Pig Lady Haunting

Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe that a person's soul or spirit can walk this world long after their physical body has decayed? And if you do believe, do you wonder why it is that some souls just can't leave this earthly world behind? Some people think that ghosts just don't know they're dead. Some people think that ghosts are the souls of those with unfinished business in life. Souls just unable to move forward into whatever it is that comes next. Our story today is one of forbidden love, of deception, of murder, of a mystery that has remained a mystery for more than 100 years, and of the terrifying apparition that haunts one lonely stretch of New Jersey highway to this very day.

Saturday, September 16, 1922 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, dawned hot and sticky. So hot, in fact, that over at nearby Rutgers University, the football coach canceled a planned scrimmage for his players. Despite the oppressive heat, 15-year-old Pearl Bahmer and 21-year-old Raymond Schneider set out that morning to gather mushrooms when they came upon a shocking scene. Two bodies lying side by side beneath a crab apple tree. The bodies were those of a male and a female, though the faces were hidden, his by a straw hat, hers by a scarf. The dead woman's head was resting on the outstretched arm of the man, her left hand resting casually on his knee, her legs crossed at the ankles. A peaceful scene at first glance.

Both victims have been shot in the head. The male had been shot once, the bullet entering just over his right ear. The female had been shot three times over the right ear, over the right temple, and under her right eye. And also, the female's neck was nearly completely severed. A police officer on the scene reported that this neck injury revealed maggot activity, and it was that finding that helped police pinpoint the time of death.

At least 24 hours earlier. This horrifying discovery led to a murder investigation that rocked a community and captivated the nation. In fact, it took the kidnapping of the Limber Baby a decade later to eclipse the news coverage this double-slang commanded. What was it about this particular story that transformed a tragedy in a small town into what many people consider the very first media circus in America?

The answer is pretty much every lurid, sensational, scandalous detail you can imagine. Starting with the identities of the victims. He was the Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, rector at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, post he'd held for 10 years. She was Eleanor Reinhardt Mills, a member of the choir at St. John's. Both were married, just not to each other.

Hall was married to a wealthy woman a decade his senior. Her name was Frances Stevens Hall, and she was related to many of the wealthiest families in New Brunswick. It was said that upon marrying the Reverend Hall, she'd gifted millions of dollars to her new husband. The childless couple lived in what can only be called splendor in a large mansion in New Brunswick.

Eleanor Mills and her husband, James Mills, who happened to be the sexton and gardener at St. John the Evangelist, they came from much humbler origins. They shared a small home with their two children, and according to James Mills, they were content. Their lives revolved around their family and their church, where James earned his living and Eleanor sang in the choir.

And I bet you can see where this is going. The Reverend Hall and Mrs. Mills were having a torrid love affair, something that was very much gossiped about in their church community. But an adulterous affair between the minister and the choir singer is just one eye-popping part of the story. Seething resentments, conflicts over jurisdiction, a comically mismanaged crime scene, a wronged wife, a sketchy cousin, a town hermit, a key witness whose story keeps changing.

And for funsies, a teenage girl tossed into jail for being incorrigible at the insistence of her own stepfather. Now, add in all the money Mrs. Hall had brought to her marriage, a marriage to a man who would not be faithful. Multiple suspects, multiple arrests. Yet in 1922, a grand jury failed to return even a single indictment.

The whole brutal incident was nearly shelved right there, two murders, two lives snuffed out and no justice for the Reverend Hall or Mrs. Mills. The case went cold and might have been altogether forgotten. Had it not been for one tabloid newspaper launching a sneaky little investigation into the murder of Mrs. Mills, it would have been a different story.

The evidence that unearthed, evidence which admittedly was a little on the dubious side, was enough to force New Jersey's governor to demand that the case be reopened. Which is how the Reverend Hall's wealthy widow, Frances, her two brothers and that sketchy cousin, finally found themselves indicted, charged with murder and facing trial.

