September 7, 2022 • 39 mins
35 miles of tunnels in New Jersey, which were once the Sterling Hill Mine, are among the richest in the world with fluorescent minerals. They're also filled with…ghosts. Special Guest: John Ruggiero
Visit amy-bruni.net for details of my fall speaking tour, plus strange-escapes.com if you're ready to take a spooky vacation with us.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Haunted Road, the production of I Heart Radio
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Minky listener. Discretion is advised. Hey, gang,
this is just a quick reminder that I have a
massive fall tour coming up starting in September, and so
if you want to head to my website Amy dash
Brunei dot net and click on the appearances page, you
(00:23):
can see if I will be anywhere near you. A
lot of these do have meet and great options too,
So if you want to get a photo of me
or ask me a question personally, this is your chance.
I can see just looking at my schedule, I'm going
to be in California, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas,
Louisiana and more. So please check it out and hopefully
(00:46):
we will get to meet in person and talk about
spooky things. My favorite. When I was a young child,
maybe four or five, my parents made me a toy
box by maid. I mean they found an old trunk,
(01:08):
probably at a garage sale knowing them, and they turned
it into my own toy chest with a little love.
It was perfect. They painted it white and used modge
pods to add a m Y on the top in
playful letters. For good measure, they also added raggedy Ann
and Andy. I loved that chest. I loved it so
much that I would even sometimes sit inside of it
(01:28):
and pretend it was a boat or a car. One day,
not long after I received the chest, so I must
have still been about five years old, I was pretending
I was sailing away in a boat. Sitting in the chest,
I let my imagination run wild, and at one point
the lid came crashing down toward me. In an effort
to avoid hitting my head, I ducked, and suddenly I
(01:48):
found myself in darkness. The lid had crashed down and
latched from the outside. Honestly, I don't remember a lot
after that. I don't know how long I was in there,
but I remember snippets of me screaming for my mom
and her definitely not hearing me from the other end
of the house. And I remember the feeling of not
being able to breathe and being very hot and sweaty,
(02:09):
until finally the lid opened and my frantic mother was
asking if I was okay. I was, I thought. Ever
since that fateful moment, I have had terrible claustrophobia. I
blame it on that experience, though I guess I'll never
know for sure. But when I have to investigate small spaces,
I am visibly anxious and have to take frequent breaks.
(02:30):
Being underground is especially worrisome, So tunnels and caves are
also a major problem for me. I can't shake the
feeling that at any moment I could be buried alive.
So imagine my trepidation when we agreed to investigate a mine,
a big one. Come with me as we ventured to
New Jersey and explore the very haunted Sterling Hill mines.
(02:51):
I hope you'll hold my hand if I need it.
I'm Amy BRUNEI, and this is haunted road. Beneath the
(03:14):
ground in Ogdensburg, New Jersey, caves glow brightly with subterranean treasures.
The thirty five miles of tunnels which were once the
Sterling Hill Mine are among the richest in the world,
with fluorescent minerals, vibrant red colcite, deep yellow espirite, lush,
violent hard distonite, and vivid green willomite, the phosphorus and
(03:35):
glow of which emanates even after there is no energy
source attached to it today, people tore the tunnels to
learn the history of mining in New Jersey, which dates
back to the sixteen hundreds, and to see the natural
wonders of the light show under the ground. They also
go to the Sterling Hill Mine looking for ghosts spirits
who remained behind after terrible accidents that happened when the
(03:57):
mine was still in operation. I know firsthand. I was
one of those people, and I found ghosts who still
had some of the most intense emotional energy I've ever experienced.
It turns out guilt and grief can last even in death.
The Sterling Hill Mine, now known as the Sterling Hill
Mine Tour and Museum of Florescence, is a former iron
(04:21):
and zinc mine in northern New Jersey near the New
York border. Legend has it that early Dutch settlers to
the area started mining on the site in the sixteen
thirties in search of highly prized copper and iron deposits. However,
those claims are unsubstantiated. According to a history of Sterling
Hill mind by Daniel Russell As he wrote, the earliest
(04:41):
documentary evidence of mining activities on the Sterling Hill site
date from seventeen thirty, when the property, then known as
the Copper Mine Tract, was divided to the hairs of
Anthony Rutger's by the proprietors of New Jersey in seventeen
sixty nine. William Alexander, who called himself Lord Sterling, though
he had no noble title, acquired the property. He might
(05:04):
iron from the site, sending many tons of ore to
his furnace in Hibernia and New Jersey, and tons of
what he incorrectly thought was copper to England. While Lord
Sterling ultimately failed to effectively mind Sterling Hill, he was
partly right. There were rich deposits of minerals in that ground,
over three hundred seventy different minerals actually, and more than
(05:24):
twenty minerals found nowhere else in the world. He just
couldn't get to them. The Franklin Knight in the ground,
which bore iron inside, was resistant to smelting by the
technology of his time. Lord Sterling drank himself to death
during the American Revolution, and the mines went to the
Ogden family, owners of the profitable Ogden Mine and nearby
iron furnace. The Ogdens didn't extract iron from Sterling Hill,
(05:48):
but did mind zinc there that was used for brass
during the War of eighteen twelve. The Ogden family ran
three separate mines in the area for most of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries until the New Jersey Zinc
Company took over operations. The company began producing or in
nineteen twelve and had a superstar consultant, Thomas Alva Edison,
inventor of the telegraph, the phonograph, and the first long
(06:11):
lasting light bulb, among about a million other things. Edison,
according to Daniel Russell, had acquired an iron mine several
miles from the Sterling Hill mines and had developed several
innovative techniques and processes for beneficiating the ores and smelting metal.
He maintained an active correspondence with the officers and management
of the New Jersey Zinc Company, offering detailed advice on
(06:33):
process technology as well as designing equipment for the company.
The work was difficult and dangerous, but the New Jersey
Zinc Company substantially improved the quality of life for miners
in Ogdensburg. It built a hospital, club rooms for the
miners and their families, bowling alleys, tennis courts, swimming pools,
and even a summer camp for the miners children. The
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mining company even provided companies subsidized housing for employees, consisting
of four room bungalows for laborers at eight dollars per
month in ninety two, and comfortable houses for staff at
seventeen dollars a month. Those costs in today's money would
be about hundred forty one dollars for the bungalows and
three hundred dollars for the comfortable houses. During their shifts,
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miners would descend as far as two thousand, six hundred
seventy five feet below the surface to excavate thirty five
miles of tunnels. Before and after their shifts, miners would
stop at miner's change house. Each miner had a locker,
there were three hundred of them, which had a chain
attached to it. The chain was attached to a pulley
in the ceiling and had a basket at one end.
(07:40):
Miners would take off their wet, muddy clothes, put them
in their basket, and hoist the basket up to the ceiling. Overnight,
the drier air would dry the clothes so they were
ready for work the next day. The mining was so
successful and the minerals so in demand that during World
War Two the mine never closed. There were three shifts
around the clock mining zinc for the brass to make
(08:01):
bullet and artillery shells. According to a History of the
Mind by Sussex County, New Jersey, the site was considered
a vital strategic interest and was protected by armed soldiers.
Rock and Gem magazine reports that over the one hundred
thirty six year period the Sterling Mine was an operation,
it mined eleven million tons of ore, of which was zinc.
(08:23):
In fact, the deposits found in the ground in Ogdensburg,
which are about one hundred three billion years old, are
exceptionally rich in zinc. The History of the Mine on
the museum's website claims that no similar deposits of richness
impurity have been found anywhere else on Earth. Zinc might
not sound like an essential mineral, but you'd be surprised
at how many uses it has. Essential car parts like carburetors,
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door handles and fuel pumps are all made from zinc.
It's integral to making galvanized metals, ceramics, batteries, tires, sun block,
even pennies. And of course we need to make sure
we eat enough of it to keep our immune systems strong.
