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The Spy House Museum in Port Monmouth, NJ has been written up in several popular books on American haunted houses, including a few by the omnipresent Hans Holzer, and has been identified as "the most haunted house in New Jersey." For decades the museum, operating from one of the oldest houses in the state (1600s), openly championed its many ghosts - reportedly over 20 - and publicized them in booklets, news reports and in the archived accounts of visitors who reported otherworldly encounters over the years. Ghost tours were arranged, and Halloween was a very busy holiday at the Spy House. Is this apparitional abode - this ectoplasmic flagship of garden state phantoms - actually haunted?
The building certainly has a lot of swashbuckling history behind it. From its original use by some of new Jersey's first settlers, with horrific reports of Indian massacres, to its later uses as a pirate hideout and den of debauchery by the infamous Captain Morgan and his posse, stopover point for Revolutionary War heroes (George Washington slept here) and later incarnation as a summer resort for the rich and famous (Abe Lincoln slept here, too), the Spy House has born witness to numerous scenes of emotional trauma and violent, unnatural death. If these things can cause a house to be haunted, Spy House is certainly a prime candidate.
Marketing hype aside, the house has had seemingly plausible reports of ghostly activity documented in local newspapers dating back to at least the 1950s. The reports of fleeting apparitional images, strange sounds and smells, sensations of electrically charged atmosphere, and being touched or pushed by an unseen force all fit within reasonable parameters of what we expect to find at authentically haunted houses (as opposed to the Amityville Horror fictions of popular imagination). Discounting the tourist trade fluff (Washington and Lincoln still wander the Spy House), the case and its details ring true.
My first visit to the Spy House a few years ago caused me to upgrade my credibility evaluation from "plausible" to "likely." Approaching the front door on an overcast but otherwise normal and cheerful early evening, my impressions were unenthused (another house, another legend, same old stuff, here we go). THAT came to close the moment I passed the threshold through the front door. In that moment, and in that measurement of one footstep, I crossed an invisible but palpable line. It was an experience I had never felt before but had read and heard about in numerous cases. The entire atmo
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sphere changed. The best I can describe it is as an immediate, tactile, increase in the density of the air pressure. It became thick, oppressive and definitely no longer cheerful. The sensation was abrupt and positively real. My two accompanying colleagues experienced the same sensation. A tour guide, who claimed to be psychic (I have no comment one way or the other), led us around regaling us with tales of history and haunts and pointing out corners where invisible children play, marked by the inevitable psychic cold spots that everybody but me seemed to feel. The eerie sensation stayed with me until I walked back outside onto the lawn, where everything seemed normal again.
My next trip to Spy House a year later, hosted and guided by museum curator Gertrude Neidlinger (a curious relic of New Jersey history herself, and believer in Spy House ghosts), was on behalf of Weird New Jersey for a Halloween TV special we were doing for NJ public television. Illustrious editor-guy Sceurman dispatched me late one evening to meet a film crew at the museum. Again, I felt the strange sensation (Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore).
We spent hours snooping and filming, everything going fine until we entered a second floor room reputed to be one of the most active, ghost-wise. The moment the WNJN-TV crew walked through the doorway to film, their fully charged NewsCam battery pack failed. Kaput. Fully drained. The journalists were perplexed; I was pleasantly amused. I have experienced or witnessed abrupt battery discharges and electronic failures at several haunted locations, and the literature is full of similar examples. It seems as if something is draining energy from the units. The film crew went back out to their van and grabbed a fully charged backup battery. The video camera was was powered up inside the house, test footage shot, and everything was fine again. Until we entered that room again. Instant power drain. (All worked out in the end, though. No ghost can stand up to the power of the mighty AC adapter). By the end of the shoot the film crew was spooked, Gertrude was thrilled, and I was pretty much convinced that this place was haunted.
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