CLINTON CASTLE

Location: Easily seen across Greenwood Lake in the winter, Clinton Castle is on the inaccessible east side of Greenwood Lake near the New York-New Jersey state line on Highway 210 between Clinton, New Jersey and Greenwood, New York. However, in the Spring and Summer months, the foliage and growth almost totally obscures it from view from the west side of the lake. Access to the grounds from the opposite side is especially difficult as the Passaic Forestry Department makes numerous efforts to restrict visitors and trespassers from accessing the site. There was once an artificial 2200-foot causeway linking the castle with Clinton Road, but it has eroded to the point that much of it is now under eight feet of water.

Description of Place: Clinton Castle is an imposing three-story crumbling 210-room stone and limestone structure with a central French Renaissance chateau-style architecture, but parts of the exterior incorporate both Gothic Victorian, Georgian Renaissance and Second Empire influences with steeply pitched roofs, turrets and sculptural ornamentation combining with French Baroque with a dome-tile roof and a Georgian Renaissance influence. The edifice was built to exude opulence with high ceilings, arched doorways and a grand staircase. The interior includes 52 bedrooms, 25 bathrooms and almost fifty fireplaces along with a game room, a ballroom, a dining room with a high ceiling, a library with a second level and a tower observatory. Once reaching almost 2200 acres, now reduced by a nearby housing developments, The rear of the property once had an elongated veranda from the end of the foyer and a multi-layered garden. Unfortunately, today, the structure is neglected and deteriorating with collapsed ceilings and stairways, fallen light fixtures, loose floorboards, and wild animals amidst extensive cobweb activity as well as a chambered basement described as consistently flooding.

Ghostly Phenomenon: When a structure has been empty for as long as such places as the Clinton Castle, it gets rather difficult to track down verified witness accounts of the activity connected to it. Sometimes, the last owners can be tracked down to provide some verification or if the site is reported often enough in the local media. If urban explorer Malcolm Flood had not called CGS to check it out, it might have gone unnoticed until for another team.

“It’s a funky old house.” Flood describes. “And it is in a funky old location.”

Flood is a local photography teacher who lives nearby in Passaic, New Jersey, who has an interest in paranormal research. He is also an avid urban explorer, exploring and photographing the remains of human civilization left to the elements. He has visited everything from empty hospitals to remote farmhouses to abandoned prisons. He has trekked through rooms crowded with boxes of forgotten relics of another time and stepped over dust covered floors of vacant homes.With over 200 videos on YouTube and a website of almost 500 places, Even if it is just a shell of a house or a decrepit wood structure, there is not much to stop him from trudging through rat-infested locations.

“First off,” Flood continues. “Clinton Road isn’t a normal road. It’s cursed. It’s part of a trail that goes back to the 1700s, and over the years, there’s been reports of cult activity, murders, robberies and other things in the area. There are areas in the woods where witches used to hold ceremonies, and runaway slaves were caught and murdered here by the KKK. It’s claimed that the Mafia used to bury bodies out in the woods or just dump them off the bridge. Serial killer Richard Kulinkski abandoned the bodies of his female victims here. One guy I know claimed he saw wispy figures dancing around a bonfire in the woods. Several motorists have described a huge black truck trying to run them off the road.”

Flood sent William Collins of the CGS to go see Burt Grayson, a Passaic computer programmer, about his story. Grayson reveals:

“I never believed in this stuff before, but in 1989, I was driving north on Clinton Road with my friends when we experienced something.” He continues. “It was about 1AM, me and my friends, one guy and two girls, and we had driven about a mile up the road, not even at the turn yet. and there were these headlights coming up behind my car basically out of nowhere. It looked like a truck, but at nighttime, you can usually see headlights coming up from a distance, but these lights came out of no where. These headlights were right on me. We heard the roar of the engine coming right up on the back of my car, and I sort of went into a panic and hit the gas. I think we got up to 70 miles per hour right on this turn. I came pretty close to wreck wrecking the car right there. I don't know how I made that turn, but I did, and the lights disappeared.

