Clinton Road

Clinton Road runs roughly ten miles north from Route 23 near Newfoundland to Upper Greenwood Lake, through the forested hills of West Milford in Passaic County. Much of it passes through the watershed lands around the Clinton Reservoir, which supplies water to Newark, so for long stretches there are no houses, no streetlights and almost no traffic. The road and the reservoir take their name from Clinton, a small iron-making settlement that grew up where the road crosses Clinton Brook; its stone furnace, built in 1826 and operated in the 1830s, still stands and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

That isolation made Clinton Road a magnet for stories. Teenagers whispered that the conical stone furnace was a Druid temple. In the hills nearby, Richard James Cross, an English-born banker, built a stone summer mansion in 1905; after a fire it fell into ruin, and “Cross Castle” became a graffiti-covered party spot linked in rumor to Satanic rituals until Newark’s water department demolished it in 1988. The road’s real dark history includes a crime: in May 1983 a cyclist found the body of Daniel Deppner in the woods off Clinton Road, a victim of the contract killer Richard Kuklinski.

The legends reached a national audience through Weird NJ, the magazine founded by Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman, whose readers sent in story after story. The best known is the ghost boy of Dead Man’s Curve: a child who drowned under the bridge over Clinton Brook is said to toss back coins thrown into the water at midnight – or, in a darker version, to push anyone who leans over the rail. Drivers tell of a phantom pickup truck, or headlights with no vehicle, that chases them to the end of the road and vanishes; of a ghostly 1988 Camaro; and of two park rangers who supposedly died in 1939 and still hand out warnings to campers.

None of these stories is tied to a documented death, and authorities have denied that rangers ever patrolled the area in the way the tale describes. The road is still a real public route that locals use every day – narrow, winding and poorly lit – which is reason enough to drive it carefully and stay off the posted watershed property.

Coins thrown from the bridge said to be returned by a drowned boy; phantom trucks, floating headlights and a ghostly Camaro that appear behind drivers; ghostly park rangers; strange lights in the sky; and odd animals in the woods – reported by drivers, teenagers and Weird NJ readers.

The bridge over Clinton Brook at “Dead Man’s Curve” near the reservoir, the stretch past Clinton Furnace, the woods around the former Cross Castle near Hank’s Pond, and Terrace Pond; almost always at night.

Clinton Road is one of the signature locations of Weird NJ magazine and its books, and has appeared in TV specials and in many lists of haunted American roads. It gave its name to the 2019 independent horror film Clinton Road, directed by Steve Stanulis.