Ringwood Manor

Robert Erskine, Washington's Revolutionary mapmaker, died here in 1780. People have seen him sitting on his grave with a lantern since the 1800s.

People walking the bridge out of the Ringwood Manor cemetery sometimes find themselves followed by a blue ball of light. The light drifts behind them for about twenty yards, hangs at the water's edge, and disappears. The locals say it's Robert Erskine's lantern. Erskine was George Washington's Surveyor-General, the mapmaker who drew the routes the Continental Army marched, and he died of pneumonia at this manor in 1780. He was buried by the pond. Washington attended his funeral on October 2, the same day Major John André was hanged up the Hudson. For two hundred years people have been reporting Erskine sitting on top of his own grave, holding a light.

Ringwood Manor sits in the Ramapo Mountains in northern New Jersey, and it is not the original building. Erskine lived in the ironmaster's house that stood on this land in the 1770s, when Ringwood was a Revolutionary iron forge supplying the Continental Army. The current 51-room manor was built by Martin Ryerson in 1807, expanded by Peter Cooper and his son-in-law Abram Hewitt after they bought the property in 1854, and donated to the state of New Jersey in 1936. Erskine's grave predates the house you tour today by nearly thirty years. It's still here, behind the pond, marked, and, visitors say, not empty.

The Erskine story is the oldest and most specific haunting in the park. Sightings began in the early 1800s, before the current manor existed, which means the legend survived the demolition of his actual residence. People described him sitting cross-legged on the slab of his tomb, lantern in one hand, sometimes a ball of blue-white light floating beside him. He would watch the road. Sometimes, if a person crossed the bridge over the brook, the light would follow them and linger at the water before winking out. One version of the story has Erskine waiting for news of the war's outcome that he never got to hear.

Inside the manor, the haunting is broader. Tour guides describe a kitchen door that unlatches itself, footsteps on the second floor when the house is empty, and a draft in the upstairs hall that drops the temperature ten degrees at the bend in the corridor and is gone by the time you turn around. The legend calls a murdered servant on the second floor Jackson White, a name the locals still use. Jackson Whites was a slur used for the mixed-race Ramapough Lenape community that lived and worked at Ringwood for generations. The haunting is real enough to the tour, but the label it carries is a reminder that whose ghosts get remembered and what they get called are political choices.

The weirdest Ringwood story doesn't happen in the manor at all. It happens at Spook Rock, a large glacial boulder on the property where a woman called Mad Mag is said to rise up from the stone, wail, and sink back in. The Ramapough community has stories about Spook Rock that predate the Erskine legend by centuries. The state park won't point it out on the map. You have to ask.

Ringwood Manor State Park is open daily, with manor tours April through October. The grave is a flat stone slab behind the pond, the bridge arcs over a brook just past it, and the first time anyone records Erskine sitting on his own grave is more than two hundred years ago. If anything crosses the bridge behind you, keep going.