“I thought we were home free and clear, but then the lights came on again just a bit up the road. Same thing again... Getting on me, getting on me…. and the girl in the back seat was screaming. My blood was pumping, and I hit the gas again, we went off again and the lights went away and stayed off, and we drove onto the big lights on the freeway.”

Collins also talked to William Keaton, a Reserve West Milford fire fighter, who has hunted and explored much of the woods east of the road near the mansion. In 1991, he was about a half mile from the former estate hunting for pheasant when he felt he was being watched. When he stopped, he noticed that the woods had become eerily quiet. There were no birds chirping, no insects and despite the fact he was near a small brook. He couldn’t hear the water running down the hill. After a minute or so, he became conscious he was being watched, looked up and saw a dark figure lurking behind a tree. He called out, but the shadow wouldn’t respond. Only hearing the sound of his footsteps, he backtracked a bit, but he couldn’t find another living person. Going on his way, he rejoined the trail, but the shadow stayed with him, walking parallel with him, but just out of visible range until he reached the camp grounds when it then disappeared.

And then there is the story of Diana Carter, an Allegan pharm representative, who had driven up and down Clinton Road several times selling and endorsing medicine in the area hospitals. On her drives, she always spent the time listening to music on her trips, but one night in February 1993, she was driving up Clinton Road a bit late, and the road was pitch black. There are no street lights on the route to guide her way. She had passed the distant mansion several times, and upon seeing it across the lake in the distance, she knew she was at the midway point for West Milford. She knew it was abandoned, and she knew it was empty, but on this night, as it turned into view, it was ablaze in lights and oddly enough, somehow she heard the far off sounds of screams, laughter and old jazz music from the distance. It was just a brief three second event, and yet, the sight and sound has stayed with her for several years.

“I’m sure glad you guys are here with me….” Flood confessed when he showed Collins the path to the house from the nearby sub-division. “But I’m at a point where I don’t want to come out here alone any more.” Weaving and hiking the trail through wild foliage and the woodland floor rising and lowering, Flood, Collins and Jimmy Bernard, another urban explorer from Philadelphia, trekked the nearly inaccessible path to the mansion. Coming onto the mansion grounds, the rear of the structure came upon them as if it was a huge Mayan Temple hidden in the Yucatan. An exterior stone pathway buried by vines descended into the lower level of a grand garden that rivaled those of Babylon. Another stone staircase ascended to the rear of another garden, a row of plant columns forming the back of an abandoned pool area in the back of the mansion rising four stories over them. The swimming pool was on the exterior basement level of the house, a level full of empty rooms, unused servants quarters, the rusted-out power room, the water basin room and a number of storage chambers, all atop another reported sub basement and wine cellar, and much of it in various stages of decay and ruin. According to Flood, there is still a fortune in fine liquor down there just beyond the wreckage of a decomposing stairwell in the way.

“Let’s stand here for a minute….” Flood paused the tour by the side of an old empty and crumbling swimming pool around fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. At the bottom of its twelve feet depth were a mass of dead foliage and leaves, strewn branches and even errant trash. “You see that third floor bedroom window?” He pointed high to a window under the eave on a wing of the structure. “That’s the window where people have seen a shadow by the window looking out. I don’t bring a lot of groups out here to see the place, but several people have claimed to see her, and a few even got so spooked they decided to turn back than go on.”

Pressing onward, Flood advanced on to the boarded up patio doors at the back of the house. Due to vandals and other miscreants violating the site, the local forestry department had become keen in keeping the place locked and nailed shut, but over the years, improvising urban hunters and curiosity-seekers had found other ways to get inside through narrow windows at ground level or through maintenance tunnels from exterior sheds, but most of the time, these routes led to rooms blocked by decay or left them trapped when they fell through a bad floor to the one under it. Flood’s way in was more direct: a power drill to remove the padlock hinge to the downstairs game room.

Opening the door released a taste of the decay inside the place, a mix of dead air, dust, mold and something belonging to the taste of old damp furniture from a garage that hadn’t been opened in years. Instructed that we’d get used to it if we breathed through our mouths, the first glimpse was of an old Sixties-era wood-paneled game room with a pool table at the far end, cue sticks on the walls along with a dart board, tables with chairs and shelves with old vintage games. There was one door ahead of us, and twin doors on the far end. There was a bar area in the corner with a three-chair pass through to a downstairs kitchen, and although it looked decent at first, a closer look showed mildewed walls and ceiling, a wrinkled carpet and debris from earlier visits.

