Welcome to Ghost Hunt, a series of caches that bring you to scenes from the unsolved Hall-Mills double homicide of 1922.
Warning: please access the median ONLY at the crosswalks at 12th street or 11th street. The median has a gravel path that leads to the cache.
You are looking for a small, circular, compact mirror. Careful: there will be strangers. Inside the cache, you will find a message, a log. Here's a link to the radio play associated with this cache: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1109147/9821524-s03-ep-10-season-finale-charlotte-s-exit
What does it mean to be haunted? For most people, it does not mean the strange or supernatural, but the all-too real: a scar from childhood, an opportunity missed, a wrong never righted. For the late Charlotte Mills, it was the murder of her mother on September 14th on the outskirts of New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her mother's body lay beside that of their Episcopalian parish priest, Edward Hall. Love letters between the two were scattered about the bodies. Edward Hall had been shot once in the face. Her mother, however, had been absolutley brutalized. While the coroner failed to conduct a proper autopsy, he did, out of curiousity cut open Eleanor to see if she was pregnant.
Charlotte Mills, just sixteen years old, was interrogated by the police and press corps about all possible suspects to the murder: Was it her father, an impovershed groundskeeper for the church? Was it Edward's wife, the solemn (and wealthy heiress) Frances Hall? Was it Edward's brother-in-law, the eccentric Willie Stevens? Was it the KKK? Was it thieves? Immigrants? Some other scapegoat? Nothing was simple, and nothing could be proved.
Charlotte, of course, could not do the police's job for them. But that didn't mean she didn't try.
By 1926 she had been driven to quit the chase when Frances Hall and her brothers were aquited at trial. She then moved here, to New York City, and tried to "make it" as a clerk at a bank. She told the press that she considered herself a "flapper," but she never had the cash to run with that crowd.
Across the North River, you can see the Lacawanna Ferry Terminal, a major artery back into New Jersey, and Charlotte's exit out of New York City: she would die in a nursing home at the age of 45.
Several blocks north on the 55th pier journalists once swarmed a cruise ship to look for the wealthy Frances Hall--wife of Edward Hall--when she fled to Europe. She was, everyone knew, the most likely suspect.
The markers of violence are here on pier 45, but they are not so easy to see. On your way to the pier you may have seen the series of boulders dedicated to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. The pier is famous for its connections to the LGBTQ+ community, and therefore serves as a fitting host for a memorial to the victims of homophobic hate crime. Look south, and you will see where the Twin Towers once stood. Look all around you, and you'll see what was traditionally the lands of the Lenape. The scars are there, but whether or not they touch you is something that have to decide for yourself.
Good luck, and keep an eye out for our other Ghost Hunt geocaches at places like Green-wood Cemetery, DeRussey's Lane, Church of Saint John the Evangelist, and the Seminary.