Up in Hackettstown, New Jersey, the memory of Tillie Smith still looms large in the public heart, and those Hackettstonians who believe in ghosts feel that Tillie still walks among them in spectral form.
It was April, 1886, when Tillie, a member of the kitchen staff at Centenary College who took her room and board in a dorm there, asked fellow employee James J. Titus to let her in the building after an evening at a theatre performance.
She was found murdered the next morning in a field behind the school. Titus was convicted of murder and rape, and condemned to swing from a gallows for the crime.
Years later, Titus cheated the hangman by claiming that Tillie had seduced him (a married man, and a father) into an affair.
The appellate jury bought his story of accidentally strangling her while trying to silence her from revealing their unsanctifed union.
With his death sentence commuted, Titus was freed after 19 years, and live in Hackettstown until dying in 1952, aged 95.
But people in Hackettstown believed that Tillie was killed defending her honor, and the statue shown here blesses her memory. What's more, they believe Tillie's ghost walks around the South Hall dorm, moaning, and making the lights flicker.
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