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CHAPTER 1

Roxana: The Ghost of Mead Hall

MADISON

ONE OF THE BEST EXAMPLES of Greek Revival architecture north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Mead Hall, on the campus of Drew University, is home to wedding receptions and gala university celebrations. Built as a residence in 1836 for William Gibbons, it was sold in 1867 to Daniel Drew, who then named it Mead Hall in honor of his wife, Roxana Mead Drew. It served as Drew Theological Seminary until 1900.

The structure was built as a “box within a box”: there is about ten inches of space between the outside brick wall and the interior wall. This was a Southern design to keep the house cooler in the summer months. Unfortunately, it was this design that allowed the August 1989 fire to burn for twenty-four hours and required help from thirteen fire companies to extinguish it. The fire started from a painter’s torch used to melt off old paint. Captain Lou Derosa of the Madison Fire Department said that the flame from the torch must have made its way into the space between the inside and outside walls via a carpenter bee hole.

The fire departments watered the fire from the roof and finally put it out. Amazingly, the collapse of the roof from the combined stress of fire and water pressure did not damage the beautiful oval railing on the second floor, save for a couple nicks and little burn marks. In 1991, Mead Hall received a $650,000 grant for restoration, and it reopened in 1993.

I first heard about the great fire of Mead Hall and the ghostly apparition of that event in 1996, when I was on a Halloween radio show for the local radio station WMTR 1250-AM. I was in the studio, but the other guest, Jack Rushing, had called in for the show. Jack gave historical ghost tours in the Great Swamp as well as some Revolutionary War–period cemeteries in the Morris County area.

On the air, he told the story of the fire at Mead Hall and how two firemen, one from Madison and the other from Florham Park, witnessed a woman coming toward them on the grounds outside the hall. They approached her, and one of the firemen called out to her to come to them for safety. As they got closer, they realized she was dressed in clothing from a different time period. Suddenly, she vanished right in front of them. Jack felt that this was the ghost of Roxana, the building’s namesake.

In the summer of 1997, a man from Washington, D.C., contacted me and said he was filming a pilot episode for a show that he wanted to pitch to either the Discovery Channel or the Sci Fi Channel. He wanted to film Ghost Hunters Inc., which is what my then-husband and I called our little investigating firm, in action at a haunted venue. I suggested Mead Hall. The name of this pilot was “Way Out There,” an appropriate name considering it was so out there that it never aired. I’ll never forget fighting back my laughter as the crew donned their bright-orange jumpsuits with the W.O.T.’s iron-on lettering on the back.

This was my first experience with a television crew on location. Up to that point, I had been on local news shows only in the studio, at stations like News 12 NJ and CN8. I was used to the microphone wiring and having a transmitter box clipped to my back. What was different was having a huge boom mic hovering over my head. Since this was my first time ghost hunting with a television crew in tow, I was uncomfortable because we had all the lights on in Mead Hall plus all the extra lighting of the camera crew. As they were not using infrared technology to shoot without light, I gathered that this was a low-budget production, though I suppose I also could have looked to their salvage-yard cars or the fact that they drove back to D.C. the same night to eliminate hotel costs.

This was back in the days before digital photography. I didn’t get my first digital camera, a Sony Mavica, until 1999. I was using a 35mm Pentax at the time of the Mead Hall filming. I was also using an Aiwa boom box for collecting electronic voice phenomena (EVPs). I took some pictures as the crew finished setting up lighting and reviewing the area for shots they wanted to film.

We started filming a walk-through beginning in the foyer. I pointed out the two large mirrors on either side of the foyer. Straight ahead in the hall, perpendicular to the foyer, hangs the portrait of Roxana. A woman who works in the office at Mead Hall told me she had witnessed a bright light coming out of Roxana’s portrait, traveling to one mirror, bouncing from that mirror to the other mirror and then bouncing back to the portrait.

We made our way up the stairs and down the hall to the oval railing. This railing surrounds the opening that allows people on the second floor to look down on the harlequin marble foyer and people in the foyer to look up at the skylight above the second floor. The child in me saw this more as a strategic vantage point for dropping water balloons on school officials.