But before we fight our way into that packed courtroom in the fall of 1926, let's go back to the crime scene, back to the crabapple tree, the bodies. And what was it Pearl and Raymond said they were doing out there that morning? Was it gathering mushrooms? Hmm. The crime scene, the two bodies appearing so obviously arranged and positioned, the faces covered, scattered on the ground between them were torn scraps of paper, scraps that were later revealed to be the remnants of love letters from Eleanor Mills to the Reverend Hall.

Those letters, the married pastor addressing the choir singer as Darling Wonderheart, Mills nicknaming her lover Babykins. There was a calling card embossed with Hall's name propped up against the dead man's shoe. Even the most casual viewer of Dateline just sat up and said, the whole scene is staged. The first gigantic red flag for us modern crime consumers, the careful covering of the victim's faces.

This is a huge piece of evidence. It signals the strong possibility of a personal relationship between killer and victim, a standard bit of profiling now known to every true crime fan out there. But remember, this is 1922 and the first school of criminology in the US won't be found it for another 28 years. And there's no point in wondering about DNA because DNA won't even be discovered for another 31 years.

We can look at this crime scene with our modern eyes, but we can't go back in time to solve it. Like the cops who swarmed the scene in 1922, our jumping off point is that blistering hot day and the discovery of two bodies by two people who, as it turned out, had their own secrets to keep. The crabapple tree, the bodies were lying beneath, was just outside of town, right off the local lover's lane, secluded, dark, little traveled, plenty of privacy for a philandering preacher and his lovestruck mistress.

And that location proved to be the first challenge for investigators. Both victims had lived in New Brunswick, that's Middlesex County, but the crime scene was just over the line in Franklin Township in neighboring Somerset County. Police from both counties arrived on the scene and before long, prosecutors from both counties would begin jockeying for jurisdiction.

By the afternoon of September 16th, 1922, the bodies just found word of the murders have leaked to both the press and private citizens. Crowds of the curious came to ogle and stare. They trampled the crime scene. People were tearing bark off the apple tree to keep as souvenirs. The calling card at the murdered clergyman's feet was snatched up and passed from hand to hand to hand.

Fingerprint evidence was very much a thing in 1922, but a piece of evidence manhandled by a crowd. Forget about it. That's never going to cut it in a courtroom. And while this carnival of reporters and looky loos stomping all over the evidence, law enforcement had some questions for the two mushroom hunters that stumbled across the scene.

They weren't exactly what they seemed, you know, wholesome youth out for a morning of foraging in the forest. 21 year old Raymond Schneider was the on again off again boyfriend of 15 year old Pearl Bomber. It wasn't that Raymond wouldn't commit to Pearl. The problem was his wife. Yup. Young Raymond was a married man and he spun a tale for the cops that steered this murder investigation into the first of many dead ends.

And that was bad luck for everyone, especially Pearl, who found herself arrested and jailed for the crime of incorrigibility. It was her stepfather who requested that she be locked away. He hated the thought of Pearl sneaking around with the married Raymond having his daughter caught up in a murder investigation. How is the last straw?

And I guess back in 1922, you actually could get your kid locked up for being incorrigible. But let me also say that dad was riding a pretty high horse about virtue for the guy who ran the pool hall. I mean, everybody who's seen the music man knows that trouble starts with a T and rhymes with a P and that stands for pool.

But what Pearl's stepfather didn't know was that he himself was about to become a big, ugly part of this story. Thanks to that troublesome Lothario, Raymond Schneider. Schneider told police that the night the murders occurred, Pearl and her stepfather were out walking in the neighborhood not far from where the bodies were found.

Schneider said that he and his buddy were following the pair. The buddy was a guy named Clifford Hayes, who'd also once dated Pearl, according to Schneider. Now, wait for it. Hayes was convinced that Pearl's stepfather was guilty of molesting the girl and he was going to make the man pay after Schneider and Hayes parted ways that night.

