I found The Ghostly Sphinx of Metedeconk in a fantastic book ( which is stolen but we won't go into that) entitled Down Barnegat Bay; A Nor'easter Midnight Reader by Robert Jahn, published by Beachecomber Press, 1980. The story itself by Stephen Crane is exerpted from The New York Press, 1895. Sadly, the book is out of print.
The story, some of which I will quote, goes this a-way:
"About a mile south of here, on the brown bluff that overlooks the ocean, there is an old house to which the inhabitants of the place have attached a portentious gruesome legend. It is here that the white lady, a moaning, mourning thing of the mist, walks to and fro, haunting the beach at the edge of the surf in midnight searches for the body of her. The legend was born, it was said, in 1815, and since that time Metedeconk has devoted much breath to the discussion of it, orating in the village stores, haranguing in the post office, until the story has become a religion, a sacred tale, and he who scorns it receives the opprobrium of all Metedeconk.
It is claimed that when this phantom meets a human being face to face, she asks a question - a terrible, direct interrogation. She will ask concerning the body of her lover, who was drowned in 1815, and if the chattering mortal cannot at once give her an intelligent answer, containing terse information relating to the corpse, he is forthwith doomed, and his friends will find him the next day lying pallid upon the shore. So, for fear of being being nonplused by this sphinx, the man of Metedeconk, when he sees white at night, runs like a hare."
I wanted to share some of the language of the story.
-----Standard ghost story fare, the rest of the story: She didn't say good-bye to her lover because he was leaving for Buenos Aires and she was pissed. His ship went down some 60 miles south of Metedeconk on the return trip but soon as he left she felt tremendous forboding. She walked the beach continually until she happened to stumble upon his corpse.
The book is full of exerpts from like this from various places like Harpers Weekly & old photos and I was very surprised to how much was written about this area which was terribly remote back in the day. It was remote when I was growing up there. Not anymore, unfortunately.
Just as an aside, Robert Louis Stevenson spent 2 summers at the Union House in Brielle, NJ which is just on the otherside of the Manasquan River not far from Metedeconk. He was working on The Master of Ballentrae in 1888. He enjoyed sailing catboats with his friend Will Low. Twenty years later Low wrote this in his autobiography:
"One afternoon we landed on an island a little way up the river, whose shore upon one side was protected by a bulkhead. As the island was nameless, we proceeded to repair the oversight and christened it Treasure island, after which we fell to with pocketknives to carve the name upon the bulkhead, together with our initials and the date. This inscription was there some years after, and if the winter tempests have spared it, I am pleased to signal it for some one in quest of a Stevenson autograph, as it might figure as a unique specimen in almost any collection."
Last time I looked, traces of the bulkhead still showed. Locally, the island is called Treasure Island though on the map, it is written as Osborn Island. And, local stories say that pirates buried trasure there.
If anyone is interested, I have a web site for the Jersey Devil - not just a hockey team! - very interesting. I can't get it to come up right now or I would give it here.
Well, I hope I didn't bore anyone. I just love sharing this stuff with anyone who'd listen. Be happy that I'm not standing in front of you talking.