The rest of the basement beyond was completely dark, but Malcolm seemed to know his way through the mansion beyond. With the smell getting stronger the further we entered, we passed halls with peeling wallpaper, floors with trash, vandalism, graffiti and other signs of a previous human activity and spots covered with a layer of foul stagnant water. From a hall crossing the length of the mansion, we turned a corner into a hall with a strained beam of lighting poking down a stairwell to the first floor. At the far end, the floor to the spare kitchen we had passed was caved-in from the floor above us.

“Don’t stray from the path.” Malcolm announced. “I can never be sure if this route I’m taking is still safe, but if it turns out it isn’t, you would never realize it in time.”

We ascended up into a dimly lit hallway where partial rays of light were forced to enter from the east under the boards on the windows. The corridor to the back of the house was caved in to the wreckage we saw below, and as we moved further, the floor creaked and made noises like dying woodland animals. With flashlights illuminating the way, we came across the library of the house. Dim, dark and covered in patches of bluish-gray to dark blue colors, it was filled with several books on shelves eight tiers high. The furniture looked as it was from a museum, the fixtures from the turn-of-the-century and the wall paper a dirty green with orange stripes, What caught our interest the most was the lop-sided figure of a woman in a wide-brimmed hat and dress posed in a chair, her hands up caught in surprised and an ugly distorted face tilted to one side. It was a mannequin.

“Yeah, there’s a bunch of those around the house.” Malcolm testified. “Probably two hundred or so posed in various rooms. I think one of the last owners was a dress-maker or collected them, but they’re everywhere, and the weird part is they somehow move around. I’ve seen this one in particular in an upstairs bedroom and in the bathtub of a separate bedroom. I’m not sure who are what is moving them around, but they’re always in a new place when I show up,

“Who do you think is moving them?”

“No idea.” Flood waved his light around. “As you can tell, the place is locked up almost as tight as Fort Knox, and I can’t think of anyone else who knows what floors in here are safe to walk on. Maybe, it’s the ghosts, I don’t know, but I do know the library is known for voices. The old caretaker often heard voices, and he would race here trying to catch someone, but he never did. One person claimed they heard strange sounds of an argument in here when the place was supposed to be empty. Back when Craig Finlayson, he was another explorer, showed this place to me, we were at the far end of the hall getting ready to go upstairs when we heard voices, and although we couldn’t figure out where they were coming from, they were in this part of the place.”

From the study, we traveled through the adjoining music room and salon into the main hall. Full of columns and cloisters high above us, it looked like an abandoned church. Spots on the walls showed where large portraits once hung, and a few dingy curtains hung limply from the second floor balcony railing. A long streak of light probed the darkness from a round window over the front entry. The ground floor had some furniture, such as sofas, tables and chairs, but much of it was broken, laying around further trash from a previous human event.

“Who is partying in this place?” Jimmy asked.

“Teenagers…” Malcolm answered. “They see an empty place and they have to trash the place.” He shines his light toward the next floor. “Up there, witnesses in the last years of residency said they saw shadowy figures crossing the top landing. Sometimes, several at a time, while at other times, just a lone figure in a long dark dress. I had one visitor say she saw someone embracing that column and peeking around it. But by the time I turned around to see it, she said it was gone.”

What remained of what had once been a grand marble staircase near the entryway had collapsed, so our journey through the mansion once more trudged through the darkness of the back hall past a solarium where the furniture had been pushed to the walls, a sitting room where two of those mannequins were dressed in suits and propped up in dialogue. From there, we entered a creepy site. In the dining room, the table had been set for ten people. Ceramic dishes and cups, silver forks and spoons, six for each place, had been set alongside three brown wilted sets of flowers and four candles, all covered by a lair of dust-covered spider webs forming a creepy canopy over the settings. The once white table sheet was now gray with streaks of brown, and the once beautiful wood mahogany chairs had decayed into feeble shells of their past selves. At both ends, two mannequins dressed as a groom and bride were posed with cups in their hands to acknowledge. The groom had no facial features, just a painted face on his cylindrical head and a weak moldy mop of dark hair on top, The bride’s head was missing, laying on the floor a few feet away with a sculpted face, blonde hair and a bridal veil pulled across her face. Four unshuttered windows looked out the back wall to the swimming pool area. A much closer look revealed flecks from the ceiling over the floor and the chandelier hanging half way down from its base.

