Ghost hunters explore Centenary

HACKETTSTOWN – The locals here don’t need Stephen King to scare the bejesus out of them. Not with the Hackettstown Paranormal Group hunting for the restless ghost of Tillie Smith, a young woman who was raped and strangled on what is now the campus of Centenary College.

The murder took place 129 years ago. But her ghost, it’s said, still appears in the imposing, gold-domed Seay Administration Building, where Smith worked as a domestic servant.

Smith was 18 on the night of April 8, 1886 when she walked to town to see a vaudeville show that finished after the 10 p.m. curfew. She never returned — not alive, anyway.

Her killing is unsolved, which has kept the story as alive today as it was back in Victorian times when her murder trial, according to the Hackettstown Historical Society, made headlines up and down the East Coast.

So last Friday night, Oct. 23, three teams of average citizens, each following a group leader from the paranormal group, explored three floors of the old mansion. They were equipped with K-II EMF Meters, which pick up electromagnetic fields, Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) Recorders, and their own smartphones.

Working into the wee hours of Saturday morning, the three groups changed positions every 45 minutes, circulating among three of the hottest spots for sightings — the mailroom in the basement, the front parlor on the first floor, and the Whitney Chapel on the second floor.

Eerie expectancy

In the dark, in the chapel, silence enveloped the first group of 10 who entered. A sense of eerie expectancy fell over the scene. Some people sat on the steps of the altar. Others, including 18-year-old Sage Witten of Hackettstown, walked up and down the aisles.

“Do you want us to come join you on the balcony up there?” Witten asked, her voice carrying throughout the chapel and its balcony, one floor above.

Witten paused as some people in the group stood at the ready with cameras. Those with a K-II EMF Meter looked down at its display, checking to see if any of the five colored LED lights would activate. The instrument measures electrical activity in milligauss, the idea being that the presence of a ghost could cause such activity. Mild activity registers on the low end, with one green light, while very strong activity elicits a full display of green, yellow, orange, and red lights.

“If you ask questions, you’ve got to ask questions with yes or no answers,” John Covert, founder of the Hackettstown Paranormal Group, had instructed the teams earlier. “If you ask a question, don’t ask a second question right away. Give a little bit of space for an answer.”

Witten went on. “So you won’t talk but you’ll tug on my jacket?” she asked, pausing again. She stood, as if listening to someone speak.

Someone else in the group called out: “Are you Tillie Smith?”

Silence ensued.

“You know, it got awful quiet when she said Tillie’s name,” Witten declared.

Group leader Mona McHugh of Wayne said that when the 10 of them entered the chapel, there was a flurry of activity: the chairs, designed like seats in a theater, moved down and up of their own accord.

“Then we heard humming after the chairs stopped moving,” said McHugh, who is in training to be a paranormal investigator. “I’m curious about all this. I believe there are trapped spirits and maybe we can help them.”

In that same group, Teri Ely of Hackettstown, shooting pictures with her phone, captured an orb of white light suspended in space above the balcony, right next to the EXIT sign. She wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“This is just something fascinating. I was here for the investigation last year, too,” Ely said. “It’s my birthday present to me. My birthday is on Halloween.”

Cast of ghosts

The story of the fateful night young Tillie Smith lost her life is as intriguing as the hunt for her ghost.

James Titus, the school custodian who was to have left open a kitchen window for the truant Smith to slip quietly back into the house, served 19 years for the crime. He said, though, that he confessed only so he wouldn’t be hung and, until the end of his days, claimed his innocence.

Besides, any one of five different men could have been the real killer, Covert said. That makes for a potentially large cast of ghostly characters, including Tillie Smith, whose tortured body was left in the middle of a field in plain sight.

She never made it to that open window, according to Covert, and is thought to have been murdered in a nearby barn, right on the premises, where two tramps had been living.

“Both were questioned by the police,” Covert said. “For some reason or another, the police chief gave them money for train fare, put them on the train, and told them never to come back to Hackettstown.

“Also, that night, on her way back,” he added, “Tillie ran into her old boyfriend and another man, who were very drunk, and they had some words. But witnesses said they parted company on Main Street and the two men went on down the road. But they could have very quickly gone up the next street, come up through the woods, and met her up here.”

The mailroom was the scene of some excitement during last year’s paranormal investigation at the Seay building. It is the site of the original kitchen and so is the very place Tillie Smith worked.

“It was a warm night,” Covert recalled. “I was standing by the railing at the entrance when a blast of very cold air hit me. I was holding a K-II and it went right up to the red. That lasted two seconds and then the meter went down to no lights.

“Right after that, it sounded like someone had banged a fist on one of the metal student mailboxes, twice, really loud,” he added. “One of the investigators was standing right there and he actually jumped. It was right behind him.”

Ely also witnessed the bizarre sounds, which, she said, seemingly had no physical cause.

“I was standing right there when it happened,” she said. It’s one of the reasons she was intrigued enough to return this year.

Also in the mailroom last year, EVP recorders picked up one of the investigators saying, “OK, I’m leaving if you don’t do anything. I’m getting bored.”

“Then we heard glass break on the recording,” Covert said, adding there was no broken glass. “Then we heard a male voice say, ‘Well, what do you think of that?’ And then it said a bad word.”

In the parlor

While the kitchen wasn’t the site of much activity Friday night, one group in the front parlor was spooked as their leader, Sara Hadgkiss, held the K-II meter and noticed lights start to flicker.

“Do you like us here?” she asked, as the rest of the quiet group formed a circle around her, the shiny wood floor glimmering in the semidarkness. She went on, leaving a full minute between her questions:

“Do you have anything to say?”

“Do you know who we are?” She hadn’t moved but the lights glowed in green, yellow, and orange. The group gasped.

“If you’re here,” Hadgkiss said, “make the little toy go red.” It did not. “Do you want us to move?” Slowly, the group walked, en masse, down a hallway.

“Are you following us?” Hadgkiss asked. But the lights flickered out and there were fewer the farther they went from their original spot.

Her group also picked up some electronic voice phenomena. One person asked a question. While it was met with silence to their ears, the recorder picked up what sounded like a snicker in response.

Covert, who worked with The Atlantic Paranormal Society for nine seasons on “Ghost Hunters,” the SyFy Channel reality series, also has conducted investigations with the group in other famously haunted places, including Gettyburg and, very recently, Alcatraz Island.

He’s been interested in the paranormal since his boyhood days in Mendham. He lived across the street from the famed “Bettin Oak,” the site where a commemorative stone marks the bravery of Capt. Adam Bettin of the Continental Army. Bettin was shot dead there on New Year’s Night 1781 after he lunged at a mutineer in the Philadelphia Line.

“My father always told me to notice that the grass didn’t grow around that oak,” Covert said. “The story always stayed with me. I just want to know if there’s something else to this life.”

Lorraine Ash: 973-248-6660; lash@dailyrecord.com

Learn more

• For more about the murder of Tillie Smith, see “In Defence of Her Honor: The Tillie Smith Murder Case,” by Denis Sullivan, http://tinyurl.com/q3hmrwa

• To contact the Hackettstown Paranormal Group, visit its Hackettstown Paranormal Page on Facebook, www.facebook.com/hackettstownparanormal