RAHWAY, NJ — Someone has been murdered and no one knows who did it or why.
Before you panic and pull your children inside the house, take heart: This murder happened more 135 years ago, and anyone who might have been there on that fateful night has long since died. But that hasn’t stopped people from speculating.
That’s where “The Case of the Unknown Woman” cemetery tour, run by the Merchants and Drovers Tavern Museum, gets involved. The museum runs numerous “Ghosts of the Past” tours throughout the year, and this one could easily be the most popular, said Al Shipley, director of operations for the museum, in an interview with Union County LocalSource on Monday, Oct. 3.
For “The Case of the Unknown Woman,” Shipley said, “Visitors are escorted to the graves of more than a dozen people who had something to do with the case. We don’t know who she was, who killed her and what the motive was. This happened in March 1887. This is an educational tour. It’s not a scary thing by any means. This story got around the world. This was the biggest murder mystery in the second half of the 1800s. There was a guy from Poland last Thursday who came in to see the story. It was a really big story.”
The tour may not be that scary, but walking around a cemetery and speaking with people who have been dead for many decades can still be unnerving.
“The cemetery tour is one where we have costumed actors who stand by graves, and they tell the story in the first person. It’s very effective,” said Shipley.
Some of the museum’s cemetery tours involve a lot of performers.
“When we did the Civil War stories, we had 300 reenactors,” said Shipley. “There are about 19 actors, 17 tour guides and I’ve got another dozen people on-site” for the Unknown Woman tour.
“Groups of 12 to 15 people go around and hear the stories. We do 17 shows, so the shows go off every 15 minutes and they last for two hours,” continued Shipley. “The tours start at noon. … In an hour and a half, we have six groups out in the cemetery. All the tours run the same way, as far as the mechanics go.”
The story itself is a macabre one. On March 25, 1887, four brothers were traveling to work at the felt mill by Bloodgoods Pond in Clark early one morning when they found the body of a young woman off Central Avenue near Jefferson Avenue, several hundred feet from the Central Avenue bridge over the Rahway River. The body lay at the side of the road in a pool of blood that had frozen. The throat had been cut twice from ear to ear, the hands were wounded and the entire right side of the face was extensively bruised as if from a severe beating. The footprints around the body were said to be huge.
The woman appeared to be in her early 20s; she was described as attractive, with brown hair and blue eyes. She was wearing a dark green cashmere dress trimmed with green feathers and a fur cape, yellow kid gloves, a black straw hat with red velvet trimmings, a black dotted veil, imported shoes, a bonnet and a basket of eggs. Her murder made headlines everywhere.
“More than 12,000 people came past her coffin in three weekends,” Shipley said. “I did a book on it in 2010 that became very popular, and I received a lot of emails from people around the world who thought they were related and this was an ancestor.”
The “Ghosts of the Past” cemetery tour will offer new insight into this century-old crime.
“They’re going to go to the graves of one of the brothers who found the body,” said Shipley. “They go to the undertaker’s grave, to the mayor’s grave, to a newspaper editor’s grave, and to the grave of a girl who lived at that time and was afraid to go out. The grave of the woman who was murdered is the last stop. We do a tour once a year — the first Sunday in October. We’ve been doing it for 28 years, but every five years, we do the Unknown Woman.” Due to inclement weather last weekend, this year’s tour was postponed to Sunday, Oct. 9.
Shipley said it is a thrill for him to make history come alive, as he has always had a fascination with history.
“I’m the city historian for Rahway,” said Shipley. “I’ve done over 100 articles for a local newspaper. I’ve done research since 1973.”
His involvement with the Merchants and Drovers Tavern Museum is also a part of history.
“This building was saved in 1969, and, in 1973, I got involved in the group because it was still kind of falling down,” said Shipley. “I’ve been involved for almost 50 years. I didn’t do as much in the 1980s and 1990s, but I still stayed in touch. I was a high school teacher and I retired in 2003 and I became the director here.”
Despite the delay of this year’s tour from last weekend to this weekend due to the weather resulting from the remnants of Hurricane Ian, Shipley is sure fans will come out in droves.
“Sunday, Oct. 9, the first tour goes off at noon,” said Shipley. “If you want reservations through PayPal, the tours start every half an hour. The tours that start every quarter hour, at 12:15 p.m. and 12:45 p.m., are for walk-ons. The tours take two hours. There’s a time where there will be 10 tours out there in the cemetery at the same time. It works like clockwork.
“The tours take place in the Rahway Cemetery, right next to our building,” Shipley continued. Merchants and Drovers Tavern Museum is located at 1632 St. Georges Ave., Rahway. “People park in an office building parking lot just down the street from us. We have a great arrangement with them at 1600 St. Georges Ave. I have 17 tours. The last tour goes off at 4 p.m.”
Rescheduling everything can be challenging, but Shipley says it always works out in the end.
“We’ve got a lot of volunteers here,” said Shipley. “Postponing it becomes a real logistical problem. I lost three actors, but I picked up two of the three already. Usually, I’m a last-minute sub. This has happened maybe three times in 28 years. I know most of the roles because I researched them. Everybody has a script, and some people read them and some know them by heart. I’ve got some actors who I’ll give them a part and they go out and do research themselves.”
To reserve a spot, call the museum at 732-381-0441 or send an email to [email protected]. For more information, visit merchantsanddrovers.org.
Photos Courtesy of Christopher Tonstad