Clinton Road runs about ten miles through West Milford, from Route 23 near Newfoundland to Upper Greenwood Lake. The name comes from the old settlement of Clinton, near where the road crosses the brook. The reservoir and the woods around it are ordinary North Jersey forest. The reputation is not.
The documented crime is the one people mix into the ghost stories. On May 18, 1983, a cyclist found the body of Daniel Deppner in the woods off the road. Richard Kuklinski was later convicted of the murder. That dumping is real. The rest of the Clinton Road file is folklore, much of it collected by Weird NJ.
The best-known tale is the ghost boy at a bridge over Clinton Brook, sometimes called Dead Man’s Curve on this road, which is a different place from the Ohio curve below. Leave a quarter on the center line at midnight, the story says, and the boy who drowned returns it. Some versions have him push a watcher into the water. Other reader reports add a Camaro said to have crashed in 1988, two park rangers who died in 1939, phantom trucks, and animals tied to Jungle Habitat, which closed in 1976. Cross Castle, built by Richard Cross in 1905 and razed in 1988, supplies the Satanist rumor. None of those sightings has been verified. The road is narrow, dark, and a bad place to stop in the lane.
Clinton Road, West Milford, New Jersey
- Clinton Road, Wikipedia covers the settlement name, the 1983 Deppner case, and the Weird NJ legends.
- Haunted Places: Clinton Road is a short field note on the boy, the Camaro, Cross Castle, and the Kuklinski dumping.