The fourth oldest mine in the country, Sterling Mine was
the last working underground mine in New Jersey when it
closed in nineteen eighty six, and closed only because of
(09:08):
a tax dispute with Ogdensburg. The town foreclosed on the
property in nineteen eighty nine, and it was bought at
auction for seven hundred fifty thousand dollars to Richard and
Robert Howe, who opened the Sterling Hill Mine Museum in
nineteen ninety. The next year, it was added to the
National Register of Historic Places and eventually became a nonprofit
educational foundation managed by a board of trustees. Today, the
(09:32):
Miners Change House is the Zobel Hall Museum. That building
houses everything from inventions by Thomas Edison to dinosaur fossils
to actual meteorites from space. It also has a stunning
multimillion dollar display of minerals from as far away as
Russia and China, and a huge display of the Periodic
Table of elements. For each element, there's an example of
(09:55):
the ore it's extracted from, an example of an object
made using that element. The Mind's Old Mill building, which
dates back to nineteen sixteen is now the Warren Museum
of Fluorescence, which displays more than seven hundred different fluorescent
minerals and objects. The museum claims to have the largest
collection of fluorescent minerals in the world. Today, both the
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main shaft, which goes down two thousand sixty five feet,
and the lower shaft, which goes down two thousand, six
hundred seventy five feet, are totally flooded. In fact, everything
lower than the very top level of the Mind, less
than one hundred feet below ground, are totally submerged. The
temperature is a constant fifty six degrees inside. Visitors to
the museum can explore not just the collection of artifacts,
(10:39):
but the mines themselves on guided walks through the parts
of the Mind that are still accessible. The subterranean walk
goes through a new two hundred forty foot section called
the Rainbow Tunnel, which they blasted in nineteen ninety using
forty nine blasts and at a cost of two dollars
a foot. They're short wave UV lights are turned on
to illuminate the entire tunnel and show case various mineral
(11:01):
samples glowing with florescence. Fans of the movie Zoolander might
find Sterling Mind familiar. The mining scenes in the movie
were filmed there. That's when he said, I've got the
blacklong pop. Paranormal researchers have claimed that there was a
terrible accident resulting in the deaths of seventy seven people
inside the mine nearly a century ago. But when I
(11:22):
was researching the Mind for the episode of Kindred Spirits
we filmed there, I did not find any historical record
of that accident. What I did find, however, was a
history of smaller accidents that have left impressions in the
space for centuries. In particular, Caven's injured miners. On November fourteenth,
nineteen thirty, a cave in at the mine injured a
(11:44):
mining expert who was rescued by workers but died on
the way to the hospital. A similar accident happened on Monday,
February ninth, nineteen forty two. John Under was killed by
what the Courier News described as a fall of rock
and dirt. But in eighteen fifty eight, a very serious
accident happened that had nothing to do with the cave in.
(12:05):
Workers in the mine were building a new shaft and
some miners were tasked with salvaging and dismantling the old
shaft For many months, Doug Francisco wrote in the Sterling
Hill Newsletter, a handful of men were tasked with shutting
her down. One night, a crew of five men were
sending scrap metal to the surface through an elevator cage.
Three men prepped the metal on the mine floor, and
(12:26):
two rode the cage up and loaded the scrap. As
Francisco wrote, level by level, the cage rattled downward at
a nice, steady pace. At six hundred eighty level, the
neglected maintenance took its toll. The cable clamps let loose,
and the cage, with its human cargo free fell hundreds
of feet, gathering speed until it crashed to the floor
(12:46):
of the shaft bottom. The men were pitched off, One
died instantly, and the other, Ralph Romans, was hurled into
a puddle of water. The three men on the bottom
rushed forward and one of them rolled Ralph onto his back,
keeping his head out of the water, and cradled him,
hoping to allow him to breathe. Ralph Romans died in
the man's arms. Years later, Francisco described a former minor
(13:10):
turn chaplain named Bob Romans was visiting patients in Newton
Hospital in the spring of around to comfort sick and
dying patients. On entering one of the hospital rooms, he
saw a whispy haired, frail old man and approaching the bed.
Chaplain Bob reached out his hand and took the old man, saying,
I'm Bob Romans, a chaplain here at the hospital. The
(13:30):
old man's eyes struggled to focus, and he finally said,
I knew a Romans a long time ago. He was
a friend of mine, many years ago. The old man said.
We worked the minds together. The old man went on
to say that they had worked at Sterling together. I
was there the night he died, the old man said.
He went on to describe the night of the accident.
I was there the night he died. It was nineteen
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fifty eight. The cage cut loose and slammed down to
the bottom. We heard it coming and got the hell
out of the way the best we could. When it
we ran forward and I found Ralph broken, bleeding and
lying face down in the water. I held his head
up out of the water, hoping he would be able
to breathe but it only took a few moments to
realize he was already dead. I just held him in
(14:13):
my arms, As Francisco wrote, Bob left the hospital that
night amazed that he had been given such a privilege
to personally thank this man for trying to help his
grandpa and his last moments on earth, and how such
a holy moment could come so unexpectedly from such a
tragic event so long ago. Bob later learned that the
man had passed away the next morning. When Adam Barry
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and I investigated Sterling Mine for kindred spirits, we made
contact with the spirit we believe was involved with that
very accident, and who carried a great amount of grief
and guilt about it. He didn't die in the mind,
but his spirit lingered there. We believe he stayed behind
to warn people about the dangers of the mind and
to not let anyone go anywhere inside the tunnels that
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wasn't safe. Another spirit who's reported to appear off in
in Sterling Mine is Bicycle Pete. According to legend, he
was a miner who would ride his bike to the
mind daily. One day, Pete went into the mines but
never returned. The only way they noticed was that his
bicycle remained parked outside well into the night unclaimed. Supposedly,
(15:17):
he was never seen again. Pete's ghost is believed to
haunt the mind to this day, and also to this day,
the Mining Museum leaves a bike parked outside the entrance
in his honor. Visitors also claimed to hear footsteps, voices,
the sound of machinery, and whispers inside the mine. But
the hauntings aren't just underground. Some people claim to have
seen shadow figures in the museum buildings or faces in
(15:39):
the windows peering out. To talk more about the hauntings,
I have genroggerro coming up next. He is the founder
of New Jersey Paranormal and has spent many nights investigating
the mines. We talk about our experiences there and it's
quite chilling. Literally it's cold in those mines. That's coming
up after the break, Ye all right, So I am
(16:25):
sitting here with Mr John Riggiero, who is the founder
of New Jersey Paranormal and you may have seen him
on Kindred Spirits in the past when we investigated Liberty Hall,
but we actually go way back. He has a really
great event that he and his team put on every
year in New Jersey, which we'll talk about at the end.
But that's how we know each other and we have
a lot of mutual friends. And so he's the one
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that brought the idea of Sterling Hill Mind to us
for Kindred Spirits because they were having some crazy activity
and wanted answers, and so he's the perfect person to
talk to. So welcome John him. Thank you for having
me on. I appreciate it. Of course. The mine is
a really wild place to investigate. Now. I have claustrophobia
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pretty badly, and I hate being underground. It is I've
talked about a number of occasions, and when they came
to me and said we have this mine that would
like you all to investigate, I was instantly like, well,
that's too bad for them. But eventually they talked me
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into it and it turned into a really interesting case. Now,
you guys have investigated it a number of times, right right.
We were contacted by them a few years back about
the activity there. They had multiple reports of seeing and
hearing things, and we asked if we could go into
the mine and see if we could see for ourselves,
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and we had gotten in there actually three or four
times over a couple of weekends. And like you said,
the initial initial visit, when you go in there with
the lights on, it's pretty intimidating with the lights on
as you're walking through there in the mind. And then
when they turned the lights off and we were in
there and the pitch black, the very first thing I
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ever experienced there was hearing voices back and forth talking
to each other in the echo and the water dripping,
and we literally just said quiet, quiet. We stayed quiet
for ten minutes and listen to these people just back
and forth talking to each other. It was one of
the most bizarre experience I've ever had. I mean when
you say that, I am literally getting chills because I
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remember that feeling of being in the mind and hearing voices.
And so here's the thing. The mind is not an operation.
It's a museum. We had it to ourselves. There's no
way for anyone to get in there. And if you
sit quietly, you will hear voices. And the darkness is
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like when you turn off the lights. It is the
darkest of dark and you are so aware that you
are underground. And then when you hear voices at the
same time, your entire body reacts like you want to run,
but you can't because because you will fall or run
into a wall of some sort. But but it is
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I would say it is one of the eeriest experience.
