
© Truly Adventurous MagazineErnie Rivers
When unexplained events terrify a young boy in 1960s New Jersey, the first purported haunting in a public housing project begins. Unearthed through original interviews and thousands of pages of archival records.
May 6, 1961On the evening of his thirteenth birthday, Ernie Rivers, shy and serious, was playing in his bedroom in an apartment in the Felix Fuld housing development in Newark, New Jersey. Loneliness had become routine for Ernie, even on his birthday. His no-nonsense grandmother, Mabelle Clark, took care of housework in her bedroom. As she did, a glass jar on top of a dresser on the opposite end of the room crashed to the floor. Mabelle was shaken for a moment โ the jar seemed to have moved by itself โ then brushed it off. Ernie heard the noise from his room, but didn't think much about it.
On May 8, two days after the glass jar incident, Ernie and his grandmother were eating in the kitchen when six punchbowl cups in the living room โ connected by an open doorway to the kitchen โ came off the hooks on the wall and crashed to the floor, one after the other. "That's when it really started," Mabelle later recalled. "Everything started smashing... Smashing โ smashing โ smashing." Later that evening, several bottles in the bathroom fell to the floor and shattered. One of them, a bottle of antiseptic stored in the medicine cabinet, flew into the living room and landed on the floor. Stunned, Mabelle walked to the bathroom only to find its door closed, making the bizarre incident flatly impossible. Not knowing what else to do, she rushed into the bathroom to take down the remaining bottles, containers, and items from the medicine cabinet and place them on the floor.
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