Union Cemetery

18-year-old Tillie Smith was murdered in 1886. Hackettstown paid for her monument at Union Cemetery. Witnesses see a woman in white at its edge.

Matilda "Tillie" Smith was 18 years old, working as a kitchen maid at Centenary Collegiate Institute, and locked out of her dormitory past the 10 p.m. curfew on April 9, 1886, when she asked the janitor, James Titus, to let her back in. He attacked her instead. He tried to rape her, strangled her when she fought back, and left her body outside Taylor Library. It was found the next morning. She's buried now at Union Cemetery in Hackettstown, under a marble monument paid for entirely by townspeople who'd never met her. The inscription reads: "She died in defense of her honor."

Tillie had no family to claim her body. Hackettstown, population of a few thousand at the time, took up a collection. The monument was unveiled on November 24, 1887. James Titus was tried, convicted on circumstantial evidence, and sentenced to hang. He appealed, had his sentence reduced, served nineteen years, and was paroled in December 1904 after confessing. When he died in June 1952, he was buried at Union Cemetery. Not far from Tillie.

She has not stayed in the ground. The figure visitors keep describing at Union Cemetery is a young woman in a flowing white dress and white shoes, sometimes carrying flowers. Witnesses describe her walking near the cemetery's edge, approaching parked cars, and climbing into vehicles before vanishing. In the summer of 1975, four separate visitors independently described encountering her, all of their accounts matching versions that had been circulating in Hackettstown for nearly a century. Some witnesses describe a white shadowy form resembling a young girl with what look like knife wounds.

Union Cemetery is only half her territory. The other half is the Centenary University campus where she was killed, now a few blocks away. Students and staff report her walking among the oak trees on the grounds. She has been seen floating along ceilings in South Hall. She turns up backstage at the theater, which staff say appears to be her favorite spot. A repair technician working near a swinging light fixture on campus once heard a voice say "Get me out of here" and refused to come back to that part of the building. Stereos and CD players in the dormitories turn themselves on. Footsteps echo in the locked and empty South Dorm. Laughter has been heard in the campus church building near midnight.

The college has folded Tillie into its identity over the decades. In 2002, Centenary Theater commissioned a play about her. The on-campus grill is named Tillie's. There's a campus legend that her face appears in a sorority photograph taken after her murder, which the college keeps under lock and key. Whether that photograph exists is a separate question from whether anyone is willing to produce it on request.

The ghost story of Union Cemetery is really one half of a story. The other half is on the Centenary campus. Tillie's grave is where the town chose to put their grief for her, and the campus is where her death actually happened. She shows up in both places. The town monument paid by strangers is probably the more honest of the two memorials, which is maybe why she keeps walking back to it.