Hayes said Schneider returned to the area and killed Hall and Mills in a tragic and awful case of mistaken identity. OK, what? So Clifford Hayes pulls off a quick, sloppy double murder, then in a panic cuts the female victim's throat, moves the bodies and just happens to have some of the love letters she'd written to Hall.

Yeah, that all holds together. But the public and the press were screaming for a suspect, any suspect. And Clifford Hayes was better than nothing. He was arrested and charged on October 9th, 1922, but the people of New Brunswick were outraged by the arrest. They felt Hayes was being railroaded, let the poor man from New Brunswick take the fall so the residents of wealthier Somerset County could have the illusion of justice.

So intense was the fury over Hayes arrest that Frank Kirby, the man who took Schneider's statement and then tried to coax a confession from Hayes, was attacked by an angry mob of New Brunswick citizens who bombarded him with bricks. Jersey justice in action. When Hayes was arrested and charged, Schneider was also detained and held as a material witness in the double murder.

Within days from the comfort of his cell, Schneider recanted and Hayes was freed. Detectives, none too happy about the time they'd wasted chasing down evidence based on Schneider's false accusation, now focused their attention on the families of the murdered lovers. Investigators revisited their first theory, jealousy, which, yes, you think.

They began with Mills' husband, James, who had an alibi that seemed legit. Neighbors reported seeing him within an hour of the murders and reported hearing him pounding away that night on a woodworking project. Mr. Mills was never charged. As it happened, detectives had a hunch about that crime scene, the shredded love letters, the covered faces.

They strongly suspected a woman was involved in this crime. And naturally, the first woman they looked at was the Reverend Hall's widow, Frances. And she had made at least one choice in the days following her husband's death that seemed very sus. She sent a fawn colored coat and scarf off to Philadelphia to be professionally dyed.

Middlesex County Prosecutor Joseph Stricker immediately seized the garments and sent them to a chemist for analysis. Frances Hall, meanwhile, was busy firing off a scathing letter to the governor of New Jersey, Edward Edwards. In it, she accused officials in both Middlesex and Somerset counties of bungling stupidity. Mrs. Hall maintained that hers was a contented marriage, that she had no reason to doubt her husband's devotion and that she knew nothing about a supposed friendship between him and the slain church choir member, Eleanor Mills.

And she most certainly knew nothing about the murders. She declared that the evening the crimes had occurred, she had been home the entire time with her brother, Willie Stevens, at her side. And that, thank you very much, was the end of that. Though, of course, it wasn't. On the morning of October 17th, 1922, Mrs. Hall and her two brothers were summoned to the office of Prosecutor Joseph Stricker.

By this point, New Jersey Governor Edwards had taken charge of the case, sending the state attorney general to New Brunswick to try to bring the whole circus under control. And it was a circus. The crime scene had become a tourist attraction, with vendors on site selling balloons and snacks and drinks. Trampled and contaminated, though it was, soil samples taken from under the apple tree revealed enough human blood to suggest that the pair had been killed where their bodies had lain.

So there was that, at least. The state AG appointed a special prosecutor. And on November 11th, 1922, the widow Hall launched a private investigation into the murders at her own expense. Three days later, she demanded a grand jury hear the case. That grand jury failed to deliver any indictments, opting instead to leave the case open for further inquiry.

Meanwhile, all New Brunswick was abuzz with rumors, gossip and suspicion. It seemed like the widow Hall and Eleanor Mills' husband, James, were the only two people in town who didn't know that the pastor and the choir singer were lovers. James Mills told the press, Eleanor was a good wife. I know that there was nothing between the Reverend Hall and her.

Reverend Hall was such a good man and always a friend of mine. Hall's widow, Frances, told the press that she thought the motive for the crime was robbery. She said that the reverend had left their home on the evening of the murder to bring a large sum of money to the mills to help pay a costly medical bill for a procedure for Eleanor.