I mean, that whole investigation was just solid, Like I
never felt relaxed, I never felt at ease. I was
constantly having anxiety and like MANI panic attacks and so
I guess that added to it for me. But the
activity itself is just wild. So we were in interviewing
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someone who worked in the Mind for a number of years.
I can't recall his name, but he was. He was
fabulous and he had so much information. And in the
middle of the interview, I was like, can you just
come with us because we were kind of describing the
sounds we were hearing, and we just asked him, you know,
can you come with us and explain some of these
because you've been in there so long and working there still.
(20:02):
So we brought this man back to the Mind that night,
and he actually wore his full like mining gear for us,
and we thought that would be neat to kind of
maybe use that as kind of a trigger, like use
him as a human trigger object. He was teaching us,
like what he did and everything, and so then we said, well,
let's just sit for a minute and let's be quiet.
And so we sat and we hear this very loud
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rumbling coming from below us, and then we hear it
kind of from above us too, and I just looked
at him, like that's the sound, Like what are what's
making that sound? And he looked at us and he said, well,
that sounds like a mining cart, but that's impossible. And
I said, well, thank you, we're not we've not lost
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it here because we thought this, say, like it sounded
like something mechanical. And he just said, you know, I've
worked in here so long, he said, but I'm always working,
he said, I've never just sat and listened. And he
was baffled. And this is a man who was hugely
skeptical of the idea of ghosts. And he didn't say
it was a ghost, but he definitely was like, I
have no explanation for what we're experiencing right now. And
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he heard the voices to these like loud, gruff male
voices talking down at the end of the mind, and
he had zero explanation. But it did make sense when
he said, no one's down here listening who works here.
They're all just working, you know. No one just wants
to just sit in the mind and meditate. They want
to get in and out, you know, so that was
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really cool for us. You had mentioned a good point
during the episode about you know, the people that run
the mind now or men of science. They have degrees
in engineering and other degrees, and these are people that
do what we do, so they're not big believers of
the para normal. And when I first went in there
and they were describing seeing shadow figures, having things rush
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them here, and growling getting pushed, it was just so
believable because again, these aren't the typical people but that
we deal with. And then when we went in there
ourselves and we were rushed at least two or three times.
Something just comes at you and you feel the rush
of wind or air and you sometimes in your ear
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you'll hear or you'll hear a growl, and it is
again a bizarre experience to know that, again you're in
the dark, you can't see who's ever there, but they're
definitely around. And that noise you're describing, we heard that,
but we also heard what sounded like residual dynamite. They
have a display there. I don't know if they showed
(22:32):
you that where they demo the mind how they used
the dynamite and it has lights and you hear when
you do that. You want to talk about a trigger object.
If you do that and then wait an hour or
two or three, you will hear the residual in the
mind in different areas. Again, bizarre how that works. It
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is very strange activity. And I know too there are
shadows seen in there a lot, and we definitely saw
one at one point. And what's your experience been with
like shadow figures or apparitions in the minds. I've got
a good one for you. The office space where I
know you were in the chip in the last year
since you've been there. Actually a lot of the miners
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that work there, they'll come back if they're from California,
different parts of the country, and they let them actually
stay in the office. They have like little bedroom set
up with refrigerators and beds, and they've been doing that
for years. But lately, over the last year or so,
they won't stay on that bottom floor of that office
anymore because they've seen a shadow figure above them when
(23:35):
they're sleeping and they're hearing banging on the pipes and
things like that. Now they actually have a trailer outside
the office because these guys, and you know, the guys
I'm talking about, these are you know, guys that are
used to manual labor and tough guys. They will not
stay in that building. So I'm in there and we
had just finished an event, and I'm grabbing all of
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my things, and I kid you not, a shadow figure
went right in front of me, paused, and then went
down the stairs and around into one of the old bedrooms.
I froze because I had never seen a shadow figure
do that before. And that's the office to where people
have to work every day, right, Oh jeez. Yeah. I
(24:20):
was surprised at the activity in that building. So this
part is not even like part of the mind. It's
kind of connected. You can kind of get to the mind.
I remember not really being familiar with that part. When
they asked us to look there because they've been having activity,
I was like, Oh, of course, any place that's not underground,
I'm happy to investigate. And so we get there and
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then I'm like, mmmm, this might be creepier than the mine.
Definitely had a strange feeling, and that was when we
did a really interesting spirit box session there s to
session there and we got this man who felt he
was communicating and feeling very responsible for some thing. We
don't know if he was affiliated with. There was a
(25:02):
really terrible mining accident that happened there. Weren't sure if
he's affiliated with that, but he definitely felt some sort
of remorse and also like he was being blamed. And
so I mean, I don't know, maybe he's trying to
make himself known, especially to miners, or maybe he knew
them from before, Like maybe he's trying to reach out
to them for some reason. Sounds like we might need
(25:23):
to revisit. That's actually a really good point, and I
had forgotten about that from the episode because I had
also done spare box and EVP sessions there, and there
is somebody that talks about a fire, talks about a fire,
and he talks about being burned, and the last thing
he remembered that I got on e VP was paying.
(25:45):
So it's kind of strange that you mentioned that, because
you know, most of the people that die their cavens
and explosions and horrible ways to go, so they do
linger with those memories, and unfortunately yeah, the mining industry,
especially back then. I mean just in general, mining is
(26:05):
such a dangerous occupation, but even back then, like they
did not have OSHA standards, they did not you know,
it's funny to look at photos when you look at
historical photos of these guys just covered in dirt and
ash and smile all smiles, and they often talk about
it with kind of a fondness, like there's something that
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it's kind of like a brotherhood. You know. Even the
miners that we met, they're kind of nostalgic for it,
like there's something about it which I don't understand. I
mean a lot of us don't understand. I'm sure you
know you think, okay, you're doing this really dangerous job.
But maybe that does create kind of, like I said before,
like a brotherhood or this feeling of like you have
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to kind of really get emotional about it and begin
to love it. To risk that, I don't know, I'm comping.
You have to count on the person next to you,
because if something happens, it's just you and that group.
Because that went down that mine. So if something happened
on level and you're with a bunch of people and
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you're working and you're in it together. Whatever happens is
going to happen to all of you. And that was
every day. I'm sure they lived with that, the notion
of hey, yeah, I think could happen. It happened a
year ago. It may have happened five years ago, but
they know things happened in that mind, yeah, I mean,
and that's when I think about the idea of them
going down so farcus. When you see the elevator shaft,
(27:31):
it is so far. And then one of the things
we did in there, and we were with that gentleman again,
he was demonstrating to us like he just picked up,
like there's pipes and stuff all he just picked up
a random pipe. There was a pool of water that
was basically one of the old shafts, and he threw
it and we could hear it pinging all the way down.
(27:51):
I'm telling you, that thing went on for like a
minute and a half, just getting further and further away,
ping ping, And I was just thinking of all those
shafts that are down there, flooded, all of the gear
and stuff that's probably still there, and are there people
still there? You know, like are there people that were
(28:12):
never recovered that are down there, like it's it's really
eerie to think about. Females, especially get kind of the
they get attention in a different way. We've we've heard
a lot of females get cursed that there, and they
hear the growling a little more. So. I don't know
if that's because females sit and work in the mine
and maybe they did believe they were bad luck. I
(28:32):
don't know, but definitely they get a different kind of
interaction from what I've seen, right, I experienced that. I
tried to explain, you know, I'm always trying to talk
to these spirits like I would want to be talked to,
and I just tried to explain, you know, hey, the
year is twenty twenty one or whatever when we were
there and women are now allowed in minds. You know,
I've tried to be though, you know, and and uh,
(28:58):
you know where this mine is an an operation anymore.
You don't have to worry about me being bad luck.
I'm sure it doesn't help on the redhead, like just
trying there perfect Yeah, but I mean maybe that's there's
something to that, because I do you remember hearing the
voices quite often, and a lot of them sounded very angry,
(29:19):
and actually we heard them back where you were talking
about that dynamite area. That's where I heard the voices
the most often, and we even followed them back to
this whole back area I didn't even know existed, and
they weren't stopping. They were chattering, and they were men.
