New Jersey's Rough (& Really Haunted) Road

Clinton Road is located in West Milford in Passaic County. The road begins at Route 23 near Newfoundland and runs roughly 10 miles to Upper Greenwood Lake. The road itself is long and dark. It’s poorly paved and extremely curvy. 

In 2024, the car rental company Sixt conducted a study on the Most Haunted Roads for its magazine. Clinton Road in West Milford, New Jersey, was at the top of its list. It came in as the second-most haunted road in the entire world in the Sixt study, just behind a major regional route in South Africa. 

Spooky Stories

Because of its isolated and wooded area, many people have gone to this area to do bad things. Throughout history, there have been gatherings of witches, Satanists, and the KKK in the woods surrounding Clinton Road. 

Within these woods, there was an actual castle at one point. Clinton, or Cross Castle, was named for the man who had it built, Richard J. Cross, but Cross and his family called the place Bearfort, after the mountain range it was built in. This castle was built in 1905, and it was three stories high. 

Cross died in 1917, and the family sold the property to the City of Newark in 1919. A fire eventually destroyed much of the remaining wooden structure, but left the stone wall still standing. This made it the perfect place for hikers, teenagers, and the occasional Satan worshippers to hang out. The stone walls were knocked down in 1988 when the Newark Watershed Commission deemed the structure unsound, and there were lots of graffiti and scary drawings on these walls. 

According to Weird NJ, a boy who drowned in the Clinton Brook under the bridge now haunts it. Supposedly, if someone throws a quarter into the brook or leaves the coin in the middle of the road, the ghost boy will return it to you. And then chase those people back to their cars. Some people have reported seeing apparitions of the ghost boy, and others have reported the ghost pushing people into the water if they look over the side of the bridge.

Besides the ghost boy, there have been other ghosts described by Weird NJ readers. Someone claims to have seen a Camaro driven by a girl who supposedly died when she crashed the car in 1988. Another report claims to have encountered two park rangers while camping with friends in the woods near the road. These rangers died on the job in 1939. 

These are first-hand accounts written by the readers of Weird NJ. 

G.J.R. wrote, “After one night of hearing tales, me and six others decided to go to the castle.  As we got up the dirt road that wound up to the castle. We parked the cars, got out, it a fire and drank some beer.  After a half-hour, we began to hear chanting and chains rattling. One of the girls started to go into a seizure. Three of us tried to move her, to no avail. It was like she was nailed to the rock. Then the chanting stopped. The girl came around. We all looked at each other like ‘What the hell is going on here?’” 

Scot wrote: “I had a friend who lived near Clinton Road. He used to take me on May Day and Halloween’s Eve to spy on Wiccans practicing in the areas near his house. The proof I have is more than a kid’s flashback of witches. It pertains to what was transcribed on the walls of Cross Castle and how a historical fact about the writing will reveal that a Satanist movement was using the area for their practices. It was a nice afternoon in 1977. We decided to get our packs, a tent, and a rifle to spend the night up in the woods. 

I took a journal along with me. When we came upon the castle, we were amazed, as always, at how it stood out in the woods. We entered it and were shocked to learn that someone had put up two huge boards with words spelled out in red paint. The nature of the writing intrigued me so I copied down what the walls proclaimed, and my friend snapped a picture. The journal stayed in a box until six months ago, when after my wife’s death, I was going through everything and read it.  What was once scribbled down in my youth was now revealed as one of the writings of Anton LaVey of The Church of Satan! I went to a local bookstore to match my journal with the Lex Satanicus. I concluded that the tales about Clinton Road were seriously understated!  The Satanists who practiced there were not a joke, but a local grotto of people using dark forces to bring forth their evil reign. Now, when I go to Clinton Road, I look at everything in a different light.” 

Weird NJ readers have also claimed to see a lot of creepy creatures at night. This includes a hellhound named Wolfie, monkeys, and unidentifiable hybrids. According to some lore, these may not be supernatural, but survivors of the closed-down attraction Jungle Habitat. 