“One of the creepiest stories I ever heard comes from this room.” Malcolm started. “Mind you, I received it second or third hand, but according to it, the old caretaker was investigating sounds of a party from here one night, and the noises continued the entire time he came in through the west entrance to investigate. As the story goes, he came in here and came across a party of several people sitting around the table eating, drinking, partying…. A maid collecting dishes, a man pouring wine along the table… when suddenly they stopped talking and laughing and turned their heads to him, noticing him for the first time, and then fading away. I still get the creeps telling the story in this room.”

“How many of these stories do you think are true?”

“Only the ones I personally experienced…” Malcolm continued through the ruins of a former 1950s kitchen covered in grime and dust and the scat of wild animals foraging for food. The cupboards were askew, much of the old bowls and utensils knocked to the floor. Paper ranging from old menus, calendar pagers and other forgotten human records littered the floor to the servants stairs. Looking down to this area of the basement, we saw empty darkness where the stairs had crashed to the basement, and with nervous trepidation, we dared the route up to the second floor.

 “How much further to the room we saw outside?” Jimmy sounded.

“It’s still a bit twisty-turvy.” Malcolm sounded. Upstairs, there were a few broken windows wafting through the house so the downstairs smell wasn’t as bad, but the mannequins were showing up with more frequency. Although a few bedrooms were mostly empty, others were not. In one, two mannequins were staged to simulate coitus, and in another, a female figure was posed naked in a chair with her legs spread apart. As we re-reached the main hall, our unknown prankster had hung another figure taking its life in the stairwell to the top floor.

Some of the second floor rooms were still full of personal belongings, including stacks of books, manuscripts, diaries and letters - someday hopefully released. Small frames still had photos of unknown relatives, one bed had clothes laid out for a day that had since passed. In one chair, a book was still spread out to a certain chapter. One closet was filled with clothes in it and shoes on the floor, and on the wall, unique among them, was a portrait of a powerful yet beautiful brunette woman with piercing bright blue eyes.

“In another creepy story I heard from a housekeeper for the last owners,,,.” Malcolm continued. “...back when I was researching the history of this place, she described seeing the figure of a blonde girl crossing the main floor from the second floor balcony. She didn’t know her, but she thought it might have been one of the daughters. She called and called to her, but she never responded to her, and when she looked up, the figure had two black spaces where her eyes should have been. She was so terrified that she ran back to her room and locked the door, quitting the next morning.”

Malcolm also enlightened us with stories of things disappearing and reappearing. Although these acts are not indicative of the house’s paranormal reputation, they do lend credence to someone sneaking in and out of the place. For example, there used to be four chandeliers through the main hall, but a few years prior, one of them crashed to the floor due to rotting wood in the attic. It sat untouched for over a year where it landed, but for some reason, it was noticed missing on a return visit in 1995. One of the staircases to the second floor has collapsed down into the basement, blocking access to the basement, but for some reason, something is blocking the alternate pathway to that part of the house.

While the mansion still has four more stairways to the second floor and attic, two other stairways into the basement still exist, and both Malcolm and Craig have both noticed things involving the items downstairs. A wooden floor globe once disappeared from the library, and later returned a few weeks later. Furniture has changed positions downstairs, a series of milk crates were once left in the solarium only to disappear a year later, a strange painting he’d never seen once appeared in the music room, then floated through the house into different rooms before disappearing altogether and a pile of old TVs piled up in one bedroom ceased to exist. At one time, there was a grand piano in the music room well known to urban explorers to the place, but it too has disappeared.