They didn't sound happy per se, so I wasn't sure
if it was like they were talking about what they
were supposed to be doing. It it's some sort of
(29:39):
residual working environment that we're hearing, but very wild. Nonetheless,
like I said, very creepy feeling to be in a
mind hearing ghostly voices, especially when it's the middle of
the night. I think it's a mixture of both. I
think there's a residual and I think there's intelligent and
it's such a weird mixture, like you said, when they're
around you. We've had so many things happen in that mind,
(30:03):
where so many different people walking through experiencing different things,
and they're not shy about coming up to you that.
That's another thing that's kind of strange about that mind
is that the odds are if you're wandering through that
mind and there are people that work there will tell
you as well that they'll hear the footsteps. That happens
a lot where you could be in one area and
(30:25):
you've been there, so you know there's water on the ground,
and you can hear the foot even sneakers, but boots
you can hear especially, and you'll be by yourself and
setting things up that you hear the wet foot steps
coming towards you and you just stand there with a
flashlight pointing it in the direction and seeing nothing yet
they're still coming. Yeah, and also bring a backup flashlights.
(30:48):
Speaking of that, I think it was Freddie. He was
telling us a story about how he was out there.
He you know, because he goes in and out of
that mind all the time. Again, it is one of
those stories that gives me the hebg bees. He was
there and he he started hearing footsteps and then so
Freddie was the gentleman who we interviewed. I believe he
(31:08):
heard footsteps and then his flashlight went out and he
couldn't he couldn't get it back on, and he's in
the pitch darkness by himself, hearing these footsteps approaching from behind.
He had to make his way out of the mind
without his flashlight whole like guiding on. Thank god he
knew how to get around in there because he'd been
in there so often. He had to touch the wall
(31:29):
and get all the way to where he could see
the doorway off in the distance. I would probably just
drop dead right. I would be like, okay, this is it,
I'm good goodbye, ye help, And there gigantic metal doors
and there's no other way to access it, so you're
stuck in there until you get out of there and no.
(31:51):
So one of the things that I love about that
place is that it's actually a huge It's very educational,
like obviously we're talking about the haunts and the ghosts,
but it isn't amazing sing museum experience, and there are
tons of field trips and kids going in out of
there all the time. Like it is not at all
a place that I would deem like a dangerous type haunt.
I do think that they're no. I think there are
ghosts there that have a lot of questions or are
(32:13):
needing something, and over time, as people investigate, you might
find that out. But I don't think people are Like
the minor that we worked with said, if you're in
there and you're walking around the sound and everything. It
moves so crazy you would not know if a ghost
was talking to you. You're not going to have a
paranormal experience in there, really unless you really sit still
and look and listen. And so I don't want to
(32:33):
dissuade people from going because I think it is such
it's such a great place, and they have some really
amazing displays. They have like a huge uranium glass collection.
They have a really great mining area where kids can
do their old gold panning my daughter and my daughter
was there for filming, and she clearly was fearless during
she literally ran off into the mind. I had to
(32:55):
follow her. She wanted to go in the mine and
no one was in there because we were down for
like lunch akee or something, and she wanted to go
in the mine, and so I had to like put
on a brave face. I think she was six or
seven at the time. By seven, and I'm sure we
can go on the mine. So it's just the two
of us and she's running ahead like living it up,
and I'm thinking, oh my god, I'm so scary. But anyways,
(33:17):
kids love it. The fluorescent minerals as well, that's another
big draw. They turned the black lights on and there's many,
many pictures of those minerals, and it's just I don't
think those minerals are in a lot of other mining
museums that I think they're kind of exclusive to the
Sterling Mine, at least in this area. Maybe for places
(33:40):
that you could actually visit and you can't do it justice.
You could look at the pictures, but when you're actually
in the room and they turned the black light on,
it really does just it's like a rainbow inside this mountain.
It is why. I mean, I didn't even know to
expect that. You know, we had done so much kind
of researching and hearing about the ghosts, and then when
they showed us that, I was like, this is the
(34:01):
most beautiful thing. Like it was. It is. It's a
very cool place. It is very very haunted, but it's
a haunt unlike any other. And I can't wait to
get back there eventually. And so at some point we're
going to have to arrange something because it is one
of my favorite places. I meant, here's the thing. I
investigate so many places. It's rare that a place really
gives me kind of the chills and I think it's
(34:23):
a combination of the ghosts but also just the location.
Like so it's always fun to pine find a place
that actually scares me a little. But it's funny you
mentioned that because, like you said, when when you walk
in there and the lights are on and they take
you through the general tour during the day, that mine
is always fifty six degrees no matter what the temperature
is outside, so there's a little chill in there all
(34:45):
the time. But walking with the lights on, it is
a little kind of intimidating to think that people were
working in that and underground. But then you turn those
lights off and it is kind of the other side
of the coin. It's night and day. That's when you
had mentioned, you know, children go there for fultures. They
have been forever. That's where most people know that mine.
(35:06):
But and and the dark. When you're trying to address
the spirits that are there, that's when you have the
most experiences, when you're actively trying to interact with them
and communicate with them. Yeah. Absolutely, And you know, I
don't think there are a lot of people going in
there and talking to them that way, and so they
(35:28):
do seem a bit eager, So well, tell me what
what are you guys? Do? You know? You run what
I would consider one of the largest paranormal conventions in
the country, the New Jersey Payer Unity Expo, which you
just had recently, and it was the first year. I
hadn't been able to come in a while because I
was on the Strange Escaped crew. So how did it go?
Are you guys going to have another one next year?
(35:48):
How do people find out about all this fun stuff
you do? We did miss you guys being there. I
told you that before for the interview. It's just feel
the same without you and Adam, But um, yeah, we
just had it two weeks ago. Are big just turn
out ever, which we try to add to it every year.
This is an event for charity. All the proceeds go
to the Woodbridge Charity Fund. We try to keep it
(36:10):
affordable for everyone. We try to give people the big
corporate casino experience, but on more of a grassroots level,
which is why we keep it affordable. Kids are only
five dollars. We bring in great people like you guys,
and Destinations here and the ghost hunters and ghost Brothers,
and we're thinking of October for next year late September
(36:32):
but the goal is again to add to the number
of guests that are going to be there, the number
of exhibit rooms that are going to be there, more
free lectures, and to just keep growing it. That's our goals.
Just give people as much as we can for only
twenty dollars. That's really what we're all about. Yeah, well,
it's always a huge success. I know. I'm always just
(36:53):
amazed at how welcoming everyone is there. And it's one
of those conventions where Adam and I will have a
line all day long and we just it's so touching
to meet so many people and it's just it's so fun.
So I love that you put it on. You guys
do an amazing job. You should be very proud of yourself.
And so people want to find out about that. What's
(37:13):
your website so they can follow that it's New Jersey.
You have to spell out New Jersey Power Unity Expo
dot com. And one of the things that makes it
as good as it is is people like you and
the other guests that we invite that really do care
about their fans, and it shows it's the given the
take between the two where you could tell people like
(37:35):
you and people like destination fear. They really do appreciate
the people that come to see them, and they give
them a great experience. That's part of the overall feeling
of the convention as well. I love it. I hope
to make it next year. Well done, as always heard
great things. So yeah, well, thank you. I really appreciate
(37:55):
you taking the time. Thanks for bringing Sterling Hill Mind
to our attention again. One of the cool haunts I've
been to in a long time, and I can't wait
to get back. Thank you for having me me. I
appreciate it, and we will see you at the next year.
There's something special about mines and mining culture. It's one
(38:17):
of those industries that we sort of forget is incredibly
necessary when it comes to our supply chain, but the
miners feel it. Those miners in New Jersey felt it.
I think that's why they took their jobs so seriously
and why their brotherhood seems to survive even beyond the grave.
Please go visit the Sterling Hill Mines when you get
a chance. Yes, there are ghosts, but the educational aspect
(38:40):
of it and the full experience of it can't be beat.
If you do see me there, though I'll probably wait
up top in the gift shop. It's above ground and
that's also where the ice cream is. I'm Amy Bruney
and this was Haunted Road. Yeah. Haunted Road is a
(39:10):
production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from
Aaron Mankey. Haunted Road is hosted and written by me
Amy Brunei additional research by Taylor Haggerdorn. The show is
edited and produced by rema El Kali and supervising producer
Josh Thing and executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and
Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
(39:32):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Haunted Road, the production of I Heart Radio
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Minky listener. Discretion is advised. Hey, gang,
this is just a quick reminder that I have a
massive fall tour coming up starting in September, and so
if you want to head to my website Amy dash
Brunei dot net and click on the appearances page, you
(00:23):
can see if I will be anywhere near you. A
lot of these do have meet and great options too,
So if you want to get a photo of me
or ask me a question personally, this is your chance.