This sum was allegedly an advance on Mr. Mills' salary to be paid back via deductions from his weekly pay. Remember, James Mills was the church sextant and gardener. Mrs. Hall went on to say that she knew all there was to know about her husband's friendship with Eleanor and that there was nothing inappropriate about it.

Yeah, well, try telling that to the other members of the church and especially the choir. A Miss Jessie Jameson said that she'd long noticed the unusual friendship between the Reverend Hall and Mrs. Mills, and when it was suggested that she tipped off Mr. Mills, perhaps triggering a jealous rage so white hot that it led to murder, she denied it.

But she did acknowledge, quote, I had been suspicious of her quite evident admiration of our rector for a long time, just as everyone had been. Turns out the choir at St. John the Evangelist Church was boiling with resentment over the affair and for a very good reason. The reverend's obvious favoritism, one after another, they came forward.

Even young Pearl Bahmer, rebellious and officially declared incorrigible, said that there had been friction in the choir for over a year due to the special relationship between Hall and Mills. Mrs. Alva T. Jordan, who'd been singing in the church choir for over a decade, explained that the reverend came to every Friday night choir practice where the group was selecting and practicing hymns for the coming Sunday service.

Jordan said if there was any disagreement or dispute, Hall always sided with Eleanor Mills. Jordan complained that Mills had an untrained soprano voice and was by far not the most talented singer in the group. Yet at Hall's command, most of the solos went to Mills. Very rarely did other choir members make the cut. Citizen detectives listening to this have already solved the case.

I know. But again, we live in a different time when it comes to forensics and criminology and whether or not we allow balloon vendors to set up a crime scenes. After that first grand jury failed to charge anyone for the killings, the case went cold and the widow Hall headed abroad to escape scrutiny, to soothe her grieving heart and shades of the O.J. Simpson case to look for the real killer.

I kid you not. But if she hoped the time and distance would heal all and dim the community's memory, she was mistaken. On July 17th, 1926, the state of New Jersey reopened the case on the strength of that sketchy evidence dug up by the New York Daily Mirror. But I guess we can't be too picky. Eleven days later, Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall was arrested and charged in the murder of her husband and his mistress.

Within two months, both of her brothers and her cousin were also arrested and charged. The three men were held without bail. Mrs. Hall was bonded out and then the bodies of the victims were exhumed the second time for the Reverend Hall. But it was the exhumation of the body of Eleanor Mills that yielded the most sensational and horrifying discovery.

Not only had her throat been severed so brutally that she was nearly decapitated, her vocal cords and tongue had been completely removed. The so-called untrained soprano had been silenced forever and in the most vicious way imaginable. The Hall-Mills trial was an instant circus complete with celebrity spectators, like the famous evangelist Billy Sunday, that anti-liquor crusader for Prohibition.

Legendary journalist Damon Runyon was there, although you may know him better from the musical Guys and Dolls. But my most very favorite Hall-Mills trial groupie, a mysterious caped figure who called himself The Bat. And you know who he inspired? An artist and cartoonist named Bob Kane, aka the creator of Batman. Isn't history just the coolest?

Anywho, as sordid and ugly and grossly mishandled as the case had been. The trial managed to up the crazy ante with the arrival on the scene of one very colorful and eccentric eyewitness to the murders. An eyewitness jackpot for the prosecution. Not the town hermit, a gentleman named Moxie Horn. Because of course, if your town has a hermit, he or she must have a name right out of an old comic book.

Moxie Horn had gotten into trouble in the past for taking aim at a kid who came a little too close to his hermit shack on the old Phillips farm. You know, the place where the bodies were found. And the eyewitness wasn't Raymond Schneider or Clifford Hayes, the friend he'd falsely accused of the killings. The eyewitness was a farmer named Jane Gibson.