Jungle Habitat was a theme park/safari created by Warner Bros. in West Milford. The park opened in the summer of 1972 and closed in October 1976. The park featured a drive-through safari section, which allowed for wild animals to roam free and approach vehicles as they slowly drove through. People in the cars could observe peacocks, baboons, camels, elephants, llamas, giraffes, and Siberian tigers. Many of the animals would climb atop the cars, and/or walk in front of vehicles. 

The walk-through section was a small theme park which included a petting zoo, camel and elephant rides, snack bars, gift shop, a reptile house, a dolphin show, and "Bugs Bunny and Friends" live shows. The park did not have amusement-style rides, although there were plans to add them in the spring of 1977. But the park was closed by then.

The park's last weekend in operation was Halloween weekend 1976. On November 2, 1976, township residents voted against expanding the park to include rides. Following the vote, Warner Bros. decided to shut the park down and sell the land. After the park closed, newspapers reported that several animal carcasses, including an elephant, had been left there to decay. They treated the animals poorly while they were living as well. This was not a safe park at all. Animals attacked people, two wolves escaped their enclosures, and several park animals had contracted tuberculosis and were euthanized. 

On July 8, 1974, a woman was bitten by a baby elephant who had reached out of its enclosure with its trunk and grabbed the woman; she was awarded $200,000 for her injuries.

According to the Travel Channel show Most Terrifying Places in America 2, phantom vehicles, such as pickup trucks or even floating headlights not attached to any vehicle, will appear out of nowhere in the middle of the night and chase drivers to the end of the road, then disappear. 

So there are plenty of rumors and tall tales surrounding this New Jersey road, but there is only one confirmed death on record. On May 18, 1983, the body of Daniel Deppner was found in this wooded area when a cyclist was riding down Clinton Road. The body had been wrapped inside a green garbage bag before being dumped, and the body was being eaten by a turkey vulture when it was found. 

Richard Kuklinski was charged and convicted of this murder. Richard Kuklinski was nicknamed the Iceman, and he was the leader of a burglary gang. He went on to murder multiple people, either stealing from them or to keep them from ratting on him. How many people he killed is unknown. 

He was convicted of 5 murders, but claims to have killed over 200 men. He also claims to have mob ties and to have worked as a hitman for the mafia, but law enforcement and organized crime experts have expressed skepticism and don’t think he’s the criminal mastermind he claims to be. Either way, he was the subject of three HBO documentaries that aired in 1992, 2001, and 2003. Several biographies were written about him, and a 2012 feature film called The Iceman was made based on his crimes. 

Daniel Deppner was one of Kuklinski’s associates, and they were part of a burglary gang together. The two murdered Gary Smith together, another one of their associates, because they believed he was going to rat on them. Deppner moved into Kuklinski’s son-in-law’s apartment, for some reason, I’m guessing the reason is murder and/or crime. Deppner was then killed in that apartment sometime between February and May 1983. Although medical examiners listed his cause of death as “undetermined,” there were signs that he was killed with cyanide and strangulation. Kuklinski’s MO, so he was the third of Kuklinski’s associates to be found dead. 

In addition to being haunted, this road is extremely frustrating for motorists. It’s notorious for having the county’s longest traffic light wait. This occurs at a double intersection where Route 23 crosses the road. The two lights can cause motorists to wait for 5 minutes in total. The wait time is to reduce backups on Route 23 during rush hour, but it just leads to a lot of people waiting. 

So not only is it freakin haunted, its freakin annoying. It’s also pretty iconic to me because there’s a 2019 movie called Clinton Road featuring none other than Ice-T. The movie follows a widowed firefighter who is seeking closure after his wife goes missing on this haunted road. He has to unlock the road’s secret if he wants to get out alive. I haven’t seen the movie, but I love it when Ice-T plays a character who is in New Jersey.