I can see just looking at my schedule, I'm going
to be in California, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas,
Louisiana and more. So please check it out and hopefully
(00:46):
we will get to meet in person and talk about
spooky things. My favorite. When I was a young child,
maybe four or five, my parents made me a toy
box by maid. I mean they found an old trunk,
(01:08):
probably at a garage sale knowing them, and they turned
it into my own toy chest with a little love.
It was perfect. They painted it white and used modge
pods to add a m Y on the top in
playful letters. For good measure, they also added raggedy Ann
and Andy. I loved that chest. I loved it so
much that I would even sometimes sit inside of it
(01:28):
and pretend it was a boat or a car. One day,
not long after I received the chest, so I must
have still been about five years old, I was pretending
I was sailing away in a boat. Sitting in the chest,
I let my imagination run wild, and at one point
the lid came crashing down toward me. In an effort
to avoid hitting my head, I ducked, and suddenly I
(01:48):
found myself in darkness. The lid had crashed down and
latched from the outside. Honestly, I don't remember a lot
after that. I don't know how long I was in there,
but I remember snippets of me screaming for my mom
and her definitely not hearing me from the other end
of the house. And I remember the feeling of not
being able to breathe and being very hot and sweaty,
(02:09):
until finally the lid opened and my frantic mother was
asking if I was okay. I was, I thought. Ever
since that fateful moment, I have had terrible claustrophobia. I
blame it on that experience, though I guess I'll never
know for sure. But when I have to investigate small spaces,
I am visibly anxious and have to take frequent breaks.
(02:30):
Being underground is especially worrisome, So tunnels and caves are
also a major problem for me. I can't shake the
feeling that at any moment I could be buried alive.
So imagine my trepidation when we agreed to investigate a mine,
a big one. Come with me as we ventured to
New Jersey and explore the very haunted Sterling Hill mines.
(02:51):
I hope you'll hold my hand if I need it.
I'm Amy BRUNEI, and this is haunted road. Beneath the
(03:14):
ground in Ogdensburg, New Jersey, caves glow brightly with subterranean treasures.
The thirty five miles of tunnels which were once the
Sterling Hill Mine are among the richest in the world,
with fluorescent minerals, vibrant red colcite, deep yellow espirite, lush,
violent hard distonite, and vivid green willomite, the phosphorus and
(03:35):
glow of which emanates even after there is no energy
source attached to it today, people tore the tunnels to
learn the history of mining in New Jersey, which dates
back to the sixteen hundreds, and to see the natural
wonders of the light show under the ground. They also
go to the Sterling Hill Mine looking for ghosts spirits
who remained behind after terrible accidents that happened when the
(03:57):
mine was still in operation. I know firsthand. I was
one of those people, and I found ghosts who still
had some of the most intense emotional energy I've ever experienced.
It turns out guilt and grief can last even in death.
The Sterling Hill Mine, now known as the Sterling Hill
Mine Tour and Museum of Florescence, is a former iron
(04:21):
and zinc mine in northern New Jersey near the New
York border. Legend has it that early Dutch settlers to
the area started mining on the site in the sixteen
thirties in search of highly prized copper and iron deposits. However,
those claims are unsubstantiated. According to a history of Sterling
Hill mind by Daniel Russell As he wrote, the earliest
(04:41):
documentary evidence of mining activities on the Sterling Hill site
date from seventeen thirty, when the property, then known as
the Copper Mine Tract, was divided to the hairs of
Anthony Rutger's by the proprietors of New Jersey in seventeen
sixty nine. William Alexander, who called himself Lord Sterling, though
he had no noble title, acquired the property. He might
(05:04):
iron from the site, sending many tons of ore to
his furnace in Hibernia and New Jersey, and tons of
what he incorrectly thought was copper to England. While Lord
Sterling ultimately failed to effectively mind Sterling Hill, he was
partly right. There were rich deposits of minerals in that ground,
over three hundred seventy different minerals actually, and more than
(05:24):
twenty minerals found nowhere else in the world. He just
couldn't get to them. The Franklin Knight in the ground,
which bore iron inside, was resistant to smelting by the
technology of his time. Lord Sterling drank himself to death
during the American Revolution, and the mines went to the
Ogden family, owners of the profitable Ogden Mine and nearby
iron furnace. The Ogdens didn't extract iron from Sterling Hill,
(05:48):
but did mind zinc there that was used for brass
during the War of eighteen twelve. The Ogden family ran
three separate mines in the area for most of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries until the New Jersey Zinc
Company took over operations. The company began producing or in
nineteen twelve and had a superstar consultant, Thomas Alva Edison,
inventor of the telegraph, the phonograph, and the first long
(06:11):
lasting light bulb, among about a million other things. Edison,
according to Daniel Russell, had acquired an iron mine several
miles from the Sterling Hill mines and had developed several
innovative techniques and processes for beneficiating the ores and smelting metal.
He maintained an active correspondence with the officers and management
of the New Jersey Zinc Company, offering detailed advice on
(06:33):
process technology as well as designing equipment for the company.
The work was difficult and dangerous, but the New Jersey
Zinc Company substantially improved the quality of life for miners
in Ogdensburg. It built a hospital, club rooms for the
miners and their families, bowling alleys, tennis courts, swimming pools,
and even a summer camp for the miners children. The
(06:56):
mining company even provided companies subsidized housing for employees, consisting
of four room bungalows for laborers at eight dollars per
month in ninety two, and comfortable houses for staff at
seventeen dollars a month. Those costs in today's money would
be about hundred forty one dollars for the bungalows and
three hundred dollars for the comfortable houses. During their shifts,
(07:18):
miners would descend as far as two thousand, six hundred
seventy five feet below the surface to excavate thirty five
miles of tunnels. Before and after their shifts, miners would
stop at miner's change house. Each miner had a locker,
there were three hundred of them, which had a chain
attached to it. The chain was attached to a pulley
in the ceiling and had a basket at one end.
(07:40):
Miners would take off their wet, muddy clothes, put them
in their basket, and hoist the basket up to the ceiling. Overnight,
the drier air would dry the clothes so they were
ready for work the next day. The mining was so
successful and the minerals so in demand that during World
War Two the mine never closed. There were three shifts
around the clock mining zinc for the brass to make
(08:01):
bullet and artillery shells. According to a History of the
Mind by Sussex County, New Jersey, the site was considered
a vital strategic interest and was protected by armed soldiers.
Rock and Gem magazine reports that over the one hundred
thirty six year period the Sterling Mine was an operation,
it mined eleven million tons of ore, of which was zinc.
(08:23):
In fact, the deposits found in the ground in Ogdensburg,
which are about one hundred three billion years old, are
exceptionally rich in zinc. The History of the Mine on
the museum's website claims that no similar deposits of richness
impurity have been found anywhere else on Earth. Zinc might
not sound like an essential mineral, but you'd be surprised
at how many uses it has. Essential car parts like carburetors,
(08:45):
door handles and fuel pumps are all made from zinc.
It's integral to making galvanized metals, ceramics, batteries, tires, sun block,
even pennies. And of course we need to make sure
we eat enough of it to keep our immune systems strong.
