Doris Lane

This is a true crime story and a ghost story.

It involves a large house in Morristown, New Jersey, in which a triple murder in 1833 produced two ghosts: one haunts a popular nightclub and restaurant that occupies the building today and the other haunts the village green.

The house on South Street was built in 1749 by John Sayre. There used to be a barn out back and a field of corn. In 1833, the year of the murders, the elderly Judge Samuel Sayre and his wife Sarah lived there with a servant named Phoebe.

It was important that the murders take place on a weekend. The killer planned to be on a ship home to France by Monday. Morristown probably wouldn’t miss one of its families before then, Antoine LeBlanc figured. If he just killed them, stole the money and the horse, he’d be on his way back to Newark in no time, and onboard the ship to France. He’d be home to his beloved, a German girl named Marie, and rich enough to marry her.

The Sayres needed a gardener, some say, or a farmhand, and they turned to John P. Fusier of New York, who ran a boarding house and agency for servants who had emigrated from France. In late April 1833, Samuel Sayre hired Antoine LeBlanc through Fusier. Shortly after LeBlanc arrived and began working, the Sayres and Phoebe were dead.

LeBlanc was not happy from the beginning.

Somehow expecting to earn wages in an important job supervising, he found himself hired as a menial laborer for room and board. He was lodged in the basement of the house, and, worst of all, he took orders from the black maid, Phoebe. In addition to his injured pride, LeBlanc saw no way of making his fortune and of marrying his Marie, except murder.

Phoebe was already asleep in the garret on the Saturday night of May 11, 1833. Judge Sayre was having a shave. A carpenter had been doing some work and stored his tools in the cornfield out back. There was a heap of manure in the barn and a handy spade.

LeBlanc went into the house, pretending to be frightened by something in the barn. Judge Sayre went out to investigate and, whack!, a blow to the left side of the head and another to the forehead, just to be sure, and a quick burial in the manure pile.

Mrs. Sayre didn’t go so quietly.

Once he’d enticed her from the house, saying again there was something wrong in the barn, he hit her inefficiently with the spade, and she began to scream. The killer said later, “I gave her another blow but with like effect; she screamed again and again, clinging hold of me, and begging for her life, and it was not until I gave her several blows that I brought her to the ground.” He grew tired of hitting her with the spade, so he started kicking her in the head with his heavy boots. Then he covered her, too, with the manure.

He took a club and went into the kitchen for a candle before starting up the back stair for Phoebe. She cooperated, being sound asleep, and he only had to hit her once before she “passed into eternal sleep.”

After a trip out into the cornstalks for one of the carpenter’s chisels, he went about a search of the house, opening trunks and bureaus, looking for hard cash. He had planned it all very carefully, he said, and would take only money in coin that could not be traced. No paper money and no silver spoons.

But then he changed his mind.

He grabbed some pillowcases and stuffed them with whatever valuables he found. He took off his bloodstained clothes, borrowed a suit of Judge Sayre’s, and saddled the dead man’s horse. The bags packed full of loot he suspended from the saddle.

The horse was not happy and wanting to turn in at houses along the way. LeBlanc tried to discipline the unruly animal, but this was a horse that knew its own mind. Finally, LeBlanc decided to slit its throat, but was so tired, he rested. The horse, knowing a bad thing when he saw it, took off for home.

The sheriff and his posse had no trouble following the trail of articles belonging to the Sayres that had dropped from the overstuffed pillowcases tied to the riderless horse’s saddle. By later the same morning, they had their man. At the trial on August 3, LeBlanc said he did it “for Marie.” The jury found him guilty within 20 minutes and Judge Gabriel Ford set the date for the hanging.

The Morristown gallows was taken out of storage at the courthouse and set up on the Town Green. The Green had been owned until 1816 by the First Presbyterian Church, when the church turned it over to a board of trustees, charged with caring for what was to be “a Common forever for the use and enjoyment of the public.”