And on November 18th, 1926, more than four years after the slayings of the Reverend Hall and Mrs. Mills, court was finally in session. Getting Jane Gibson to the courthouse in Somerville was a grand undertaking. She'd been hospitalized with kidney disease and probably cancer, but agreed to testify and against her doctor's better judgment, had herself discharged.

An ambulance ferried her to court, moving through streets packed with curious crowds and hordes of reporters. She was carried through the packed halls on a stretcher, then ceremoniously deposited by six men onto a bed placed in front of the judge's bench. With a hot water bottle at her feet and her medications arrayed on a small table beside the bed, star witness Jane Gibson asked that the head of the bed be raised.

The jury then filed into the courtroom and news accounts say that they were most intrigued by this unconventional setup. Gibson spoke in such a low voice that the court stenographer had to relocate to the woman's bedside in order to even hear her testimony. Gibson testified that on the night of September 14th, 1922, her dogs began barking and wouldn't stop.

Gibson then described hearing something that sounded to her like a creaky old wagon. Her cornfield had been robbed five nights before the murders, so she saddled up her mule and headed up to Rusty's Lane to investigate. On her way to the cornfield, she reported seeing an automobile with two people in it, a man and a woman whom she later identified as Mrs. Frances Hall and her brother, Willie Stevens.

Gibson continued on her way, but finding no wagon in her cornfield, turned around and headed back down to Rusty Lane. She described tying her mule named Jenny to a tree out of concern that the animals praying might give her away if the cornfield bandits return. And that was when she heard the voices. She said there were multiple voices, a quartet with one female voice.

She testified that one voice said, then explain those letters. She described male voices swearing from her hiding place. Gibson described seeing two faces, one of them Willie Stevens. And then a shot rang out, followed by a woman screaming. Oh, Henry, easy, easy, easy. And then another woman began screaming. At that, Gibson took off running, losing a moccasin in the process.

Three more shots, one right after the other. Safely home, Jane Gibson reconsidered what she had heard and seen and decided to return to the spot on the old Phillips farm that she just fled. And once there, she described seeing a woman kneeling on the ground and weeping, a woman she identified as Mrs. Frances Hall. At the judge's instruction, the bed was adjusted once more and Gibson was asked if the person she saw that night on Darussi Lane were in the courtroom, Gibson pointed first at Mrs. Hall, then at her brother, Willie, and finally at the other Stevens brother, Henry.

The doctor stepped forward to take her pulse and then it was time for the defense cross examination. OMG, the drama kind of makes the whole if the glove doesn't fit, you must quit thing at the O.J. trial look like nothing. And let's not even get started on the jury. The defense complained bitterly that the jurors were unsupervised, often asleep and openly talking to anyone who approached in and out of the courtroom.

Defense attorney Simpson wrote to the governor of New Jersey that trial conditions in Somerville were, quote, so bad as to be disgusting and that some of the jurors were, quote, both stupid and unintelligent. Oh, ouch. Nothing about Jane Gibson's time in court went smoothly for the defense. Gibson gasped audibly at times, prompting attention from a medical team.

She denied statements attributed to her, denied insinuations that she had tried to coerce another witness into lying to support her story. Henry Carpenter, cousin to Frances Hall, was brought forward. Carpenter, already indicted and charged for the murders, was being held in county jail as he awaited trial. The attorney for the defense asked Gibson, Now, did you say you saw this man with something glittering in his hand at the murder scene?

Gibson confirmed that, yes, Carpenter was one of the men she'd seen when the defense then read an excerpt from the record in which Jane Gibson described seeing no one but Carpenter at the scene. She shrugged it off, saying it was a dark night. Dramatic a witness as she was, inconsistencies dogged Jane Gibson every step of the way, starting with her name.

Was it Jane Easton? Jane Gibson? Was it Mary Eisleitner? How about Mary Leitner? Had she been married? Yes, but she was vague on the date and place, although she did allow as to how her husband used to call her Jessie. She was equally vague as to the number of husbands she'd had, although she firmly denied having ever lived with anyone named Harry Hay or Stumpy Gillian.

