Mystery music, flickering lights, ghostly visions: Monmouth University's haunted history

WEST LONG BRANCH - Lights flickering on and off, seemingly at random. The sound of organ music echoing. Unexplained cold spells and visions. Eerie experiences in the elevators, where tragedy happened four decades ago.

Stories about ghosts at Monmouth University’s Great Hall abound in such legion that Kathy Kelly, owner of Paranormal Books and Curiosities in Asbury Park, has conducted two seances and an investigation there over the past decade.

“It has a reputation of being haunted,” said Kelly, who earned a master’s degree in history from Monmouth in 2017. “People are always really curious about these large, historic buildings — they feel that history rests there, and I think there’s something to that.”

The pull of the stories is so strong that anthropology professor Richard Veit, who is associate dean of Monmouth’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, interviewed students about them when he first arrived on campus two decades ago. In 2005, staff members detailed their spine-tingling encounters in an award-winning documentary, “Shadows of Shadow Lawn,” which was produced by Patrick Perrotto and Tom Hanley.

Shadows of Shadow Lawn from Patrick Perrotto on Vimeo.

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“I have heard stories of paranormal activity since I started teaching at Monmouth,” said Veit, who is featured in the hourlong documentary. “It’s part of our heritage as a place, all the stories Monmouth has accumulated over its history.”

The epicenter for those stories is the 130-room Great Hall, which has a fascinating and tortured past.

'A lot of sadness there'

Before the Great Hall there was Shadow Lawn, a mansion built on the site in 1902. President Woodrow Wilson stayed there for six weeks in 1916, using it as a “summer White House.” In 1927 the wooden mansion burned down.

Hubert Parson, who was president of the Woolworth Co. department store chain, had a new one built at a cost of $10 million — the equivalent of $150 million today. It features 50 varieties of Italian marble, the same Indiana limestone used in the Empire State Building, a 70-foot atrium crowned by a stained-glass skylight and a bathroom walled by petrified wood.

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“This was a real Gilded Age mansion,” Kelly said. “There was an indoor swimming pool and bowling lanes. These people were never happy there because they were never accepted — they were ‘new money’.”

The Parsons were bankrupted by the Great Depression and lost Shadow Lawn due to tax delinquency in 1939.

“(Hubert Parson) had spent an enormous amount of money on artisan furniture; he thought he would leave these as museum pieces,” Kelly said. “But they were all fakes, and when he passed away (his wife Maysie) was left with nothing. So there’s a lot of sadness there.”

Maysie’s sister, Bertha, served as Shadow Lawn’s caretaker and lived alone on the third floor.

“People would report seeing her still wandering the hallways in the administrative wing up in the top floor,” Kelly said.

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During her investigation, Kelly said, “I remember getting interesting readings on some of our equipment and talking to people who worked there who really believed there was something there.”

Then there is the basement, the elevators, and the real tragedy that links them.

Séance in the basement

The Great Hall’s elevators are vintage, with the old-school gate and all.

“Folks claim that one of the elevators is haunted,” Veit said. “The story there, and I think there’s a kernel of truth to it, was a ghost that related to the tragic death of a firefighter in the Great Hall in one of the elevators there.”

The true story: In the summer of 1984, responding to an electrical fire caused by a lightning storm, 20-year-old firefighter Michael William Thorne of West Long Branch Fire Co. 2 fell down an elevator shaft and died.

“Firefighters were clearing the building of fumes and smoke when Thorne fell,” the Asbury Park Press reported at the time. His body was found in the basement.

A few years back, Kelly held a private séance in the basement, which used to be a chapel.

“I remember there was information (coming through) about the fire that actually happened,” she said.

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In “Shadows of Shadow Lawn,” which describes the place as “a supernatural hotbed,” there is a segment devoted to the mansion’s organ. According to Monmouth University’s website, the Parsons “had the organ built into the fabric of his mansion. It spanned two floors and included double harps, double sets of cathedral chimes, a Concertola (self-playing piano) with double controllers, and nearly 5,000 pipes” and “vibrated to life each morning when Parson and his wife, Maysie, began their daily routine of eating breakfast to the tune of Christian hymns.”

Though the organ has not been played since the 1970s due to deterioration, the documentary interviews security guards who claim to have heard organ music echoing through the halls at night.

Veit said spectral tales extend to other parts of campus, including the library — “lights going on and off of their own accord and rooms having temperatures that didn’t make sense, being cold when everything else around was warm,” he said — and Woods Theatre.

“It’s a former stables building,” he said of the theater. “There are stories there about the ghost of a stable boy.”

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'You might have an experience'

In the spookiest scene of “Shadows of Shadow Lawn,” a statue next to the library appears to be captured blinking on camera. Optical illusion, editing trick or supernatural occurrence, it’s creepy stuff.

Who needs to pay for a haunted hayride or watch a scary movie this Halloween when you can just walk through your local college campus?

In the end, Kelly said, that’s kind of the point.

“Regardless of whether or not you believe in this stuff, even the stories themselves are important,” she said. “I would encourage local people to go take a walk through the campus, go take a walk through your historic places. You may not see a ghost, but you might have an experience.”

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Jerry Carino is community columnist for the Asbury Park Press, focusing on the Jersey Shore’s interesting people, inspiring stories and pressing issues. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Monmouth University's haunted history: Mystery music, ghostly visions