In Brief
Drivers along Union Cemetery in Hackettstown, New Jersey keep meeting a girl in a long white dress on the roadside. She'll get in if you offer her a ride, then disappear. The grave she's buried under reads: She Died in Defence of Her Honor.
The Full Story
At Union Cemetery in Hackettstown, New Jersey, drivers keep meeting a girl in white on the road near the gates. She wears a long flowing dress and white shoes, and sometimes she's carrying flowers. The story goes that if you ask whether she needs a ride, she'll get into the car, and then a few minutes later she's gone from the seat.
The grave they bury her under has a name and a date. Matilda "Tillie" Smith was an 18-year-old kitchen maid at the Centenary Collegiate Institute, a few blocks from the cemetery. On the night of April 8, 1886, she was locked out of her dormitory past the 10 p.m. curfew. She was last seen alive around 10:10 that night near the Institute's gate. The next morning, John White found her body on the grounds near the library at 8:40. She had been raped, beaten, and strangled.
A janitor named James Titus, 29 years old and on the Institute's payroll for over 11 years, was arrested at the end of that April. His trial began in September. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang, then confessed by affidavit to avoid the rope, had his sentence commuted to life, and walked out on parole after roughly 19 years.
Tillie had no family to claim her, so she went into a pauper's grave. Then the New York World took up her case, decried the burial, and ran a national fundraising drive for what it called "a monument to virtue." The town of Hackettstown gave what it could. In November 1887, about 600 people came to see the marble monument unveiled over her plot. The inscription reads: She Died in Defence of Her Honor.
The haunting is only half here. A few blocks away, on the Centenary University campus where she was killed, students report her too. She walks among the tall oaks. She turns up in a back room behind the theater stage, the spot the lore calls her favorite, and at South Hall she's said to float along the ceiling. In the dorms, students tell of doors opening on their own and stereos switching on with no one near them. A repair man working under a swinging light fixture is said to have heard a voice tell him, "Get me out of here." He never came back.
The campus kept her in smaller ways too. The on-campus grill is named Tillie's. In 2002 the resident stage company commissioned a play about her, *The Tillie Project*.
The grave is the part the town built for her. The campus is the part she keeps returning to.