The original courthouse built in 1755 was a log cabin. This was a new courthouse built only six years before, with a statue of Justice over the door, whose eyes were not blindfolded. The Morristown Green in the 1830s was an open lot bare of trees and ridged by wagon tracks. A gathering of 10,000, about 3000 of which were locals, crowded the 2-1/2 acre square to watch the LeBlanc execution.

Once LeBlanc was hanged ‘til dead, his body was sent across the street to Dr. Isaac Canfield. Dr. Canfield and another local physician, Joseph Henry, were conducting experiments in animal electricity. They hooked the corpse up to batteries in an attempt to prove that electricity governed body movement. They did manage to get the dead man’s eyes to roll back in his head and his arms and legs to jerk.

It could be said that Antoine LeBlanc was both hanged and electrocuted. In any case, he was dead before they skinned him.

They peeled off his skin and sent it over to a tannery on Washington Street, where it was cured and made into little souvenir pocketbooks. These were sold as “charming little keepsakes” and many local families had them in their homes long after. If you think you may have one, though, and it doesn’t bear the authenticating signature of Sheriff George Ludlow, it is not the real thing.

Mrs. Rita Veader owned one of the “charming little keepsakes,” which was donated by her daughter to the Morristown Museum. The New Jersey Historical Society, at one time, according to folklorist Henry Charlton Beck, had one of the LeBlanc pocketbooks in its collection, but it was lost. Rutgers University Library is supposed to have a bit of the skin labeled: “A piece of the tanned skin of LeBlanc, taken from his right arm, given to me by Davis Vail, late of Iowa, but now of Boston, Massachusetts. Montrose, New Jersey, October 26, 1881.”

The ghost of Antoine LeBlanc is seen every so often wandering around outside the courthouse in Morristown, presumably seeking his own skin.

But the story doesn’t stop here on the Green.

The Samuel Sayre house was occupied as the private home of the Lidgerwood family for many years, before it went through a series of incarnations as an inn, restaurant, and banquet hall. Edward Winchester bought the property in 1946 and opened Winchester’s Inn, which went on fire in 1957, on a night the phone lines were mysteriously dead, and help could not be summoned.

In 1960, William McClausand opened the Wedgwood Inn with an upstairs banquet room called the Hamilton Room. But things went strange right off in the Hamilton Room, which was, in part, the murdered Phoebe’s old bedroom. Lights dimmed, candles blew out, and even in high summer, or overheated in winter, the room was cold as the tomb. Guests wondered at a spooky presence that could be felt in the bone. Waitresses checking their appearance spied Phoebe’s shade in a gilt-framed mirror.

In 1981, the Sayre House became Society Hill and was scheduled to open on May 11, the anniversary of the triple murder. Not a good idea, apparently, as one thing and another went wrong for the new owners, including an exploding punchbowl. The owners of Society Hill had ghost-hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren investigate the haunted building. They concluded that, in addition to Phoebe, the ghost of Antoine LeBlanc was also present. A Catholic priest was called in to perform an exorcism.

Throughout several new businesses to open in the Sayre House, including one called Phoebe’s, eerie whispers, swinging chandeliers, doors opening by themselves, misplaced items suddenly turning up, sounds of a crowd carrying outside when the building is closed and vacant — and many more ghostly happenings have been commonplace.

Today the Sayre House is a New Orleans-style restaurant and nightclub called Jimmy’s Haunt and happy to be the home of the ghost named Phoebe. (Antoine LeBlanc seems to have gone with the priest.)

Jimmy’s website reads: “Charming in the ambience of New Orleans, with its tastes of the Bayou, the mystique of Voo Doo, the birthplace of Jazz, and splendor of the French Quarter, Jimmy’s will transport you to The Big Easy. Come let us all eat and drink to these history filled walls. You never know who may be joining you!”

Great style – go there, 217 South Street in Morristown, and you might just see Phoebe in a mirror.