TLDR
Manuel Rionda built the Alpine tower in 1910 for his wife Harriet, who died of natural causes in 1922. The devil story came from 70s teenagers.
The Full Story
The rumor is that if you walk backwards around the tower six times, Harriet Rionda appears. In the car version of the ritual, which came in once everybody drove, you circle it six times in reverse with your headlights off and she shows up in the rearview mirror. Harriet was not murdered and did not jump. She died of natural causes in 1922. The ghost still has opinions.
Devil's Tower is a stone watchtower in Alpine, tucked inside a gated development called Rio Vista, which sits on land that used to belong to Manuel Rionda, a Cuban-born sugar importer who made a fortune moving raw cane to American refineries. He built the tower in 1910 on a bluff with a clean view of the Manhattan skyline. Architect Charles Rollinson Lamb, the same designer behind the Dewey Arch in New York and a founder of the National Sculpture Society, drew it up. The popular version of the story says Rionda built it for Harriet so she could see New York from the bluff.
Harriet died in 1922 and was buried on the estate for about twenty years, then moved to Brookside Cemetery in Englewood when the property changed hands.
The tower sat there. Kids found it.
Through the 1960s and 70s, teenagers from up and down Bergen County broke into the tower at night, spray-painted pentagrams, lit candles, held fake seances, and generally treated it as a clubhouse with a view. By the late 70s the name Devil's Tower had stuck, and teenagers backfilled a legend about Harriet jumping after catching Manuel mid-affair, because they needed a reason for the building to be scary. The owners eventually welded the door shut.
Today the tower is inside a gated community and you can't legally walk up to it. Which, naturally, hasn't stopped people. Atlas Obscura and Weird NJ both get submissions every year from drivers who tried the six-laps ritual and report figures at the base, lights in the upper window, and cars stalling at the end. The Alpine police have opinions too. Their opinion is that you're trespassing.
Harriet, if she is anywhere, is in a cemetery in Englewood. The thing teenagers summon when they circle the tower six times is less a Gilded Age widow than the collective imagination of forty years of New Jersey trespassers.
The door is still welded shut.
Researched from 8 verified sources. How we research.
