Creative Non-fiction

A Midnight Séance in the Pine Barrens

Unearthing Secrets in New Jersey: A Ghostly Encounter Retold

When I opened The Philadelphia Inquirer, I nearly gagged on my blueberry yogurt.

There it was on the South Jersey front page: The Samuel Richards House in Atsion, New Jersey. I flipped frantically to the inside. There it was again — in all its infamy: a long, wide view of the Greek Revival mansion from 1826.

Hadn’t that house been condemned? Torn down?

That’s what my students claimed back in October. Had the authorities found out about the unwanted house guest or were they just tired of sending away curious ghost hunters?

I was one of those curious hunters back in 1988 — some thirty years ago

I was shocked that plans were underway to restore the mansion — with the hope to provide tours. “Just don’t go to the basement,” I smirked to myself, finishing my banana. I had told this story so many times to my English students, usually around Halloween.

The sudden appearance that morning forced me to recall the details.

I knew I needed to tell my friends. “Have you heard the news about the Atsion house?”

I saved The Inquirer. It remained by the toilet — my defacto study. I looked at it again. After my students left for the day, I decided to take the oral story and make it concrete . . . or at least putty. After thirty years the memories can be — shall we say — misty.

The tale unnerves me, even now.

It was spring break of 1988. I was a sophomore at college. It was a Friday night. I expected Danny soon. My younger brother Dave was there too — along with my friend Anthony. His nickname was Maggot. Not sure why. It was raining hard. That’s a fact. I don’t include that for suspense or foreshadowing. We were playing with a Ouija board at my mom’s home in Voorhees, New Jersey.

Then Danny walked in.

We didn’t know what we were doing, but Danny did

I remember Anthony saying, “If the thing was real, Parker Brothers wouldn’t sell the game at Toys R Us for ten bucks!”

Danny told us the basic ground rules. Since none of us felt like going out in the rain, I obliged. He had been playing in college. The fact is: I did place my hands on the plastic indicator, thinking it was a joke. Danny started asking questions, like, “Are there any spirits in the room?”

After a few minutes of laughs, Danny asked, “Are you there CJ?”

“Who in the hell is CJ?” I asked.

“A spirit who contacted me up in college,” he replied. “You remember that history teacher of yours — Mr. Junkin — who told you about the spirit who haunts that old house out on 206?”

I nodded. Anthony did, too. Mr. Junkin was the “Pine Barren folklorist.”

“Well, I found him.”

The indicator moved to “YES” right before Danny explained about CJ. Was Danny controlling the damn thing, scripted for our amusement? But the touch was light. I wasn’t sure how it was moving. Was it actually CJ?

“What do you want?” Danny asked.

CJ spelled out “S.H.O.W. Y.O.U.”

Danny asked, “What do you mean? Show you?”

“M.E.”

“You want to show yourself to us?”

“YES.”

Danny asked where.

“A.T.S.I.O.N.”

After ten minutes of this type of exchange, CJ had informed us that he would show himself to us, and indicated the time and place and location. It was the old mansion on Route 206. The legend went that drivers on Route 206 — between Hammonton and Trenton — would sometimes see a red light in the attic. CJ “confirmed” he was the train conductor who inhabited the house. He promised to show himself on Saturday night at midnight, the day before Easter.

“What should I tell him?” Danny asked us.

“Ask him what hell’s like?” I recall Anthony asking.

“It’s not funny,” Danny replied. He was the only one not laughing.

“So we’re going to spend our Spring Break waiting for a ghost?”

“It’s only one night,” Danny said.

So Danny told CJ that we would be there

But then word got out that Danny and I were planning a séance in the Pine Barrens, and by Saturday night, at least twenty kids were camped in my front yard. It was all for kicks, I guess, something else to do. Some brought Bibles, others crosses. This one guy I didn’t know was stoned.

It was a party, but Danny wasn’t happy.

How was he doing? (He was sitting with the board across his lap in the box on the front steps). He didn’t seem himself. He was usually the life of the party. But maybe not the life of a midnight séance.

The full moon illuminated threads of stray, murky clouds — spotlighting the house as well. We stopped at the intersection of Route 206 and Atsion Road. The house is four stories, painted a dull peach with white boarded-up windows, a large wooden porch, all surrounded with barbed wire. The only open windows were the four crescent windows on the upper floor. Because I did not expect anything to happen, I was not afraid.

