by Anne Motto, F.M. Kirby Curator of Collections
October 28, 2025
The legend of The Morristown Ghost was the story that would not die. Reanimated dozens of times over the decades, the tale first spread in the immediate aftermath of the alleged fraud and was retold, reimagined, and embellished through the 1970s and beyond. At their core, each version centered around the same basic premise: School teacher Ransford Rogers of Connecticut, somehow still illiterate, came to Morristown in 1788 and with the help of accomplices convinced the area’s more credulous citizens to part with gold and silver in the promise that ghosts – manufactured by Rogers – would reveal to them how to retrieve buried treasure from Schooley’s Mountain. Chroniclers generally agree that he was successful the first time around but was caught red-handed (and sheet-covered) in the midst of a similar con the following year.
New York newspapers quickly picked up the story and spread it to publications up and down the Atlantic Seaboard. In this first telling, the cash-strapped teacher hatched a plot to appear before his marks as an “angel” who would reveal a valuable secret if they turned from their wicked ways, prayed regularly, and, oh yeah, gave the angel £40 (later reduced to the bargain price of £6). However, after the wife of one of his victims grew suspicious, Rogers was arrested, escaped on bail, was recaptured, and confessed. Neither this account nor subsequent ones are clear on the details, but he somehow escaped again in time to be in Massachusetts for the 1790 census.
Just a year later, a “dramatic piece” in two acts was presented in Elizabeth on The Morristown Ghost, as it was already being called. Then, in 1792, the first of several booklets detailing the escapade in absolutely exhaustive detail was printed. Far more damning of the duped than the con man who duped them, the booklet was postulated by later observers to possibly have been the work of Rogers himself in order to profit further from the scheme and exact revenge on the townspeople who turned on him. 19th-century historians point to the fact that virtually no copies from that edition survive, the theory being that the embarrassed Morristonians bought and destroyed all they could.
The booklet would nonetheless be reprinted multiple times over the following century, and everyone was eager to sell their version of the tale. In fact, after David Young of Hanover published an edited version in 1826 which was materially identical to the others, albeit more succinct, the purveyors of succeeding reprints always insisted that theirs – and not his – was the true account (so buy theirs, please). Renewed interest gained particular fervor in the 1870s when two separate magazine articles and a reprint brought the story back onto the national stage and spawned newspaper articles from Pennsylvania to Kansas.
The retellings have become less frequent in the past century, although you still occasionally hear tell of The Morristown Ghost. In fact, in 1971, it was made into an opera of all things, written by an FDU professor and performed at the Morris Museum. Nearly too fantastical to be true, Ransford Rogers’s audacious scam seems surprisingly more likely to have occurred than not, although the veracity of some of the more sensational details passed down through the various versions will never be known for sure. That is, unless a ghost comes knocking at your door with a new story to tell. Beware if he asks for money though.
For all the gory details, a full copy of the 1876 reprint is available here.
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