The Hermitage

Mary Elizabeth Rosencrantz died in 1970 from coal stove burns. Her companion Katie followed five days later. The Hermitage still reports both of them.

Mary Elizabeth Rosencrantz was burned by a coal stove she could barely afford to keep running, and she died of the infection in March 1970. Five days later, her companion of 25 years, Kathryn "Katie" Zahner, died too. They are buried together in Valleau Cemetery in Ridgewood. Visitors to The Hermitage in Ho-Ho-Kus have reported hearing a woman's voice shouting from the upstairs windows ever since.

The Hermitage had a haunted reputation before the Rosencrantz women joined the cast. In 1917, Mary Elizabeth's mother Bess opened a tea room in the front parlors, and a local newspaper ran the headline "Hohokus Ghost House Becomes Tea Resort" within the first month. Bess cheerfully told ghost stories to paying customers over tea, never planning to become one herself.

The estate belonged to four generations of Rosencrantzes from 1807 to 1970. The current Gothic Revival house dates to an 1847 renovation commissioned by Elijah Rosencrantz II, who is one of three spirits investigators have named as primary residents, alongside his wife Cornelia "Killie" Livingston Dayton and daughter Mary Elizabeth "Bess" Rosencrantz. That's before the property's older life as a Revolutionary War-era plantation that hosted George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Marquis de Lafayette.

When the Friends of the Hermitage took over in 1972 and began undoing fifty years of neglect, the docents immediately started reporting things. Phantom singing in empty halls. Piano music from rooms that had no piano (the original had been shipped off to Ringwood Manor years earlier). The master bedroom went heavy, an oppressive quiet that pushes people back into the hallway, sometimes accompanied by the scent of old perfume.

In 2005, the New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society investigated and a visitor's camera captured what investigators called a full-figure apparition of a little girl on the front lawn. L'Aura Hladik Hoffman, the group's founder, identified the spirit as Mary Warner Rosencrantz based on a portrait that sometimes hangs inside the house, a girl with shoulder-length curly hair.

The most unresolved figure at the Hermitage is a Black woman holding a baby who has been seen coming out of the barn. Nobody knows who she is. The Rosencrantz family owned the property for 163 years, and the house itself dates to the Revolutionary era when this was a working plantation, so the list of who she might have been is long and poorly documented.

Medium Craig McManus runs annual "Psychic Tea" events and ghost tours, mostly in the last week of October. Séances are held regularly. Phantom footsteps work the attic. Objects move. Temperatures drop in specific rooms without explanation. The Hermitage operates as a museum now, but the people who stayed the longest still seem to be running the tea room.