The fourth oldest mine in the country, Sterling Mine was
the last working underground mine in New Jersey when it
closed in nineteen eighty six, and closed only because of
(09:08):
a tax dispute with Ogdensburg. The town foreclosed on the
property in nineteen eighty nine, and it was bought at
auction for seven hundred fifty thousand dollars to Richard and
Robert Howe, who opened the Sterling Hill Mine Museum in
nineteen ninety. The next year, it was added to the
National Register of Historic Places and eventually became a nonprofit
educational foundation managed by a board of trustees. Today, the
(09:32):
Miners Change House is the Zobel Hall Museum. That building
houses everything from inventions by Thomas Edison to dinosaur fossils
to actual meteorites from space. It also has a stunning
multimillion dollar display of minerals from as far away as
Russia and China, and a huge display of the Periodic
Table of elements. For each element, there's an example of
(09:55):
the ore it's extracted from, an example of an object
made using that element. The Mind's Old Mill building, which
dates back to nineteen sixteen is now the Warren Museum
of Fluorescence, which displays more than seven hundred different fluorescent
minerals and objects. The museum claims to have the largest
collection of fluorescent minerals in the world. Today, both the
(10:16):
main shaft, which goes down two thousand sixty five feet,
and the lower shaft, which goes down two thousand, six
hundred seventy five feet, are totally flooded. In fact, everything
lower than the very top level of the Mind, less
than one hundred feet below ground, are totally submerged. The
temperature is a constant fifty six degrees inside. Visitors to
the museum can explore not just the collection of artifacts,
(10:39):
but the mines themselves on guided walks through the parts
of the Mind that are still accessible. The subterranean walk
goes through a new two hundred forty foot section called
the Rainbow Tunnel, which they blasted in nineteen ninety using
forty nine blasts and at a cost of two dollars
a foot. They're short wave UV lights are turned on
to illuminate the entire tunnel and show case various mineral
(11:01):
samples glowing with florescence. Fans of the movie Zoolander might
find Sterling Mind familiar. The mining scenes in the movie
were filmed there. That's when he said, I've got the
blacklong pop. Paranormal researchers have claimed that there was a
terrible accident resulting in the deaths of seventy seven people
inside the mine nearly a century ago. But when I
(11:22):
was researching the Mind for the episode of Kindred Spirits
we filmed there, I did not find any historical record
of that accident. What I did find, however, was a
history of smaller accidents that have left impressions in the
space for centuries. In particular, Caven's injured miners. On November fourteenth,
nineteen thirty, a cave in at the mine injured a
(11:44):
mining expert who was rescued by workers but died on
the way to the hospital. A similar accident happened on Monday,
February ninth, nineteen forty two. John Under was killed by
what the Courier News described as a fall of rock
and dirt. But in eighteen fifty eight, a very serious
accident happened that had nothing to do with the cave in.
(12:05):
Workers in the mine were building a new shaft and
some miners were tasked with salvaging and dismantling the old
shaft For many months, Doug Francisco wrote in the Sterling
Hill Newsletter, a handful of men were tasked with shutting
her down. One night, a crew of five men were
sending scrap metal to the surface through an elevator cage.
Three men prepped the metal on the mine floor, and
(12:26):
two rode the cage up and loaded the scrap. As
Francisco wrote, level by level, the cage rattled downward at
a nice, steady pace. At six hundred eighty level, the
neglected maintenance took its toll. The cable clamps let loose,
and the cage, with its human cargo free fell hundreds
of feet, gathering speed until it crashed to the floor
(12:46):
of the shaft bottom. The men were pitched off, One
died instantly, and the other, Ralph Romans, was hurled into
a puddle of water. The three men on the bottom
rushed forward and one of them rolled Ralph onto his back,
keeping his head out of the water, and cradled him,
hoping to allow him to breathe. Ralph Romans died in
the man's arms. Years later, Francisco described a former minor
(13:10):
turn chaplain named Bob Romans was visiting patients in Newton
Hospital in the spring of around to comfort sick and
dying patients. On entering one of the hospital rooms, he
saw a whispy haired, frail old man and approaching the bed.
Chaplain Bob reached out his hand and took the old man, saying,
I'm Bob Romans, a chaplain here at the hospital. The
(13:30):
old man's eyes struggled to focus, and he finally said,
I knew a Romans a long time ago. He was
a friend of mine, many years ago. The old man said.
We worked the minds together. The old man went on
to say that they had worked at Sterling together. I
was there the night he died, the old man said.
He went on to describe the night of the accident.
I was there the night he died. It was nineteen
(13:52):
fifty eight. The cage cut loose and slammed down to
the bottom. We heard it coming and got the hell
out of the way the best we could. When it
we ran forward and I found Ralph broken, bleeding and
lying face down in the water. I held his head
up out of the water, hoping he would be able
to breathe but it only took a few moments to
realize he was already dead. I just held him in
(14:13):
my arms, As Francisco wrote, Bob left the hospital that
night amazed that he had been given such a privilege
to personally thank this man for trying to help his
grandpa and his last moments on earth, and how such
a holy moment could come so unexpectedly from such a
tragic event so long ago. Bob later learned that the
man had passed away the next morning. When Adam Barry
(14:35):
and I investigated Sterling Mine for kindred spirits, we made
contact with the spirit we believe was involved with that
very accident, and who carried a great amount of grief
and guilt about it. He didn't die in the mind,
but his spirit lingered there. We believe he stayed behind
to warn people about the dangers of the mind and
to not let anyone go anywhere inside the tunnels that
(14:56):
wasn't safe. Another spirit who's reported to appear off in
in Sterling Mine is Bicycle Pete. According to legend, he
was a miner who would ride his bike to the
mind daily. One day, Pete went into the mines but
never returned. The only way they noticed was that his
bicycle remained parked outside well into the night unclaimed. Supposedly,
(15:17):
he was never seen again. Pete's ghost is believed to
haunt the mind to this day, and also to this day,
the Mining Museum leaves a bike parked outside the entrance
in his honor. Visitors also claimed to hear footsteps, voices,
the sound of machinery, and whispers inside the mine. But
the hauntings aren't just underground. Some people claim to have
seen shadow figures in the museum buildings or faces in
(15:39):
the windows peering out. To talk more about the hauntings,
I have genroggerro coming up next. He is the founder
of New Jersey Paranormal and has spent many nights investigating
the mines. We talk about our experiences there and it's
quite chilling. Literally it's cold in those mines. That's coming
up after the break, Ye all right, So I am
(16:25):
sitting here with Mr John Riggiero, who is the founder
of New Jersey Paranormal and you may have seen him
on Kindred Spirits in the past when we investigated Liberty Hall,
but we actually go way back. He has a really
great event that he and his team put on every
year in New Jersey, which we'll talk about at the end.
But that's how we know each other and we have
a lot of mutual friends. And so he's the one
(16:48):
that brought the idea of Sterling Hill Mind to us
for Kindred Spirits because they were having some crazy activity
and wanted answers, and so he's the perfect person to
talk to. So welcome John him. Thank you for having
me on. I appreciate it. Of course. The mine is
a really wild place to investigate. Now. I have claustrophobia
(17:09):
pretty badly, and I hate being underground. It is I've
talked about a number of occasions, and when they came
to me and said we have this mine that would
like you all to investigate, I was instantly like, well,
that's too bad for them. But eventually they talked me
(17:31):
into it and it turned into a really interesting case. Now,
you guys have investigated it a number of times, right right.
We were contacted by them a few years back about
the activity there. They had multiple reports of seeing and
hearing things, and we asked if we could go into
the mine and see if we could see for ourselves,
(17:53):
and we had gotten in there actually three or four
times over a couple of weekends. And like you said,
the initial initial visit, when you go in there with
the lights on, it's pretty intimidating with the lights on
as you're walking through there in the mind. And then
when they turned the lights off and we were in
there and the pitch black, the very first thing I
(18:14):
ever experienced there was hearing voices back and forth talking
to each other in the echo and the water dripping,
and we literally just said quiet, quiet. We stayed quiet
for ten minutes and listen to these people just back
and forth talking to each other. It was one of
the most bizarre experience I've ever had. I mean when
you say that, I am literally getting chills because I
(18:36):
remember that feeling of being in the mind and hearing voices.
And so here's the thing. The mind is not an operation.
It's a museum. We had it to ourselves. There's no
way for anyone to get in there. And if you
sit quietly, you will hear voices. And the darkness is
(18:57):
like when you turn off the lights. It is the
darkest of dark and you are so aware that you
are underground. And then when you hear voices at the
same time, your entire body reacts like you want to run,
but you can't because because you will fall or run
into a wall of some sort. But but it is
(19:21):
I would say it is one of the eeriest experience.
I mean, that whole investigation was just solid, Like I
never felt relaxed, I never felt at ease. I was
constantly having anxiety and like MANI panic attacks and so
I guess that added to it for me. But the
activity itself is just wild. So we were in interviewing
(19:42):
someone who worked in the Mind for a number of years.