After heated debate with defense attorneys, the judge disallowed any questions regarding Gibson's supposed past as a concert hall singer. Her character was definitely on trial, a phenomenon we're used to seeing today. But a little something that surely didn't help Jane Gibson's credibility was the sight of her own mother seated in the front row of the gallery, wringing her hands during her daughter's testimony and saying aloud, she's a liar.

She's a liar. She's a liar. One detective testified that Gibson told him a newspaper had paid her seven hundred dollars for a story. That's nearly twelve thousand dollars in today's money. Another witness named George Sipel testified that back in 1922, when the murders occurred, Gibson offered him a hundred bucks to back up her story that she had been on to Russell Lane that night from the disastrous crime scene management to the ever evolving story of the state star witness.

This was a case that would have caused poor Nancy Grace's shellacked blonde head to explode had she been alive at the time to cover it. And just when you think it can't get any messier, here comes the widow Hall to take the stand in her own defense. By the time Frances Stevens Hall raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, she'd already sat through some intense moments in that courtroom, like the unveiling of the blood spattered dress worn by the slain Mrs. Mills, the repeated declarations by Jane Gibson that placed the widow at the crime scene and the mortifying revelations of her late husband's blatant infidelities.

And let's don't forget the grim testimony of the undertaker who handled the Reverend Hall's remains. We're talking ghastly, vivid descriptions of leaking and bombing fluid. Stuff like that would be hard for anyone to hear. Yet Mrs. Hall was described as mostly emotionless throughout the proceedings. The press dubbed her the iron widow.

Compare that to what they call Jane Gibson, the pig woman. On the stand, Frances Stevens Hall stuck firmly to her story. She was innocent of any wrongdoing and had been completely unaware of any adulterous relationship between her husband and Mrs. Mills. Most of the press was very sympathetic to Mrs. Hall, painting her as a woman who'd closed her eyes to her husband's faults, refusing to accept his infidelity because she simply could not face that truth and live.

Her brother, Willie Stevens, in his turn on the stand, also denied any involvement in the murders, claiming that he and his sister spent the evening together at the Hall home. He testified that Frances came into his room in the night and awakened him to say that her husband had not come home. There was much disagreement over the time this happened.

Willie's story had changed from the initial investigation in 1922 to the trial in 1926. There was also lots of conflict around a fingerprint found on the calling card at the dead reverend's feet. According to multiple experts, the print belonged to Willie Stevens, but the mishandling of evidence and damage to the print created doubt.

Willie also owned a 32 caliber handgun, one he'd kept loaded in his room for 20 years. Same kind of gun used in the murders. Questioned about his purchase of cartridges and the ones missing from the box, Willie said that he'd given them to someone, but darn it all, could not remember who. And he declared emphatically that the pig woman had been very much mistaken when she identified him at the scene of the crime.

The other Stevens brother, Henry, a retired exhibition marksman, testified that he was at home the night of the murders in Lavalette, New Jersey, 50 miles away, fishing. Three witnesses backed his story up, despite the prosecution's argument that it was Henry, a skilled marksman, who pulled the fatal trigger. And remember Jane Gibson testifying to hearing a woman's voice crying out, Oh, Henry, easy, easy, easy.

If this trial was unfolding today, someone would have to capture Dateline's Josh Mankiewicz and sedate him for his own safety. Because this jury, whether they were as defense counsel complained asleep or just stupid, heard all this testimony and served up a full acquittal for all three defendants. This, despite Jane Pigwoman Gibson's eyewitness testimony delivered from her hospital bed in the courtroom.

This, despite the carefully staged crime scene, which told a naked story of fury, jealousy and humiliation. With the crime scene turned into a macabre carnival, it's true that much of the evidence presented was circumstantial. But in that courtroom in Somerville, New Jersey, another kind of evidence was on display. The evidence of class, wealth and privilege.