I only expected laughs. I was reckless and naïve.

At a quarter until twelve, the caravan pulled into the parking lot — heaving up a wave of dust and sand. There were five or six cars. Danny ran underneath a huge oak tree. The buds were yellow. It was a warm night. Everyone surrounded Danny by the fence, eyes fixed to the darkened eyelids of the house. Then we heard something. A ranger crept over to us with his flashlight.

“What are you guys doing out here?” he asked.

Danny stepped forward. The beam of light caught his handsome face. “We’re college students,” he said, “and we’re conducting an experiment for school.”

Danny could talk his way out of anything — so suave and cool, even under this pressure.

The caretaker said — “behave ourselves.” Sure. Sure, man. So with his flashlight the man weaved his way back to the station. Danny and I sat cross-legged underneath the oak tree with the Ouija board on our laps. Our friend, Brian, counted the seconds to midnight.

“CJ, are you there?” Danny asked.

The indicator was still. Some hissed.

“CJ, are you there?”

Again, there was no movement

I thought of moving it to “No.” Brian said it was midnight. We all peered transfixed to the crescent-shaped windows. Where was the light? The glow? The red lantern? Nothing. More hissed. Others booed. Did I even think it was — funny? What else did everyone expect? Would mysterious lights in attic windows in abandoned buildings make any sense?

Danny’s face was rigid, cold. He asked: “Why didn’t you show yourself to us?”

He spelled out: “T.O.O M.A.N.Y.”

Danny whispered: “We brought too many people.” We had broken the original promise. There was only supposed to be the original four. Was Danny pissed at me for the one who made the occasion a “spectacle?”

“How did all these people find out,” he asked. “Do you even know half of these people?”

I told him he was taking this far too seriously

Then he asked CJ: “Do you remember what you told me last night?”

Danny had broken one of those unwritten Ouija board rules. Do not play alone — ever! A spirit could assume control of your body — and weird stuff like that. I wasn’t really worried. But was my friend going insane? Who would do that if it wasn’t just for a joke and a laugh? Was this all a set-up? An elaborate drama without a stage? Would anyone think I set this up?

CJ filled us in with the details of his troubled life. He was a train conductor in the late 19th century. Now those familiar with the woods around there know about the train tracks. On calm nights one could sense the wind of passing trains ferrying the souls of vacationers to Atlantic City.

CJ fell in love with the madam of the Richards House. While the hubby was away on business, CJ had a romantic tryst. During one of these occasions, his wife and child burned in a house fire. The remains on the grounds of the house were where his family perished. Did this make sense?

The last time I was on the grounds of the house, ten years ago when I brought my young wife there, the ruined shacks were still there, but they were fenced off too, like the house. They were far too close, and the affair far too dangerous to be so close.

The shacks don’t look like proper houses at all — especially for one who was a train conductor. CJ was consumed in grief, thinking that God was torturing him for leaving his family, and so he committed suicide in the basement by hanging himself. He has been there since, haunting the house, showing his red conductor’s lantern in the attic windows. That was the story he told us, but then I did not know he was lying.

“Do you still want to show me your grave?” Danny asked CJ.

I looked at him as if he were crazy

I had enough. “I’m not going to any grave!”

But I was — out-voted. And like I said, Danny had a way of getting his way. CJ had told Dan the night before, and so we followed Danny into the pine forest, along Old Quaker Bridge Road, a sandy, two-rutted road where dirt bikes and trucks with canoes on trailers go to find access to the Batso River.

A green house to the right had vicious dogs. Did they probably have guns, too? We tried to stay quiet. Trespassing on Pineys was maybe more dangerous than CJ. We soon came upon an old white church and the graveyard.

The trunk of a huge tree stood proud and sentinel-like in death in the middle of the graveyard. That trunk is gone now, thank God. There was no fence. The church is still active. It couldn’t hold more than thirty worshippers, but by the looks of the surroundings, that was twenty-five more than was needed.

The graves were a hundred years old — some dated to the late 18th century. Most tombstones were crumbled. Danny and I sat on the skirts of the graveyard with the full moon. This was the holiest day of the Christian calendar. What would God think of all of this?