I can't recall his name, but he was. He was
fabulous and he had so much information. And in the
middle of the interview, I was like, can you just
come with us because we were kind of describing the
sounds we were hearing, and we just asked him, you know,
can you come with us and explain some of these
because you've been in there so long and working there still.
(20:02):
So we brought this man back to the Mind that night,
and he actually wore his full like mining gear for us,
and we thought that would be neat to kind of
maybe use that as kind of a trigger, like use
him as a human trigger object. He was teaching us,
like what he did and everything, and so then we said, well,
let's just sit for a minute and let's be quiet.
And so we sat and we hear this very loud
(20:23):
rumbling coming from below us, and then we hear it
kind of from above us too, and I just looked
at him, like that's the sound, Like what are what's
making that sound? And he looked at us and he said, well,
that sounds like a mining cart, but that's impossible. And
I said, well, thank you, we're not we've not lost
(20:44):
it here because we thought this, say, like it sounded
like something mechanical. And he just said, you know, I've
worked in here so long, he said, but I'm always working,
he said, I've never just sat and listened. And he
was baffled. And this is a man who was hugely
skeptical of the idea of ghosts. And he didn't say
it was a ghost, but he definitely was like, I
have no explanation for what we're experiencing right now. And
(21:04):
he heard the voices to these like loud, gruff male
voices talking down at the end of the mind, and
he had zero explanation. But it did make sense when
he said, no one's down here listening who works here.
They're all just working, you know. No one just wants
to just sit in the mind and meditate. They want
to get in and out, you know, so that was
(21:26):
really cool for us. You had mentioned a good point
during the episode about you know, the people that run
the mind now or men of science. They have degrees
in engineering and other degrees, and these are people that
do what we do, so they're not big believers of
the para normal. And when I first went in there
and they were describing seeing shadow figures, having things rush
(21:47):
them here, and growling getting pushed, it was just so
believable because again, these aren't the typical people but that
we deal with. And then when we went in there
ourselves and we were rushed at least two or three times.
Something just comes at you and you feel the rush
of wind or air and you sometimes in your ear
(22:11):
you'll hear or you'll hear a growl, and it is
again a bizarre experience to know that, again you're in
the dark, you can't see who's ever there, but they're
definitely around. And that noise you're describing, we heard that,
but we also heard what sounded like residual dynamite. They
have a display there. I don't know if they showed
(22:32):
you that where they demo the mind how they used
the dynamite and it has lights and you hear when
you do that. You want to talk about a trigger object.
If you do that and then wait an hour or
two or three, you will hear the residual in the
mind in different areas. Again, bizarre how that works. It
(22:52):
is very strange activity. And I know too there are
shadows seen in there a lot, and we definitely saw
one at one point. And what's your experience been with
like shadow figures or apparitions in the minds. I've got
a good one for you. The office space where I
know you were in the chip in the last year
since you've been there. Actually a lot of the miners
(23:14):
that work there, they'll come back if they're from California,
different parts of the country, and they let them actually
stay in the office. They have like little bedroom set
up with refrigerators and beds, and they've been doing that
for years. But lately, over the last year or so,
they won't stay on that bottom floor of that office
anymore because they've seen a shadow figure above them when
(23:35):
they're sleeping and they're hearing banging on the pipes and
things like that. Now they actually have a trailer outside
the office because these guys, and you know, the guys
I'm talking about, these are you know, guys that are
used to manual labor and tough guys. They will not
stay in that building. So I'm in there and we
had just finished an event, and I'm grabbing all of
(23:57):
my things, and I kid you not, a shadow figure
went right in front of me, paused, and then went
down the stairs and around into one of the old bedrooms.
I froze because I had never seen a shadow figure
do that before. And that's the office to where people
have to work every day, right, Oh jeez. Yeah. I
(24:20):
was surprised at the activity in that building. So this
part is not even like part of the mind. It's
kind of connected. You can kind of get to the mind.
I remember not really being familiar with that part. When
they asked us to look there because they've been having activity,
I was like, Oh, of course, any place that's not underground,
I'm happy to investigate. And so we get there and
(24:42):
then I'm like, mmmm, this might be creepier than the mine.
Definitely had a strange feeling, and that was when we
did a really interesting spirit box session there s to
session there and we got this man who felt he
was communicating and feeling very responsible for some thing. We
don't know if he was affiliated with. There was a
(25:02):
really terrible mining accident that happened there. Weren't sure if
he's affiliated with that, but he definitely felt some sort
of remorse and also like he was being blamed. And
so I mean, I don't know, maybe he's trying to
make himself known, especially to miners, or maybe he knew
them from before, Like maybe he's trying to reach out
to them for some reason. Sounds like we might need
(25:23):
to revisit. That's actually a really good point, and I
had forgotten about that from the episode because I had
also done spare box and EVP sessions there, and there
is somebody that talks about a fire, talks about a fire,
and he talks about being burned, and the last thing
he remembered that I got on e VP was paying.
(25:45):
So it's kind of strange that you mentioned that, because
you know, most of the people that die their cavens
and explosions and horrible ways to go, so they do
linger with those memories, and unfortunately yeah, the mining industry,
especially back then. I mean just in general, mining is
(26:05):
such a dangerous occupation, but even back then, like they
did not have OSHA standards, they did not you know,
it's funny to look at photos when you look at
historical photos of these guys just covered in dirt and
ash and smile all smiles, and they often talk about
it with kind of a fondness, like there's something that
(26:27):
it's kind of like a brotherhood. You know. Even the
miners that we met, they're kind of nostalgic for it,
like there's something about it which I don't understand. I
mean a lot of us don't understand. I'm sure you
know you think, okay, you're doing this really dangerous job.
But maybe that does create kind of, like I said before,
like a brotherhood or this feeling of like you have
(26:47):
to kind of really get emotional about it and begin
to love it. To risk that, I don't know, I'm comping.
You have to count on the person next to you,
because if something happens, it's just you and that group.
Because that went down that mine. So if something happened
on level and you're with a bunch of people and
(27:07):
you're working and you're in it together. Whatever happens is
going to happen to all of you. And that was
every day. I'm sure they lived with that, the notion
of hey, yeah, I think could happen. It happened a
year ago. It may have happened five years ago, but
they know things happened in that mind, yeah, I mean,
and that's when I think about the idea of them
going down so farcus. When you see the elevator shaft,
(27:31):
it is so far. And then one of the things
we did in there, and we were with that gentleman again,
he was demonstrating to us like he just picked up,
like there's pipes and stuff all he just picked up
a random pipe. There was a pool of water that
was basically one of the old shafts, and he threw
it and we could hear it pinging all the way down.
(27:51):
I'm telling you, that thing went on for like a
minute and a half, just getting further and further away,
ping ping, And I was just thinking of all those
shafts that are down there, flooded, all of the gear
and stuff that's probably still there, and are there people
still there? You know, like are there people that were
(28:12):
never recovered that are down there, like it's it's really
eerie to think about. Females, especially get kind of the
they get attention in a different way. We've we've heard
a lot of females get cursed that there, and they
hear the growling a little more. So. I don't know
if that's because females sit and work in the mine
and maybe they did believe they were bad luck. I
(28:32):
don't know, but definitely they get a different kind of
interaction from what I've seen, right, I experienced that. I
tried to explain, you know, I'm always trying to talk
to these spirits like I would want to be talked to,
and I just tried to explain, you know, hey, the
year is twenty twenty one or whatever when we were
there and women are now allowed in minds. You know,
I've tried to be though, you know, and and uh,
(28:58):
you know where this mine is an an operation anymore.
You don't have to worry about me being bad luck.
I'm sure it doesn't help on the redhead, like just
trying there perfect Yeah, but I mean maybe that's there's
something to that, because I do you remember hearing the
voices quite often, and a lot of them sounded very angry,
(29:19):
and actually we heard them back where you were talking
about that dynamite area. That's where I heard the voices
the most often, and we even followed them back to
this whole back area I didn't even know existed, and
they weren't stopping. They were chattering, and they were men.