In the far East Wing beyond the kitchen and Grand Dining Hall, Malcolm led the way to the East Stairwell leading to the Third Floor and Attic. Relying on his memories of the safe paths in the house, we reached the second flood and passed a series of bedrooms in various stages of neglect. One room had a female mannequin at a vanity table while another had a decrepit dusty figure posed in a bed to watch the activity in the hall. Had it been less obvious, it might have scared trespassers. Eventually, we reached the second level of the main hall. The higher view did nothing to lessen the feeling of hopelessness in the place, but it did allow us to detect the rancid decaying scent of rot and mold heated by the summer day.

“Here’s another story….” Malcolm entered into a room on the west end of the house and pointed to the doors to the back balcony. “I’m not sure this happened here since it's unlikely to have people on the grounds, but I heard witnesses claiming to have seen a figure of black standing out there. It might have happened once, and several people then started repeating it.”

“What kind of figure in black?” Jimmy asked between photos.

“The black kind.” Flood responded matter-of-factly. “I guess it's supposed to be the Grim Reaper, but I don’t know.” He turned round to an opening in the wall to the next room. This detour was to avoid a section of hall that had collapsed into the downstairs gallery, the result caused by an urban explorer who had crashed through a year or two before. This path took us closer to the third floor room seen outside past more abandoned furniture, boxes and trunks of forgotten relics and even more mannequins sitting in chairs, posed on wires in doorways and even frozen in time in sexual poses in the bedrooms. There was a second smaller system of stairs and balconies in this part of the house, and with a warning on the status of the floors in this part of the house, Malcolm stood at the edge of a collapse and a ruined bedroom whose floor was open to the bedroom below it.

“I’m not sure when the floor here was lost or if it occurred before or after the first sighting,” He continued. “But this is the interior of the room where everyone keeps seeing an unknown presence. Obviously because of the missing floor, it can’t be a real person, but this is the sighting that made the house’s reputation in 1981 and started it’s haunting reputation.”

“Hasn’t there been photos?” Jimmy asked.

“Yes,” Collins mentioned. “Eight of them. Three of them were taken on one occasion, and two of the others have been debunked. The other three I’m not sure come from this location.”

“Who is supposed to be haunting the house?”

Malcolm looked to William for a response.

“No one knows.” Collins responded. “The sightings are mostly second-hand, people passing on other witness’s stories. Problem is the exact history of the place is muddled by conflicting accounts. No one has ever been blamed for the activity here. “ Collins paused. “If there are any grounds for a real haunting here at all.”

“Ready for a few more stops?” Malcolm asked before departing the wing. Heading down the balcony we entered the attic space crossing the length of the mansion. Despite the crumbling nature of the living spaces below, it seemed mostly preserved but for the dust kicked up from the floor. Armoires, boxes and crates were pushed into spaces the length of it and around the garret windows. There was a row of tables down the center covered in the priceless heirlooms of an unknown family, attire an old clothing hanging in forgotten closets, and in the crowded eaves over the main hall surrounded by a stacked chairs, tables and assorted furniture, the team of curiosity-seekers came upon a sight to end all sights.

“What do you know… it’s still here.” He opined.

In a small space possibly about twelve square feet in size was a round table and placed in chairs around it were five mannequins set up as if they had been frozen in a card game. Two of them had painted faces; three of them were more human in appearance. One of them had no legs, another had a missing left arm. They were all garbed or dressed in some way, and on the table before them were tarnished drinking goblets, cards and a fortune in poker ships scattered in piles around the table. Beyond them, were picture frames propped up on their edges, a period bird cage, a baby carriage lifted up atop some boxes, a shelf crowded with yearly journals and a confusion of other devices, antiques and objects of a by-gone age.

“Nice haunted attraction you have here.” Jimmy remarked.

“Remember how I said someone had to be setting these up….” Malcolm spoke defiantly. “I’ve noticed these figures mocked up and reset all over the place in new rooms and locations, but this one…..” He emphasized “All of them…. But this set. This has not been disturbed since I discovered it three years ago.”.

“In my opinion, “ Collins spoke up. “I think the bored forestry guys are moving and setting up these tableaus to terrify would-be trespassers. They might be the reason people think its haunted.”

