round, and other rides to make it more like a traditional amusement park. The township residents were tired of dealing with Jungle Habitat and voted down the expansion. Warner Brothers took that as its cue and finally shut things down for good.

That’s when the rumors started.

There were stories that some of the animals were too old and/or sick to be moved, so the Jungle Habitat staff just left them there. According to the tales, some survived, crossbred, and moved with their mutant offspring into the surrounding woods. There they wait by the roadside for some poor schlub to wander by. There may be some truth to these stories. After the Jungle Habitat people split, a large number of carcasses were found on the property, including that of a dead elephant. They remained out in the open for eight months before someone bothered to bury them. And people routinely spot exotic birds that should not be seen in rural New Jersey.

Today, all that remains of Jungle Habitat is a few ramshackle buildings, overgrown roads, broken fences, and the occasional piece of equipment. We find a few rusted cages and piles of wood, but most everything else is picked clean. Vandals long ago carted away anything that could be carried out of the park, so all the missing signage turns the place into a daunting maze: twenty-nine miles of twisting and intersecting road. Most of the pavement is in surprisingly good condition for having sat here untended for more than thirty years, but weeds sprout through the many cracks and the surrounding woods creep in from the sides, giving the illusion that former two-lane roads are now only four-foot-wide paths. What was once a three-thousand-car parking lot is now just a sea of broken asphalt and knee-high weeds.

However, Jungle Habitat is just the opening act to our real destination, on the other side of the mutant-creature-infested woods: Clinton Road.

Clinton Road is an otherwise unremarkable ten-mile stretch of patched asphalt and sand about an hour north of Newark, New Jersey. It’s also ground zero for almost every back-road urban legend in America. Think of any preposterous and implausible story that involves a dark and lonely stretch of pavement, and there’s a Clinton Road version of it. There have been terrible stories about ghosts, witches, mysterious deaths, mutants of nature, and occult happenings on Clinton Road going back to the early eighteenth century.

Our task there is a simple one: to do everything that you are never supposed to do on Clinton Road.

We intend to provoke the area’s rumored ghosts and other paranormal creatures while avoiding the also-rumored cults, escaped lunatics, Satanists, hitchhikers, crazy inbreeds, KKK groups, cannibals, and other Clinton Road lurkers who purportedly want to kill, rape, dismember, haunt, torture, or otherwise bother us. This doesn’t even take into consideration the other very real threats along rural Clinton Road: poisonous snakes, black bears, and fields of poison ivy everywhere you look. Oh, and it’s wild-turkey hunting season to boot, so we have to be careful that we don’t get shot by a hunter who mistakenly thinks he wants to serve us to his family for Thanksgiving.

It always amazes me how when you discover something you’ve never heard of or encountered before, it suddenly finds its way into your life and you can’t avoid it. It’s kind of like when you buy a new car. You had no idea there were so many silver Honda CRVs in the world until you bought a silver Honda CRV. Then, suddenly, you notice them everywhere. You pass them every day and wonder, “Where did all these silver Honda CRVs come from?”

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:

• Do not pick up hitchhikers.

• Do not flip off passing cars.

• Do not mention a car accident involving a blue 1988 Chevy Camaro.

• Do not discuss area ghosts or hauntings while on Clinton Road.

• Do not pick up shiny objects, step inside a circle of rocks, assist stranded motorists, investigate lights or glowing objects in the woods, acknowledge any drivers who blink their headlights at you, assist a bride in need of a ride to her wedding chapel, walk or drive down unpaved roads or paths, touch or pick up discarded items of clothing (especially those that move on their own), taunt any unknown sources of noise coming from the woods, or explore origins of any tapping, knocking, or thunking sounds coming from the exterior of the car.

• Do not attempt to move, drive around, or investigate trees that fall in the roadway.

• Do not stand on the edge of the reservoir bridge or throw coins off the bridge.

• Do not eat bagels.

• Avoid all animals, fires, local residents, disembodied hands, fellow travelers, men with no arms, midgets, UFOs, large groups of suspicious characters, horses, anyone shouting seemingly random numbers, black pickup trucks, miniature ponies, dogs that appear to be floating on air, nudists, and albinos.

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.

At bedtime on the first night I was there, an image came into my head, an image of a dead boy, dripping wet, standing outside the patio door. I imagined his jellied, waterlogged white skin, his dilated eyes. His face stuck somewhere between desperation and anger. In my mind, I saw him just standing there, shaking. Every night before I lay down in bed to not sleep, I’d see the image in my mind. I’d just lie there or toss and turn all night, waiting for the drowned drunk nonswimmer to show up. I eventually was so freaked out and tired that on the last night I was there, I got up and walked out onto the patio at 3 A.M. and called him out.

I’m going to close my eyes. And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again.

Nothing.

I went back inside and fell asleep.

After three weeks, long after my visit had ended, they found the boy, almost directly across from my parents’ house, tangled in some sunken branches deep under the surface.