They didn't sound happy per se, so I wasn't sure
if it was like they were talking about what they
were supposed to be doing. It it's some sort of
(29:39):
residual working environment that we're hearing, but very wild. Nonetheless,
like I said, very creepy feeling to be in a
mind hearing ghostly voices, especially when it's the middle of
the night. I think it's a mixture of both. I
think there's a residual and I think there's intelligent and
it's such a weird mixture, like you said, when they're
around you. We've had so many things happen in that mind,
(30:03):
where so many different people walking through experiencing different things,
and they're not shy about coming up to you that.
That's another thing that's kind of strange about that mind
is that the odds are if you're wandering through that
mind and there are people that work there will tell
you as well that they'll hear the footsteps. That happens
a lot where you could be in one area and
(30:25):
you've been there, so you know there's water on the ground,
and you can hear the foot even sneakers, but boots
you can hear especially, and you'll be by yourself and
setting things up that you hear the wet foot steps
coming towards you and you just stand there with a
flashlight pointing it in the direction and seeing nothing yet
they're still coming. Yeah, and also bring a backup flashlights.
(30:48):
Speaking of that, I think it was Freddie. He was
telling us a story about how he was out there.
He you know, because he goes in and out of
that mind all the time. Again, it is one of
those stories that gives me the hebg bees. He was
there and he he started hearing footsteps and then so
Freddie was the gentleman who we interviewed. I believe he
(31:08):
heard footsteps and then his flashlight went out and he
couldn't he couldn't get it back on, and he's in
the pitch darkness by himself, hearing these footsteps approaching from behind.
He had to make his way out of the mind
without his flashlight whole like guiding on. Thank god he
knew how to get around in there because he'd been
in there so often. He had to touch the wall
(31:29):
and get all the way to where he could see
the doorway off in the distance. I would probably just
drop dead right. I would be like, okay, this is it,
I'm good goodbye, ye help, And there gigantic metal doors
and there's no other way to access it, so you're
stuck in there until you get out of there and no.
(31:51):
So one of the things that I love about that
place is that it's actually a huge It's very educational,
like obviously we're talking about the haunts and the ghosts,
but it isn't amazing sing museum experience, and there are
tons of field trips and kids going in out of
there all the time. Like it is not at all
a place that I would deem like a dangerous type haunt.
I do think that they're no. I think there are
ghosts there that have a lot of questions or are
(32:13):
needing something, and over time, as people investigate, you might
find that out. But I don't think people are Like
the minor that we worked with said, if you're in
there and you're walking around the sound and everything. It
moves so crazy you would not know if a ghost
was talking to you. You're not going to have a
paranormal experience in there, really unless you really sit still
and look and listen. And so I don't want to
(32:33):
dissuade people from going because I think it is such
it's such a great place, and they have some really
amazing displays. They have like a huge uranium glass collection.
They have a really great mining area where kids can
do their old gold panning my daughter and my daughter
was there for filming, and she clearly was fearless during
she literally ran off into the mind. I had to
(32:55):
follow her. She wanted to go in the mine and
no one was in there because we were down for
like lunch akee or something, and she wanted to go
in the mine, and so I had to like put
on a brave face. I think she was six or
seven at the time. By seven, and I'm sure we
can go on the mine. So it's just the two
of us and she's running ahead like living it up,
and I'm thinking, oh my god, I'm so scary. But anyways,
(33:17):
kids love it. The fluorescent minerals as well, that's another
big draw. They turned the black lights on and there's many,
many pictures of those minerals, and it's just I don't
think those minerals are in a lot of other mining
museums that I think they're kind of exclusive to the
Sterling Mine, at least in this area. Maybe for places
(33:40):
that you could actually visit and you can't do it justice.
You could look at the pictures, but when you're actually
in the room and they turned the black light on,
it really does just it's like a rainbow inside this mountain.
It is why. I mean, I didn't even know to
expect that. You know, we had done so much kind
of researching and hearing about the ghosts, and then when
they showed us that, I was like, this is the
(34:01):
most beautiful thing. Like it was. It is. It's a
very cool place. It is very very haunted, but it's
a haunt unlike any other. And I can't wait to
get back there eventually. And so at some point we're
going to have to arrange something because it is one
of my favorite places. I meant, here's the thing. I
investigate so many places. It's rare that a place really
gives me kind of the chills and I think it's
(34:23):
a combination of the ghosts but also just the location.
Like so it's always fun to pine find a place
that actually scares me a little. But it's funny you
mentioned that because, like you said, when when you walk
in there and the lights are on and they take
you through the general tour during the day, that mine
is always fifty six degrees no matter what the temperature
is outside, so there's a little chill in there all
(34:45):
the time. But walking with the lights on, it is
a little kind of intimidating to think that people were
working in that and underground. But then you turn those
lights off and it is kind of the other side
of the coin. It's night and day. That's when you
had mentioned, you know, children go there for fultures. They
have been forever. That's where most people know that mine.
(35:06):
But and and the dark. When you're trying to address
the spirits that are there, that's when you have the
most experiences, when you're actively trying to interact with them
and communicate with them. Yeah. Absolutely, And you know, I
don't think there are a lot of people going in
there and talking to them that way, and so they
(35:28):
do seem a bit eager, So well, tell me what
what are you guys? Do? You know? You run what
I would consider one of the largest paranormal conventions in
the country, the New Jersey Payer Unity Expo, which you
just had recently, and it was the first year. I
hadn't been able to come in a while because I
was on the Strange Escaped crew. So how did it go?
Are you guys going to have another one next year?
(35:48):
How do people find out about all this fun stuff
you do? We did miss you guys being there. I
told you that before for the interview. It's just feel
the same without you and Adam, But um, yeah, we
just had it two weeks ago. Are big just turn
out ever, which we try to add to it every year.
This is an event for charity. All the proceeds go
to the Woodbridge Charity Fund. We try to keep it
(36:10):
affordable for everyone. We try to give people the big
corporate casino experience, but on more of a grassroots level,
which is why we keep it affordable. Kids are only
five dollars. We bring in great people like you guys,
and Destinations here and the ghost hunters and ghost Brothers,
and we're thinking of October for next year late September
(36:32):
but the goal is again to add to the number
of guests that are going to be there, the number
of exhibit rooms that are going to be there, more
free lectures, and to just keep growing it. That's our goals.
Just give people as much as we can for only
twenty dollars. That's really what we're all about. Yeah, well,
it's always a huge success. I know. I'm always just
(36:53):
amazed at how welcoming everyone is there. And it's one
of those conventions where Adam and I will have a
line all day long and we just it's so touching
to meet so many people and it's just it's so fun.
So I love that you put it on. You guys
do an amazing job. You should be very proud of yourself.
And so people want to find out about that. What's
(37:13):
your website so they can follow that it's New Jersey.
You have to spell out New Jersey Power Unity Expo
dot com. And one of the things that makes it
as good as it is is people like you and
the other guests that we invite that really do care
about their fans, and it shows it's the given the
take between the two where you could tell people like
(37:35):
you and people like destination fear. They really do appreciate
the people that come to see them, and they give
them a great experience. That's part of the overall feeling
of the convention as well. I love it. I hope
to make it next year. Well done, as always heard
great things. So yeah, well, thank you. I really appreciate
(37:55):
you taking the time. Thanks for bringing Sterling Hill Mind
to our attention again. One of the cool haunts I've
been to in a long time, and I can't wait
to get back. Thank you for having me me. I
appreciate it, and we will see you at the next year.
There's something special about mines and mining culture. It's one
(38:17):
of those industries that we sort of forget is incredibly
necessary when it comes to our supply chain, but the
miners feel it. Those miners in New Jersey felt it.
I think that's why they took their jobs so seriously
and why their brotherhood seems to survive even beyond the grave.
Please go visit the Sterling Hill Mines when you get
a chance. Yes, there are ghosts, but the educational aspect
(38:40):
of it and the full experience of it can't be beat.
If you do see me there, though I'll probably wait
up top in the gift shop. It's above ground and
that's also where the ice cream is. I'm Amy Bruney
and this was Haunted Road. Yeah. Haunted Road is a
(39:10):
production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from
Aaron Mankey. Haunted Road is hosted and written by me
Amy Brunei additional research by Taylor Haggerdorn. The show is
edited and produced by rema El Kali and supervising producer
Josh Thing and executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and
Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
(39:32):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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