“I don’t think so.” Flood remained skeptical. “The stories started long before the forestry department took over the property. A real estate developer in the 1990s told me he had heard loud boisterous laughter coming from up here. Women’s voices, footsteps, sounds of the structure groaning… I don’t know about ghosts, but a lot of weird things have been heard here.”

On the route back to the East Wing stairway, there were a few more mannequin tableaus. Not all of them were made of wood or plaster, some of them were clothing stuffed with rags and hanging from beams while others were mere various analogous human forms in strange settings. Some of them were not obvious at first; some only noticed after a careful analysis of a room. Coming down the stairs, there was a male figure sitting in a chair without legs propped up on the table by it, and in the butler pantry, a clothed antique wooden form of a woman without a head was dressed as a housekeeper.

“There’s a few stories I know about the house….” Malcolm announced while returning to the basement entrance. “I heard a rumor about a homeless guy being killed here, but I don’t know the year. There's also a rumor about hold-up men once sheltering here after robbing a bank, one of them being shot and killed here. Now, maybe that story led to the story about the homeless guy, I don’t know, but I was hoping you could look into that.”

“When was the last time someone saw something?” Jimmy asked. 

“Don’t know…” Malcolm confessed. “All the stories I’ve heard are second and third-person accounts, but last Fall, there was this guy named Alex Wraith, he’s a big time urban researcher from New York. He was let in on this site and came here to get a few photos, and he came out thinking someone was living here. He said he thought he had someone following him through the place.”

“Did he say he saw someone?”

“I don’t know.” Malcolm continued. “But he said he wasn’t interested in revisiting the place.

History: Not much is known about the history of Clinton Castle, and what has been passed on about it is speculative and debatable. According to paranormal researcher Dr. Johnathan Rankin.

“...built by Richard Castle, a wealthy industrialist whose peers at the time were known as Rockefeller, Astor and Carnegie, between 1930 and 1938. His family came from rifle production and landed on the steel dynasty and eventually started developing city-wide electrical grids along the East Coast of the United States. To match the prestige and grandeur of other financial dynasties, he acquired several acres of cheap woodlands along Clinton Creek north of North Milford and against Lower Greenwood Lake (sometimes known as Clinton Lake) and cleared the land to build a house…..

:…..and several lavish parties. By the Early Forties, the structure had been delegated to a summer resort. The Castles stayed in London after the war, and ended up donating the house and grounds to be used as a hospital for injured American soldiers coming home from the War. (ibid.) However, nothing seemed to come of this, and the structure went unused for twenty-three years. In that time, there were several strange stories and sightings to come from the grounds….”

Unfortunately, historical records and the Castle family archives don’t agree with this sequence of events. Although Richard Castle’s family had a substantial fortune, it really didn’t come close to the Rockefeller, Astor and Carnegie families, and it wasn’t clearly enough to build the vast structure near North Milford. Furthermore, when the family sold off much of its properties in 1983, Clinton Castle was not listed in the inventory of previous properties. Even Castle’s granddaughter, Hillary Louise Castle, has said her family never lived anywhere in New Jersey.  

Of the structure’s original history, property records suggest the structure has been around as early as 1873, which is as early as the county records go back. Two families named Farnsworth and Luckweather once lived here and were likely connected by family. However, it is known the Farnsworths were also related to the Castles, having an ancestor in common, which is possibly where Rankin’s research became confused. The last person to live there was Max Hallstrom, the caretaker, who died in 1978. It was in 1991 that the grounds fell under the purview of the Passaic Forestry Department.

Identity of Ghosts: A phantom stager, a spectral party girl, ghostly partiers, invisible lovers, a dark presence... The scattered and conflicting history makes it impossible to guess who or what is haunting the location.

Source/Comments: Ghost Story/Circle Of Fear (Episode: “The Mannequins”)/Most Terrifying Places in America: Episode: “Special #2”) - Architecture based on the Biltmore Mansion in Asheville, New Jersey. Phenomenon based on Beatty Castle in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, the Winchester Mansion in Castalian Springs, Tennessee, Clinton Road in West Milford, New Jersey, Black Woods Road near Cherryfield, Maine and the Devil’s Backbone in San Marcos, Texas.

Alexander Wraith from “Greystone Park” (2012)

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