In Brief
A curator at the Spy House in Port Monmouth, New Jersey invented the ghosts of the old Seabrook-Wilson farmhouse, and its name, in the 1960s. The trouble is what came after: visitors who knew none of her stories kept reporting a woman in a black skirt, staring out to sea.
The Full Story
The woman who runs the ghost tours at the Spy House in Port Monmouth, New Jersey made most of it up. Her name was Gertrude Neidlinger, a retired concert singer who took over the place part-time in the 1960s, and she is the reason the house has a name and a roster of the dead at all.
The house is really the Seabrook-Wilson House, built around 1663 and held by one family for roughly 250 years. Neidlinger told visitors it had been a Revolutionary War tavern where patriot spies got British soldiers drunk to pry loose their secrets. None of it holds up. There's no record the house was ever a wartime tavern; a county historian found it had been a quiet farmhouse, then a seaside inn that went by Bayside Manor and the Lighthouse Inn. Neidlinger coined the "Spy House" name herself.
She also gave it ghosts. By the count in her tour materials, 22 of them. There's Captain Morgan, described variously as a pirate, a sea captain, or a British soldier murdered in the basement by his own men. There's Peter, a boy in knickers who disables tape recorders and damages cameras and laughs. There's a reverend who conducts phantom funerals in a back bedroom, clutching a Bible. A woman in white walks room to room, the story goes, searching for a crying baby she never finds.
Her candlelit tours drew national attention. A 1993 episode of *Sightings* filmed there, and a magazine roundup named it one of the three most haunted houses in America. That same year, the museum board locked Neidlinger out, citing her lit candles as a fire hazard. The fight over her dismissal ran on until just a few days before she died. The woman who built the legend lost the building first.
Here is the part she couldn't have staged. Long after, visitors who'd been told none of her stories kept reporting the same figure: a woman in a long black skirt, a red blouse, a black bow under her bonnet, staring far out across Sandy Hook Bay. The tours call her Abigail, waiting on a sea captain who never came back. The house really does face the water.
The county restored it in 2009, stripping the interior back to bare timbers, undoing the museum Neidlinger built. The invented ghosts went with it. The woman at the window is the one people still see.
