In Brief
On Gallows Hill Road, where Westfield meets Cranford, New Jersey, drivers report Revolutionary-era soldiers standing along the shoulder, sharp from a distance and gone up close. Roughly ten men were hanged from a tree on this rise. The street kept the name.
The Full Story
On Gallows Hill Road, on the rise where Westfield meets Cranford, New Jersey, drivers say they pass Revolutionary-era soldiers standing along the shoulder. They look sharp from a distance and aren't there when you get close. The corner is a quiet residential intersection now, Gallows Hill Road and Brookside Place, with a college campus across the way. The name is the only thing left from what happened on it.
There was a giant tree on this hill once, and people were hanged from it. The most documented of them was James Morgan. On November 24, 1781, Morgan, an American sentry, shot and killed Reverend James Caldwell at a checkpoint in Elizabethtown after Caldwell refused to let him inspect a package. Caldwell was famous by then. A year and a half earlier, at the Battle of Springfield, he had handed soldiers Isaac Watts hymnals to tear up for musket wadding and shouted, "Give 'em Watts, boys!" He had also already buried his wife, Hannah, killed by British forces at Connecticut Farms days before that battle, which left their nine children without a mother.
Morgan was tried at the Westfield Presbyterian Church on January 21, 1782, found guilty, and hanged on Gallows Hill eight days later. When his residence was searched, they found British gold, and the story spread that he had been bribed to kill the chaplain. His body was buried in an unmarked grave to keep it from being desecrated.
He was not the only one. Tradition holds that roughly ten men were hanged from the same tree during the Revolution, several of them accused British spies, their bodies left dangling from its limbs. The tree is long gone.
The hauntings reported since fit the ground. On dark nights, the story goes, locals see iridescent lights and movements swirling over the hill. Police have been called again and again about yelling on the road, and find no one when they arrive. Locals say it's the condemned, still crying out over their sentences. One driver described shadows moving on the north side with nobody there, then a car that followed for a minute on the side near the college and was gone the next, with no turnoff it could have taken.
The plaque on the hill gives Morgan's hanging as January 1781. It's off by a year. He was hanged in 1782, and the marker has had the date wrong since 1976.