“Can you see Brian?” Danny asked.

While the others wandered, looking for a grave with the initials C.J, the spirit on the board directed Brian, the tallest in the group with long, black hair, through the tombstones. “Turn right,” Danny yelled. “Stop! Now turn left! Walk slowly!” It was like that for a while.

Was I condemning my soul to hell for playing with dark spirits? Before this, CJ had described in detail the shape and size of his gravestone: “S.M” meant small, and “T.R.I” meant triangle. In a few minutes, Danny yelled, “STOP!”

Brian was on the far side of the graveyard — almost by the tree line. Everyone rushed toward Brian, who had stooped down, and by a small, insignificant, triangular-shaped gravestone, dirty and covered with dead grass, with a flashlight, read: “Charles F. Jones. July 16, 1888.”

“He’s here!” Brian shouted. “He’s really here.”

Was he really at rest as his tombstone declared?

I was late in examining the gravestone, but it was true

There could have been only three explanations; either we were tampering with spirits I didn’t think could exist, or that Danny had planned this whole charade — or even me — and I’m still playing this game of mine — even now — down to the position of a gravestone — simply for a private joke.

That’s when I looked at him, really looked at him. Was that a smile? Or the type of grin that’s not funny? Like madness. Instead of uttering, “Got ya!” he said, “You need to do something for me.”

He kneeled on the gravestone. Some in our group had been frightened and ran away shouting, “I’m outta here.” Others lingered, wondering what we’d do next. The moon illuminated the board. Should I have run back to my Nissan? Yes — but I kneeled too. I have asked for God’s forgiveness, but I was young and foolish and curious — then. And a dedicated buddy. Danny asked CJ what he wanted him to do.

“D.I.G.”

I don’t know who screamed, but it was high-pitched. It pierced the quiet woods. Would that scream alert the Pineys? At least CJ wouldn’t be able to shoot us or unleash the dogs on us. By this time most were running away, screaming, back to the cars.

Within seconds, Danny and I were the only ones left in the graveyard.

I stood up. Damn it, I wasn’t digging. He pulled me back down, pleading, “Please, please, just a little more.” So we continued. Charles Jones spelled quickly, “D.I.G. M.E.” and “T.O. H.O.U.S.E.”

After filling in the holes with yes and no questions, Danny was able to discern that Charles Jones now wanted Danny to bring his remains into the basement so that his soul and his body could be united so that he could be released from the purgatory.

The spirit then told us he had been lying

He committed suicide before he could be tried for murder of a local girl. It seemed suspicious, contrived, belonging to a cheap horror story. I grabbed the board and ran through the graveyard.

Danny caught up with me, out of breath. We stood there, face to face. Out of breath, he said that Charles Jones could do something for him. This involved a girl in New Hampshire. CJ claimed he would be able to work things out with this girl. He was a romantic that Danny.

Danny claimed that if CJ didn’t get what he wanted, Danny would get into a car accident. Was this some test of friendship? Would I exhume a one hundred year old corpse for the sake of some girl? So that my friend wouldn’t die in an accident? I was impressionable then, but there was no way I would drive for a shovel.

“I don’t care anymore,” I told Danny. “Girl or no girl, the game is over.”

I sprinted to the house. By the oak tree I broke the Ouija board over my leg and threw it over the fence, vowing never to touch the board again — a promise I have kept. The caretaker wouldn’t find the proof of our midnight séance until the next day.

Eating at Denny’s in Somerdale afterwards was rather an undramatic ending to an evening of drama. Oh, and how I love drama! We sat at our large, round table with the usual waitress with the usual drunks with our usual drinks — Lemokes — lemon-aid and Coke — and at two o’clock in the morning.

We didn’t say much — at least to each other.

I have my moment in the classroom every year, and I know Danny tells ghost stories in the South Jersey area. He has a version too. But we haven’t talked about it for thirty years. Thirty years — damn.

That’s why I was disquieted to call my friends. Or was there a better word for that feeling? Anxious? Fearful? Troubled. Or even keenly dying to finally know the truth.

“Hey, did you see that article? You want to visit? It’s opening for visitors. Think we could see that basement?”

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