'I would not go in there at night': West Long Branch cemetery has problems with the dead

WEST LONG BRANCH - Just who is responsible to care for the dead in the two abandoned cemeteries between Locust Avenue and Wall Street?

Great lengths have been made to find out. But the reality might just be that there is no one. Meanwhile, the cemeteries have taken on a post-apocalyptic look, and people whose loved ones are resting there have become increasingly frustrated with the lack of upkeep.

Gravestones, some older than 200 years, are crumbling, their inscriptions long eroded and undecipherable. Trees are twisted and dying, choked by thick vines of honey suckle, grape, blackberry and poison ivy. The deer and fox thrive. The underbrush is festering with rodents.

A cult allegedly worshipped back there. Homeless people have been known to camp there, hidden from view.

West Long Branch: Borough makes history with new police chief, who was inspired by a car crash

"It's a wildlife preserve. I would not go in there at night," said Arthur Green III, the borough historian and whose descendants are some of the oldest buried in the ground there.

Green said there are also many hidden dangers like vaults that have rotted out and could trap a person in the ground if they fell through. Despite the warnings, volunteers will attempt to clear some of it out this coming Saturday. Green is skeptical they will make a dent, because the task is so large.

"Every so often some goodwill people get fired up and come in with chainsaws and weed whackers. But then the growth comes back, even worse," Green said.

Nancy Stout of Eatontown is one of the volunteers who will try to beat back some of the brush this Saturday. She said they said she has grandparents, great grandparents and a couple of aunts and great aunts resting in the ground there. She goes in there from time to time to tidy up her own family plots, but there is no one to call regarding the maintenance of the cemeteries.

"No one knows who owns it. We'll do what we can do, Saturday. We could use some pickup trucks to help take the weeds out," Stout said.

NJ cemetery worker trapped inside grave: Rescued by large crew of first responders

Who cares for the cemeteries?

There are three cemeteries that lie between Locust Avenue and Wall Street, with no obvious property boundaries to divide them. Where one begins and another ends is part of the problem. The three combined are 10 acres.

One cemetery belongs to the Old Methodist Church, which started interring people there around 1807 or 1808, and is still cared for, Green said. The church did not return a call or email for this story.

The other two have long been abandoned. Green said one was started In 1838, by a group of people from Long Branch who opened the Public Burial Ground next to the church's plots. Then in 1872, the Long Branch Cemetery Company started a third cemetery.

Monmouth University expansion? Long Branch OKs new district next door to campus

Green said from 1872 to the early 1920s, each cemetery had its own caretaker. Then the West Long Branch Cemetery Association was formed about 1922 to care for all three cemeteries. That lasted until the early 1980s, when the association dissolved. The trustees aged out, Green said, and no one was left. A trust that was set up to pay for the upkeep ran out of money.

Since then, the cemetery has been slowly degrading.

Last patrol: Toms River man and his aging dog seek overgrown veterans graves

"The problem is that the abandoned properties have been researched and we don’t have any living persons, trustees or entities to contact," said Jason Gonter, borough administrator.

Complicating things is the borough doesn’t legally have the right to go onto private property and conduct maintenance.

It "is not to say that (West Long Branch) is not concerned about the issue or searching for legal, efficient solution for taxpayers.  At present, it seems that a viable solution doesn’t exist. We are open to suggestions to solve the issue,' Gonter said.

This summer the borough reached out to the New Jersey Cemetery Board for help, but was turned away because that board has no funds available from the state for abandoned cemeteries. The board had no records of any of the cemeteries. It suggested the town find people to create a new association to care for it.

Mystery unfolds: Who left anonymous flowers at grave in forgotten Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital cemetery?

According to Green, that is a monumental undertaking.

"You need at least a million dollars in a trust to take on the upkeep the cemeteries. You need professional landscapers to come and do it section by section. Then you need to pay someone to regularly come in and cut the grass," Green said. "Bur once you take ownership of that, then you're the responsible party in case someone gets hurt back there."

Who's buried here

Green said the cemetery is a bit of "who's who," of local notoriety as far as who's buried back there, as many of the leading families of early Long Branch and West Long Branch laid their dead to rest there starting in the very early 1800s.

The cemetery includes people who fought in the Revolutionary War. It includes the roughly 150 people who died on the ship New Era, which shipwrecked off the coast of Asbury Park in 1854 after striking ground in dense fog. The ship was carrying German immigrants.

Then there is Dan Rice, the "most famous man you've never heard of," according to his biographer. Rice was a 19th century entertainer, who at the height of his popularity was a household name. He coined the phrase "one-horse show," along with his likeness being used for Uncle Sam. Rice even ran for president in 1868. However, soon after he slipped into obscurity. He died almost penniless in 1900.

The tale of Dan Rice: Famous, forgotten and buried in West Long Branch

Green said they made an attempt to catalog all the grave sites, an estimate there are between 6,500 to 7,000 known burials, and another 1,000 unmarked plots, most of which are illegal burials.

"It's like Dodge City back there with no sheriff," Green said.

When Jersey Shore native Dan Radel is not reporting the news, you can find him in a college classroom where he is a history professor. Reach him @danielradelapp; 732-643-4072; dradel@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: West Long Branch cemeteries are crumbling, as no one is responsible