Like the trial of Lizzie Borden, which came before and that of OJ Simpson, which came later. Frances Hall and her two brothers benefited from the community's collective disbelief that people with all their advantages could ever be guilty of such recklessness as murder. They had too much to lose, goes the reasoning. Why would they ever take that risk?

It's a question we're still asking today and not just about this notorious unsolved double homicide. We ask it every time someone powerful or wealthy or famous collides with the law. Infuriating as it is, there's another way to look at it, a more hopeful way, I guess. Despite all of our exhausting cynicism and gruesome hypocrisy, it's almost adorable the way we cling as humans to a childlike faith and rationality.

As though the impulse to murder might be checked by something as simple as money or fame, we should know better than that. And we don't. The story of the Hall-Mills murder is a big one to this day, with tentacles stretching in all directions. It wouldn't be going too far to say that it helped birth an industry, looking at you, Court TV, and about a gazillion other offerings from the true crime judicial industrial complex.

Oh, and the sketchy cousin, Henry Carpenter, who whiled away his days in a jail cell, waiting his own trial. He, too, denied everything. And the fact that two of the charged shared the name Henry was clearly all the reasonable doubt the jury needed to overlook that part of Jane Gibson's testimony. After the jury acquitted the three Stevens, the case against Carpenter was dismissed.

The widow Hall, her brothers, and Carpenter wasted no time launching a lawsuit against the tabloid they felt was most responsible for the damage to their once stellar reputations. They went after the New York Daily Mirror for half a million dollars each, in case you were thinking that rich people suing the press for defamation is any kind of a new thing.

Whoever pumped those bullets into the Reverend Edward Hall and Mrs. Eleanor Mills got away with murder. Wonder of my heart and babykins slaughtered in what looks to our modernized like a clear cut case of hell hath no fury like a minister's wife scorned. But we won't ever know for certain now what happened that night in September 1922.

I told Mrs. Mills I thought that clergyman was a devil and would wake up in hell one of these days. Those are the words of one Mrs. A. Howard, a close friend of Mrs. Eleanor Mills. She added that Eleanor had shared with her that the Reverend Hall didn't believe in hell. According to Eleanor, the Reverend declared that no merciful God would condemn a soul to eternal damnation.

Hall reportedly said, quote, we are placed on this earth to enjoy ourselves and make the most of life. And so we did right up until that bullet pierced his skull and ended his earthly pleasures forever. So why is it that his ghost doesn't haunt that lonely stretch of road in Somerset County, New Jersey? Why does no one report seeing the spectral figure of Eleanor Mills so lovely in her last minutes on earth and her fine navy blue dress with its pattern of white flowers?

It seems that the only restless spirit prowling the old Phillips farm is an apparition that those unlucky enough to encounter it describe as part pig, part woman. Is it an urban legend, a story told around the campfire to give kids a harmless scare? Or is it the spirit of a woman unable to depart this physical plane until justice is done?

Let's hope not, because how could there ever be any justice now for Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills? And if it is Jane Gibson's restless spirit still stalking the old Phillips farm, wouldn't that be a terrible kind of hell for her? The very hell that the Reverend Hall refused to believe in. Don't stand under the apple tree, anyone else but me, anyone else but me, anyone else but me, no, no, no, don't stand under the apple tree, anyone else but me, until I am gone.

Until I come marching home. Don't go walking down Lovers Lane with anyone else but me, anyone else but me, anyone else but me, no, no, no, don't go walking down Lovers Lane with anyone else but me, until I come marching home. I just got word from the guy, word from the guy next door to me, that girl you met, she lost her pen and it clicked into her teeth.

Don't stand under the apple tree, anyone else but me, until I come marching home. Next time on True Weird Stuff. Who doesn't want to go to work with their dad? Especially if going to work with dad means crisscrossing America for a whole summer while dad pops ice picks into people's skulls. The lobotomy on the next True Weird Stuff.

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