Ringwood Manor

Paranormal investigator Hans Holzer called this 51-room Victorian mansion the most interesting haunted house he'd ever visited. It sits in the Ramapo Mountains on land with ancient Native American burial grounds.

Ringwood Manor sits on a sprawling estate in Passaic County that has been tied to ironworking since the colonial era. The property's most significant historical figure was Robert Erskine, a Scottish-born engineer and entrepreneur who operated the iron mines to produce munitions for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. General George Washington appointed Erskine as his chief Geographer and Surveyor-General, making him responsible for mapping the terrain that would give American forces a strategic advantage. On September 18, 1780, Erskine caught a severe cold and developed a fever. He died on October 2, 1780, at the age of forty-five, and was buried on the property near a pond that still bears traces of the colonial-era ironworks.

Erskine's ghost is the most frequently reported at Ringwood Manor. Visitors and staff have described seeing a figure sitting pensively on his gravestone, overlooking the pond, sometimes carrying a lantern as though still making his nightly rounds of the property. His spectral form has been seen walking the grounds at dusk, and some accounts describe him appearing to survey the land as he did in life. The pond itself has its own haunting. During the Revolution, French soldiers who fought alongside the Americans were buried in unmarked graves near its shores. At night, the dead walk around the pond and gaze over the water, sometimes with soft, sad voices speaking in French.

Inside the manor house, a second prominent ghost is associated with a figure known as Jackson White, a nineteenth-century servant of African American and Native American descent who lived and worked at Ringwood Manor. The story goes that Jackson White was caught stealing food and was beaten to death in a second-floor room. Visitors on guided tours of the house have reported hearing soft crying, footsteps pacing the upstairs hallway, and the heavy thud of an object -- or a body -- falling in the room where he was killed. Others have experienced the temperature dropping sharply in certain rooms, doors unlocking on their own, and the unsettling sense of being watched from the second-floor windows.

A third entity, known locally as Mad Mag, is connected to a large boulder on the property called Spook Rock. Mag was a woman driven to madness by some unrecorded tragedy. Her ghost rises from the boulder itself, wailing and moaning, before vanishing back into the rock as though absorbed by the stone. The boulder has been a landmark of local folklore for well over a century. Ringwood Manor is now a New Jersey State Park and National Historic Landmark, open for tours that cover both its industrial and Revolutionary War history. The grounds encompass gardens, outbuildings, and the pond where Erskine was buried -- and where, on quiet evenings, some visitors still claim to hear the murmur of French voices drifting across the water.