Ringwood Manor's Controversial Ghosts

Apparitions Sighted by Witnesses and Hans Holzer’s “Findings”

Mar 28, 2009

French Revolutionary War Soldiers, http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/229174

Credible people reported phenomena, including hearing mysterious sounds. The paranormal investigation conflicted with historical evidence, but was recorded as authentic.

The Manor, in Ringwood, New Jersey, had been owned by several families: the Erskines, Ryersons, Coopers and Hewitts, before becoming New Jersey state property in 1936. The house played an important role in the Revolutionary War. Robert Erskine was General Washington’s Geographer and Surveyor General. The mansion is a museum that gives tours featuring art and furnishings of an earlier, more gentile era. Generations of local residents believe former residents’ ghosts haunt the building. Some reported sightings, strange sounds and eerie feelings while in the manor house and on its grounds.

Ringwood Manor’s Ghostly Phenomena and Legends

There are an array of stories out there concerning the haunting of Ringwood Manor:

Kathleen Tanis grew up hearing stories about her great-grandfather who was decapitated in a mining accident near the estate’s grounds. Her grandmother believed his ghost haunted an upstairs bedroom.
General Erskine is buried behind the manor’s pond. Witnesses have seen him at dusk sitting on his grave looking across the water.
There’s, supposedly, an unmarked grave filled with bodies of French soldiers who fought in the
Revolutionary War are on the grounds. Their specters have been seen and heard, speaking French.
There’s the phantom of a maid haunting a small second floor bedroom where she, allegedly, was beaten to death. People have heard crying, footsteps and objects dropping emanating from the empty room. When its door was opened, the bed was rumpled.
Historian Elbertus Prol, curator of Ringwood Manor since 1968, was a skeptic until he had his own paranormal experience. While he was working in the manor, he sensed an unseen presence and felt a sense of approval. He concluded it was Abraham Hewitt’s ghost. When the area where he was sensed the entity stood was measured, it was about five feet, four inches tall, the approximate height of the man.
A woman heard a cargo car running in Peter's Mine, which had been closed for years.
There’s been EVPs, Electronic Voice Phenomena, in a small graveyard on the estate. EVPs are recordings of mysterious voices on tape captured by analog and digital recorders, believed to be those of apparitions.

Hans Holzer and Ringwood’s Ghosts

Holzer “investigated” the manor. Ethel Meyers was his chosen psychic. Her claim to fame was her involvement in The Amityville Horror investigation. She proclaimed the debunked hoax was true.

Holzer wrote that Meyers, while in a trance, discovered that the center of the hauntings was in the area of the one that originally was Mrs. Elizabeth Erskine's bedroom and there were three ghosts:

There was a 19th century servant, Jackson White, part black and part Indian, who lived at Ringwood Manor.
Another one was servant Jeremiah, who bitterly accused Elizabeth of mistreating him.
There was Elizabeth Erskine, who wasn't pleased with their presence there and unpleasantly told him to leave and get off her property several times.

According to one of Ringwood’s curators, Elizabeth Erskine never saw the present house which isn’t near the site of the original house she lived in. The idea that she mistreated any servant was also denied. So much for Holzer’s credibility.

His dubious reliability is also evidenced by Jamaica’s Rose Hall, which Holzer declares as being haunted by the White Witch, Annie Palmer, its former mistress.

Herbert G. de Lisser believed the paranormal was bunk and wrote a fictionalized version of her life, The White Witch of Rose Hall. There is no documentation the she haunts the hall and historical documents vastly differ from fiction presented in the book.