Welcome to Ghost Hunt: the Hall-Mills Double Homicide. This series brings you to sites tied to the unsolved murders of the choir singer Eleanor Mills and the Reverend Edward Hall. *Rivery Styx Road is dangerous. Please stay on the sidewalk on the north side of the bridge. Please do not enter private property. The cache is accessible only from the sidewalk. Good luck.*
On September 13th, 1922, the day before he was murdered, Edward Hall brought his wife Frances out to Lake Hopatcong. But he also brought his younger lover, Eleanor Mills; his excuse was that he wanted to reward some of the women from the church for having "looked after things" while he and Frances vacationed in Maine (he also brought along the Sunday school teacher, Minnie Clarke). By this point in time, tensions between Eleanor, Edward, and Frances had been building for several months. After Edward had married Frances, it was easy to think that he might have married her for her money; she was, after all, an heirress to the Johnson & Johnson fortune--and several years his senior. She was a part of the American elite, and she had expected her life to follow the puritanical, straight and narrow way--after all, she had married a priest. Eleanor Mills, on the other hand, was completely reliant on the church as an outlet to life and to happiness. A child of German immigrants, she had been singing at Saint John's since she was fourteen years-old, long before Edward Hall had become the priest of the little church. She had married young, possibly due to a pregnancy during her adolescence. Her husband, James Mills, proved an unambitious, dull man. It is not known who made the first move--Eleanor or Edward--but it is known that after their affair began, Edward hired Eleanor's husband to be the church's sexton, or groundskeeper.
Financial inequality, patriarchal power, religious feeling, and a small-town social atmosphere collided to create an impossible situation. Within 36 hours of leaving this spot on Lake Hopatcong, Eleanor and Edward would both be dead. It would take another 36 hours for anyone to report the discovery of their bodies. Edward had been shot once in the head. Eleanor had been shot three times in the face--and then her throat had been slit ear to ear. Someone posed the bodies in an embrace, and then tossed her love letters about their feet. An autopsy later revealed that someone had removed her tongue and vocal cords. The brutality of the murders shocked the public--and generated an endless parade of interest in the case.
The crime remains unsolved. Frances Hall, as well as her older brothers, Henry and Willie, all stood trial for the murders. But there were no reliable witnesses. And Frances and the her siblings were known "to be such good people--the very highest kind of people."
Keep an eye out for our other Ghost Hunt caches in New Brunswick, Somerville, New York City, Virginia, Texas, and Venice, Italy.
[Congratulations to StrattonRob, FTF!]