Portrait of Roxana Mead Drew

As we covered the whole second floor, I took picture after picture. I used a 35mm; the instant feedback of a digital camera’s LCD screen was not yet available. I shot seven rolls of film. We continued down the back stairs and covered the ballroom on the first floor. Since I had left the boom box recording for EVPs in the front room on the first floor, I made it a point to check the cassette tape to see if I needed to flip it over.

The night was wearing on, and I was getting tired and cranky from having this entourage follow me around with microphones and bright lights. I asked the producer if I could take a break. He agreed, and I went upstairs to sit on the little bench in front of the window facing the oval railing. I sat down and breathed a sigh of relief. But after a few minutes, I sensed I wasn’t alone. I picked up my camera and fired off a shot at the railing. The crew noticed the flash and came running upstairs to see what happened. I told them I merely took a picture.

We proceeded to walk around the oval railing toward the hallway. I tried to take another picture, but the camera battery was dead. “I need a minute to change batteries,” I said. “This one is dead.”

“The battery is dead on this too,” the cameraman said. “I just switched this out downstairs. This was a fully charged battery.”

One by one, each person noticed their camera, recording device, anything with a battery in it, was dead. This happens on paranormal investigations. From what I can tell, the ghosts draw the energy from the batteries. It must be like an adrenaline rush for them. I explained to the television crew that a ghostly presence might have just had its power hit for the day, courtesy of our batteries. We made our way back downstairs to reload new batteries and resumed investigating upstairs, but detected no temperature fluctuations or electromagnetic fields (EMFs).

Finally, by 2:00 a.m., we completed our work and packed up. The crew was heading back to Washington D.C., and I was heading home to bed. The next day, I dropped off my seven rolls of film for developing. I sat and listened to the audio tape and heard nothing unusual. The producer called me later in the afternoon to say they had arrived safely back in D.C. They enjoyed their first ghost hunt and were looking forward to the editing process on Monday.

Monday I went back to Walgreens to pick up my pictures. I didn’t even wait to get home. I sat in the parking lot reviewing the photos and was struck with disappointment. Not one orb in 168 pictures … but wait—there was one. That solitary orb was positioned right by the oval railing. My “ghostometer” had successfully detected a presence that night when I was on my break. I further realized that after I took this picture and the crew rushed upstairs, we all had our batteries drained.

The show never did air. I still wonder if Roxana came back to check on me when I took my break. Perhaps she was curious as to why I was finally alone. Perhaps she was making sure I wasn’t disturbing anything in her home. Whatever the case, something otherworldly definitely was there that night.

A FEW YEARS LATER, I was at Drew University’s Kirby Shakespeare Theatre to see the play Enter the Guardsman. I had heard the stories of a ghost named Reggie, who haunts the theater, which was once the campus pool. I tucked a 35mm disposable camera with 800 ISO film and a built-in flash into my purse. Reggie was a track star at the school. For some reason, while he was doing laps around the pool, he slipped, hit his head, and drowned.

During intermission, I took some pictures in the theater. After I got this film back from developing, there were two pictures with an orb in them. In the first picture, the orb was on the curtain by the stage, and in the next photo it appeared at the top of the curtain. All the photos taken after that were normal. Maybe Reggie was doing his laps during the intermission.

The Hoyt-Bowne building on campus is where people claim to see a phantom and hear his heavy breathing. There have been reports of a piano playing when no one was there. There is also the story of a girl who was raped and killed and her ghost haunts the fourth floor of this dorm building, but I’ve never personally investigated this building to know for sure.

Drew University has had many politicians deliver addresses, as well as the late Christopher Reeve, who delivered the commencement speech on May 22, 1999. Yet I find it ironic that David Conrad appeared in the university’s Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 2006. He plays Jim Clancy on the television show Ghost Whisperer. I wonder whether he knew he was performing on stage while Reggie was doing laps.