Exploring the dark side of the Jersey Shore
ASBURY PARK, N.J. — A dozen men and women lined up in the quiet darkness on a recent Saturday night outside an abandoned church in Keyport on the New Jersey Shore.
They peered into the black windows of the old Trinity restaurant and imagined the specter of a little girl glaring back from the gloom.
Hauntings are abundant in Keyport, and the ghost, called Lorraine, isn’t the only spirit still inside the now empty building, said Genevieve Kelly, a tour guide who specializes in the paranormal.
Each weekend through the summer, guides from Jersey Shore Ghost Tours take locals and visitors alike through Keyport and Red Bank, and recounting stories of the strange and supernatural.
Other such walking tours, catering to those with an interest in the paranormal, can be found in Asbury Park and Beach Haven, too.
Maggie O’Neill, who sells real estate in Beach Haven for a living, moonlights as a ghost hunter in this Long Beach Island borough on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings during the summer months.
Proprietor of Into the Mystic Ghost Tours, O’Neill has been a believer ever since a spirit saved her life while she was on vacation in Maine a number of years ago, she said.
While staying in a reputed haunted house in the Pine Street State, O’Neill woke up from a nightmare, which had left her with an ominous vision of a man.
“I believe a ghost saved my life — no joke,” O’Neill said.
The next day, while out bicycling alone in the Maine woods, O’Neill recalled the sickening feeling as she rode closer to a parked car on a secluded road along a portion of the bike trail. She stopped the bike before reaching the car, but a suspicious man stepped out of the vehicle and called out to her, asking her if she thought her friends might be looking for her.
She said the unknown man seemed intent on drawing her closer so they could talk. However, O’Neill said the feeling of dread kept her from moving any closer. Silently, she stared down the man until he got back into his vehicle and drove away. Later, she was interviewed by police investigators who told her that they were looking for a serial rapist who fit the description of the man she had seen.
That sealed O’Neill’s interest in the paranormal. She was convinced that a spirit of some kind had saved her and she began to include ghost tours on her vacations all over the world, from Amsterdam to Savannah. Eventually, O’Neill decided that Beach Haven should have its own ghost tour. so she began researching local ghost stories.
“There is a difference between a haunt and a ghost,” O’Neill told a group of more than a dozen on the bi-weekly tour this past Tuesday night. “A ghost, if you believe, is the energy of a departed person who still interacts with us on this plane. A haunt is something that happens, which imprints a picture from that moment in time, and then it just plays over and over again like a film loop.”
In Keyport, places like the empty church now play a starring role on such ghost tours.
When the church was Trinity restaurant, one bartender used to see the apparition of a tall man in a black suit so frequently that he sometimes failed to serve customers with similar appearances, Kelly said.
“There’s so much history here,” said Kelly as she gripped an oil lantern and wore a black and purple striped dress reminiscent of a Tim Burton heroine. “It really is a hot bed for some paranormal activity.”
Keyport is the most haunted town in Monmouth County, Kelly said. Its waterfront and Victorian neighborhoods are home to unexplained knocks, disembodied footsteps and spectral forms, according to her stories.
“Is anyone here a nonbeliever?” Kelly said at the beginning of the tour.
“In what?” a man in the crowd asked.
“In ghosts,” Kelly said.
More than an hour walking Keyport’s slate sidewalks in the dark while listening to tales of bloody pirate slaughters and macabre mansion experiences might be enough to make the stoutest disbeliever think twice.
Haunted is the home of Dr. Harry M. Poppick, the former president of Bayshore Community Hospital in Holmdel who died in 1990, Kelly said. Residents there have reported feeling sheets tugged inexplicably, hearing a heavy man’s footsteps by the front door, whispers and whistling, she said.
The Barton House on Main Street is inhabited by the ghost of a civil war soldier who lingers in a bedroom, Kelly said.
Such stories attract people like Marie Tirrell of Freehold, who celebrated her birthday on the Keyport tour with her daughters.
“I liked Halloween as a little kid,” said Tirrell, who has toured the paranormal in Philadelphia, Piscataway and Middletown. “Historically, it’s interesting,”
Apart from the chills and shudders, these stories of death and the afterlife serve an important purpose, Kelly said.
“Keyport’s a really cool place,” she said. “It keeps the history of the town alive.”
But why do so many have a fascination with ghost stories?
“Many of us have had things happen to us that we can’t explain and I think we all ponder what happens after we die, it’s a universal question,” O’Neill said. “I really think the more we know about quantum physics — string theory, parallel universes — all the these things scientists are studying, so much of what we call the paranormal will be just normal, and we’re no longer crazy.”
Reflecting back on that trip to Maine so many years ago, O’Neill said people have more to fear from the living than from the dead.
“I’d rather meet a spirit in a dark alley than a human,” she quipped.