5 Haunted Places in Morris County, NJ, and the Local Legends Behind Them

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Morris County has been settled long enough to build up a real backlog of ghost stories. Some come out of the Revolutionary War, some out of Gilded Age mansions, and at least one comes from the regulars at a neighborhood bar. None of it is proven, and that is most of the fun. Here are five places around the county where people swear they have seen or heard something they could not explain.

Jockey Hollow in Morristown is the oldest story on the list. It is part of Morristown National Historical Park, where the Continental Army spent the winter of 1779 to 1780 through what is still remembered as the hardest winter of the war. The troops rode out 28 separate snowstorms with drifts as high as 15 feet, and more than 100 soldiers are buried on the grounds with no individual headstones, only a single plaque mounted on a boulder. The Grand Parade, the open field where orders were issued and inspections were held, was also where two soldiers were hanged and buried. Hikers have reported seeing colonial soldiers marching in formation through the trees, and the sighting that comes up most often is a woman in a long white colonial dress carrying a lantern along the trails. The park is free and open daily, and the Jockey Hollow Visitor Center is on Tempe Wick Road.

The Darress Theatre at 615 Main Street in Boonton opened in 1919 as a vaudeville house and still looks the part. The legend attached to the building is a former actor who never left, and people who have worked there describe chairs moving on their own backstage. The Town of Boonton bought the theatre in December 2020 and is rehabilitating it into a roughly 500 seat regional performing arts center, so the marquee is quiet while the work moves through its phases. Check the town’s project page before you plan a trip.

Drew University in Madison keeps its own ghost stories on the record, which is unusual for a school. The campus grew out of an estate built in 1833, and the university archives hold decades of accounts from students, security officers, and maintenance staff. In Mead Hall, people working alone have reported footsteps on the main staircase, an interior office door slamming shut with no windows open, and the attic door found standing open at odd hours. In Craig Chapel inside Seminary Hall, a maintenance worker described watching the shadows of the pews sway as if the chandelier were swinging, then looking up to find it perfectly still. He also said the chapel lights switched back on three separate times after he shut them off. Mead Hall is named for Roxanna Mead Drew, and students have said for generations that she is the one still walking the building.

The Florham Campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University sits on the old Florham estate, which bridges Madison and Florham Park. Its centerpiece is Hennessy Hall, a 100 room mansion designed by Stanford White in the 1890s as a replica of a wing of King Henry VIII’s Hampton Court. Inside it is Lenfell Hall, the former drawing room, where the campus story is that lights turn themselves on and off. Elsewhere in the mansion people have reported seeing a girl in a white dress dancing. Hennessy Hall is a working academic building rather than an attraction, so it is not somewhere to wander through uninvited, but it hosts public events through the year and the university publishes an online audio tour of the estate.

The Knotty Pine Pub at 242 East Union Turnpike in Wharton is the only spot on this list where you can order wings while you wait for something to happen. Regulars have described a thin man standing near the dartboards and whistling coming from that same corner. Employees have reported thumping from the crawlspace attic and a stretch of the basement storage area that nobody likes being in alone. It is a working neighborhood bar with darts, a pool table, and a jukebox, and it is worth calling ahead at 973-361-3879 for current hours.

If you would rather have your scares on a schedule, we keep a running list of haunted houses and Halloween attractions in and around Morris County, plus a full Morris County Halloween guide with trick or treat times town by town. For the daylight version of fall around here, start with our fall festivals and fairs guide.

For the seasonal attractions rather than the history, see haunted hayrides in NJ.