I stand there at the head of that trail near the Clinton Road reservoir, in the dark, listening to Curry and Joe fade away into the distance.

I’m going to close my eyes. And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again.

When I open my eyes, all I can see through the darkness is the bridge itself.

The only thing I can really see is the graffiti on the Jersey barriers mounted on top of the bridge. According to stories, the ghost boy’s name is written on the bridge’s guardrails. I conclude that unless the dead kid’s name is Alice or I Love Weed, we can immediately write off this part of the story. One of the few legible things written on top of one of the barriers is “All the fairytales of Clinton Road … never prove true.”

Curry and Joe’s voices are getting louder; they’re heading back up the trail toward me. They tell me that they’d made it about forty yards before Joe thought he heard and saw a pack of approaching bears, then announced he would go no farther and headed back to the road. After reuniting, we line up along the guardrail.

There is a part of the reservoir bridge legend that is Clinton Road’s best-known ghost story. It says that if you stand on this bridge and throw a coin into the water, the dead boy will throw it back to you. This is the story that most drew me to Clinton Road in the first place. It’s a pretty cut-and-dry legend. Either the coin comes back, or it doesn’t. Sometimes the coin hits you, sometimes you see it land on the ground, and other times you might find it in your car or clothes the next day. Some versions call for pennies, others quarters. We have brought both, each covered with our initials in red fingernail polish.

“Which way are we supposed to face?” asks Joe.

“What do you mean?”

“Are we supposed to face the road … or the water?”

“I don’t know,” I answer. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I’m facing the road,” Curry interjects. “If this ghost kid is going to knock me in, I want to see him coming.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in any of this.”

“Well, fuck you guys then. He’ll push you in first.”

The thing I’ll remember most about the moment that follows is how quiet it is. No breeze, no insect or animal sounds, and none of the chatter you associate with being out in the woods at night. Nothing. It is absolutely and completely still and silent. It’s as if someone suddenly has pressed a Pause button and life has simply stopped.

Then Joe whispers that he sees someone in the woods coming toward us.

“Look over in the trees. Someone’s shining a flashlight up the path.”

Curry and I swing our heads over, and then we see it too. It’s like a lightning flash inside the forest, and then it’s gone.

I think to myself: Who would be walking down a dark path in the woods in the middle of the night? The trails around the reservoir simply run in giant loops going nowhere. There are no houses or parked cars for at least four miles in either direction. Anyone or anything out on that path probably has even less of a reasonable excuse for being there than we do.

A few seconds later we see it again—a bright light swinging in our direction, then gone. It’s maybe thirty yards down the bank of the reservoir.

“Oh, shit,” Curry states flatly.

“What do we do?” asks Joe.

“You can start by keeping your voice down.”

“Oh, shit,” Curry repeats softly.

We see two flashlights pointing toward us, then back toward the lake.

Then we realize that they aren’t flashlights at all but headlights. Headlights from a car winding along Clinton Road, going very fast and heading directly for us.

My first thought is that the car would come around the hairpin curve, see three sketchy-looking dudes standing on the bridge, freak out, go out of control, and slam through the barriers, thus taking its passengers, us, and whatever else is lurking around that bridge straight into a watery grave.

“What do we do?” Joe repeats.

“I don’t know,” I offer. The car’s less than twenty yards from turning onto the bridge and isn’t slowing down.

“How about we duck?” Curry suggests.

“Duck?”

“Yeah.”

“Now?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Three … two … one, duck!”

With that, we all slam against the ground behind the Jersey barrier, just as the car skids around the corner, tears up and over the bridge, and then speeds away into the night.

“Man, I can’t believe we hid,” I say, brushing little bits of Clinton Road from the front of my shirt and pants a minute later. “We’re lucky it didn’t lose control.”

“Let’s try the coins.”

“Eric should go first,” Curry says.

I should. The three of us have traveled here so that I can do just that.

As I raise my hand, I can feel a heavy rush in my chest. I would have expected that I’d feel scared, but this time it isn’t fear. It feels more like sadness. Or maybe it’s just a sudden memory of sadness.

You see, this is less a story about ghosts than it is a story about what it means to be haunted.

As much as I want to encounter the boy at the bridge, or a haunted Camaro, or any of the hundreds of other horrible things that we’re supposed to stumble across up and down Clinton Road, I know no coins are ever going to come back. But I’m still scared. I’m scared to begin facing the truth. Not the truth of Clinton Road, but the truth of me.

You might think that standing there on the reservoir bridge, with no idea where this journey will take me, I’d want to throw the coin hard, to heave it into the lake in a way that reflected all the weight attached to it.

Instead, I simply open my hand and bend it slightly, letting the coin slowly slide off my fingers, down past the guardrail, and quietly into the darkness. The hushed plop of a single coin sinking into the still water marks the beginning of my quest.

I just close my eyes, hold my breath, and wait.