The Spy House (Seabrook-Wilson House)

The Spy House lists twenty-two ghosts by name, half invented by a curator to save the building. The other half keep turning up anyway.

The woman at the upstairs window wears a long black skirt and a red blouse with billowy sleeves, and she stares out toward Sandy Hook Bay waiting for a husband who isn't coming back. Her name, according to the curator who first catalogued her, is Abigail. She sobs in the upstairs bedroom. She's one of twenty-two.

The Seabrook-Wilson House, better known as the Spy House, sits on a lonely stretch of Port Monmouth shoreline and dates to 1663, which makes it one of New Jersey's oldest standing buildings. Thomas Whitlock put up the original one-and-a-half-story cabin after sailing from England by way of Brooklyn. His grandson Thomas Seabrook, a Revolutionary War militiaman, expanded it into the colonial house that stands today. The Seabrook family held the property for 250 years before it passed to the Wilsons, a line that included ship captains, merchants, and the Reverend William Wilson. By the early 1900s the farmhouse had been converted into an inn called the Bay Side Manor, and later the White House.

The ghost count and the nickname both trace to one person: Gertrude Neidlinger, a retired concert singer who took over as part-time curator in the 1960s. Neidlinger invented a story that the house had been a tavern during the Revolution where patriot spies got British soldiers drunk to pry military secrets loose. Historians have since flattened the claim. There's no record the house was ever a tavern during the war. But Neidlinger's stories drew enough national attention, including a 1993 segment on the TV show Sightings, to probably save the building from demolition. At its peak, her candlelit tours logged twenty-two distinct spirits by name and backstory.

Abigail is the best-known, but not the only named ghost. There's the Lady in White, an 18th-century figure who walks from room to room searching for a crying baby. Captain Morgan, allegedly a British soldier murdered by his own men, works the basement and tends to drop the temperature when he shows up. Peter is a British boy of about ten or twelve in knickers and a blouse who interferes with cameras, shuts off tape recorders, and laughs. Robert, Morgan's alleged first mate, posts up at a window. The Reverend William Wilson's ghost conducts phantom funerals in a back bedroom, clutching a Bible. Penelope Stout, one of the earliest European settlers in the region, has turned up in a front bedroom with an infant. A dog has been reported on the grounds.

Psychic Jane Doherty visited with a TV crew. The cameras caught nothing, but Doherty's mother, waiting outside, described a motionless woman in a long black skirt staring at the sea. Neidlinger identified her on the spot as Abigail. A later 2014 investigation found nothing outstanding, which tells you how wildly the evidence swings depending on who's holding the equipment.

The story doesn't end cleanly. In October 1993, the Spy House Museum Corp. evicted Neidlinger after a dispute over the museum's direction. She died a few days later. Middletown Township eventually turned the property over to Monmouth County in 1998, and from 2008 to 2009 the county park commission stripped the interior back to bare timbers and restored it to the Seabrook era. Which meant undoing a lot of what Neidlinger had built.

Forbes once called it the most haunted house in New Jersey. U.S. News and World Report put it on a list of the three most haunted houses in America. The building now operates as the Bayshore Waterfront Park Activity Center, open Sundays from April through October, with exhibits on local ecology and early colonial life. Park officials prefer the documented 17th-century history to the ghost roster. Visitors keep asking about the woman at the window anyway.

Half the hauntings were made up by a curator who loved the place enough to keep it standing. The other half got reported by people who showed up decades later and saw things nobody had told them to expect. Which of those two halves Abigail belongs to is the whole question.