Clinton Road

Drop a quarter on the Clinton Brook bridge at midnight and the drowned boy throws it back. Ten miles of stories and one real Iceman murder.

Drop a quarter on the bridge over Clinton Brook at midnight and it comes back.

Kids from Passaic and Bergen counties have been testing that story for something like sixty years. The bridge you want is near Dead Man's Curve, though there's a second bridge a few miles south near the old Clinton Furnace, and nobody is sure which one the drowned boy actually haunts. The deal is the same either way: leave a coin on the asphalt, wait, and the ghost of a boy who fell from the bridge into the reservoir picks it up and tosses it back. The tellings disagree on whether he slipped or was pushed. The coin doesn't care.

Clinton Road runs ten miles north from Route 23 near Newfoundland to the south end of Upper Greenwood Lake, and almost every mile of it has a story. There's a phantom pickup truck that tailgates cars at night and then vanishes. Phantom headlights come at you the wrong way down the road. Weird NJ readers report carnivores from Jungle Habitat escaping into the woods when the drive-through zoo closed in 1976. Others claim witches meet at a specific cross street. There are Klan rumors, Satanist rumors, and a cross at the top of the hill that nobody will claim responsibility for.

Not all of it is legend. On May 18, 1983, a cyclist on Clinton Road spotted a turkey vulture feeding on a green garbage bag. The bag held the body of Daniel Deppner. Richard Kuklinski, the contract killer later known as the Iceman, was convicted of his murder. One of the most notorious murderers in modern American crime used this road as a dumpsite. Clinton Road's reputation didn't need the help.

What actually keeps your hand tight on the wheel is how little your high beams show you. The trees press in. Cell service drops fast. For long stretches there are no houses, no turnoffs, no lights, and the reservoir on your east side is a black mirror. You don't see the ghost boy. You don't see the phantom truck. You see ten miles of nothing that could be anything. Your brain does the rest.

Kuklinski is dead. The zoo's fence fell down. The boy has had his quarter back a thousand times.