The Morristown Ghost of 1788

After the Revolution, New Jersey folklore held that Loyalists fleeing Washington’s army had buried stolen Patriot gold on Schooley’s Mountain in Morris County, and that spirits guarded it. In 1788 that legend met a clever opportunist. According to the Morristown Green’s account of the case, Ransford Rogers, a schoolmaster from Connecticut with a smattering of chemistry, had met two New Jerseymen while teaching in New York State. He offered to lead them on a supernatural treasure hunt and in August 1788 opened a school on the Mendham Road, just outside Morristown, as his base.

Rogers recruited a circle of local men, among them a colonel, doctors and a justice of the peace, according to that account, and presented himself as the one person able to dispel the spirits. Accounts differ on details, but agree on the method: night-time meetings in the woods, a loud explosion, flame, groans and a white figure speaking in a hollow voice, effects that a man who knew a little chemistry could produce. Each member was asked to pay for the spirits’ ‘goodwill’, and the sums mentioned in various retellings include 30 dollars and 12 pounds in gold or silver. When the group was told the spirits found them unworthy, Rogers took money from a second, richer group.

The scheme came apart when the ‘ghost’ proved human. Retellings say a wife noticed the apparition wore shoe buckles like Rogers’s, and that a follower who traced footprints and hoof marks from a visit by the ‘spirit’ ended at Rogers’s door. Rogers was arrested, bailed out by some of his own victims, arrested again and said to have confessed to taking about a thousand dollars, then escaped. The Morristown Green adds that a ‘Rice Williams’ was an accomplice of John Dady, convicted nine years later in York County, Pennsylvania, of a similar swindle, and identifies Williams as Rogers; that identification rests on a single source here.

The story was printed in 1792 as the anonymous pamphlet The Morristown Ghost, which sold out and was reprinted several times, and was retold in the 1820s. Local historian Peter Zablocki’s book The 1788 Morristown Ghost Hoax covers it in detail. Schooley’s Mountain was never excavated for treasure. Library guides present the tale either as a ghost legend or as a parable about greed and gullibility, and the second reading is the more accurate one.

A staged apparition, explosions, flames and a hollow voice at night meetings in the woods, all attributed by the con man to spirits guarding buried treasure.

Woods and farmland near Morristown, Morris County, with Schooley’s Mountain as the supposed hiding place for the treasure.

The tale appears in New Jersey libraries’ ghost and legend guides, was eventually turned into a play and has been retold in modern local-history talks and in Zablocki’s book.