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CHAPTER 3

The Ghost of Rose City

MADISON

I GREW UP IN MADISON, NEW JERSEY, also known as the Rose City, went to school at St. Vincent the Martyr on Green Village Avenue, and spent summers hanging out at the playground at the end of Delbarton Drive. There was a path from this park through the woods that had the best blackberries. The path led to Memorial Park, where I learned to ice skate.

I have fond memories of growing up in Madison. The city provided the nation’s best hotels with fresh roses. And to this day, I am an Italian-food snob. Having been brought up with Mrs. Coviello’s manicotti and Mrs. Massucci’s homemade pizza, I see the Olive Garden’s offerings as “plastic Italian.” In addition to the great food and the not-so-great beatings I took for my younger brother from members of “the Niles gang,” neighborhood teens from Niles Avenue, there was this scary story my mother used to tell me about the ghost of a young girl who was murdered on the way home from her baby-sitting job.

In early adulthood I forgot about the story as I concentrated on my family and career. However, once I turned back to my interest in the paranormal, primarily ghost hunting, I asked my mother more about it. Mom said that when she was a teller at the Madison National Bank, there was a part-time teller named Whitney Atchison. Whitney served in the Navy on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. A tire blew out on one of the planes, striking Whitney and costing him his arm and leg. He knew the ghost-girl story and would discuss it with my mom. He claimed his grandfather was on the Madison police force when the murder happened.

Mom said that over the years motorists would report seeing a young girl walking on Ridgedale Avenue who would then vanish. I was intrigued. My research at the Morris County Library turned up the year of the murder, 1921. Armed with that information, I found many articles on microfiche at the library relating to the murder of a girl named Jeanette Lawrence.

Jeanette, who was twelve, lived at 142 Ridgedale Avenue with her mother, father, and sixteen-year-old brother. She was in seventh grade at Green Avenue School and baby-sat Mrs. Sandt’s four-year-old daughter, Madeline, on a regular basis. The Sandts lived around the corner, at 19 Fairview Avenue. On October 6 of that year, at around 5:30 p.m., Jeanette left Mrs. Sandt’s house to return home. When Jeanette turned around to wave good-bye, it was the last time Mrs. Sandt would see her alive.

It should have taken about ten minutes for Jeanette to walk home. When she did not arrive home at the usual time, Mrs. Lawrence sent her son to Mrs. Sandt’s house to see if Jeanette was still there. Mrs. Sandt explained that Jeanette had left a half hour earlier. Mr. Lawrence and his son grabbed flashlights and proceeded to search the immediate neighborhood calling out for Jeanette. Neighbors pitched in on the search, and by 7:00 p.m. the Madison Police were contacted. Even the local Boy Scout troop pitched in to search for Jeanette since her family and the police feared the girl might have fallen and been injured in the brush while traversing the Kluxen Woods. In fact, two Boy Scouts, Chauncey Griswold and Walter Schultz, found Jeanette’s body in Kluxen Woods. Her wrists had been bound behind her back with floral twine, which was readily available given all the nurseries in town. Her body had twenty-three stab wounds, and police later determined that Jeanette had been sexually assaulted.

As the investigation ensued, police learned that Francis Peter Kluxen III, a troubled fourteen-year-old, had bullied Jeanette on at least several occasions. Francis had become too much trouble for the nuns to handle and was expelled from St. Vincent’s, my school. He was taken into custody and questioned. His mother raised suspicion by soaking the pants Francis had worn the day of Jeanette’s murder, stating that he had wine stains on them from working at the family’s winery. Forensics in that era were not able to detect bloodstains following the washing.

Map of Jeanette Lawrence’s neighborhood

Strangely, Mr. Monell Sayre, a wealthy resident of Convent Station, persuaded Francis’s parents to let him adopt the boy and make him the sole heir to Sayre’s estate. By the time Francis was brought to trial in July 1922, he was fifteen years old, stood six feet two inches, and weighed 170 pounds.

Francis appeared to have been well-prepared for his testimony on the witness stand, and he narrated his version of what happened the evening of the murder with a charming composure that won over the jury. It deliberated for just three hours before acquitting him. Many people in Madison thought he was guilty as sin and that Sayre had bought Francis’s freedom with high-powered defense attorneys.

In 1926, Francis Peter Kluxen III left Madison for San Diego. He attacked and robbed two men with a meat cleaver on Christmas Day 1932. He also shot and killed a San Diego neighbor in June 1933. The coroner determined that Francis, by this time a twenty-seven-year-old Marine officer, acted in self-defense. By April 1934, San Diego police had charged him in nine burglaries and recovered $1,000 worth of stolen property from his residence. He served time in San Quentin before dying in San Francisco in 1971.

Jeanette was laid to rest at her grandparents’ cemetery in Andover, New Jersey, on October 14, 1921. Her murder is still listed as “unsolved,” and motorists claim to see a young girl walking down the road and vanishing. Some witnesses claim that they see her turn, wave, and then disappear. This type of haunting could be considered a residual haunting—the video imprint of the last living moments of Jeanette’s life that play over and over.

When I returned to the Chatham/Madison area, I held the monthly meetings of the NJGHS at the Madison Public Library. After one meeting, a woman approached me and asked if I knew anything about a haunting in Madison. I told her about the Jeanette Lawrence case. She said that her son saw the ghost of a girl in their home. Their house is on Central Avenue, directly across the street from Summerhill Park, whose main entrance is on Ridgedale Avenue. Summerhill also once held the Kluxen Winery. It was closed, and its parts auctioned off, in 1972.

The woman was not sure that she wanted an investigation of her home as she was renting the place and afraid her landlord would not approve. Luckily, her son was with her, so I was able to ask him some questions about his experience. He told me that he saw a girl around his age, eleven or so. He said he saw her once in the dining room and once going down the hall and vanishing though a wall. I suggested that they conduct their own investigation by taking pictures and audio recordings.

Orb at Kluxen Woods

As part of the NJ Ghost Conference 2004, I took a group to Summerhill Park for an investigation. In the dark, it was too dangerous to climb down the remains of the steps of the winery. One attendee, Nichole, did capture an amazing orb photo. I did register a drop in temperature, only about ten degrees, in the area where Nichole took this picture. There were several faint orbs, which might have been dust or pollen, but there were also two very bright orbs. One is smaller than the other. This could be explained by depth of field, but it could also be representative of Jeanette and Francis because she was so much smaller than he was. Other than this photo, no EVPs were recorded on our digital audio equipment nor EMFs detected on the meters.

I would love to drive along Ridgedale Avenue and survey Summerhill Park some October 6, the anniversary of Jeanette’s murder, and find out which spots she favors and whether she’s still trying to explain to the living the truth about what happened.