A 9,000-square-foot Rhineland-style castle built in 1905 for textile magnate Frederic Kip, occupied for five years in the 1980s by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and now an Essex County park open to the public.
22 Crestmont Road, Verona, NJ 07044
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Essex County park; no admission fee. Interior access may be limited or require special event ticketing.
Access
Limited Access
Hilly terrain with stone paths; the castle structure involves stairs and uneven flooring.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1905 · Rhineland Revival castle built 1905 for textile merchant Frederic Kip · Occupied 1980-1985 by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh · Now Essex County public park
The castle at 22 Crestmont Road was designed in a Rhineland Revival style and completed around 1905 for Frederic Kip, a textile merchant with ties to the Newark industrial economy. The structure is built from local stone and features suits of armor, stained glass windows, and the architectural vocabulary of medieval German castle design as it was interpreted by American Gilded Age builders. At approximately 9,000 square feet, it was among the more ambitious private residential projects in the Essex County hill towns at the time of its construction.
The property changed hands several times in the decades following Kip's tenure. In 1980, a group of followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh — the Indian spiritual teacher whose organization would later become notorious for the 1984 bioterrorism attack in The Dalles, Oregon, and other criminal activity — purchased the castle and established it as a residential compound. The Rajneesh community's presence in Montclair and Verona from approximately 1980 to 1985 drew coverage from the New York Times and generated sustained tension with neighboring residents, who objected to the compound's activity and the organization's broader reputation.
The property was eventually acquired by Essex County and converted to a public park. The castle structure remains standing, and the county has used it for occasional public events. It sits on a wooded ridge accessible via Crestmont Road, with views toward the Watchung ridge and the Essex County skyline. The suits of armor and stained glass referenced in local accounts remain features of the interior.
Sources
The ghost claims at Kip's Castle are less precisely documented than its factual history, but they have been consistent enough to appear in regional coverage alongside the Rajneesh history and architectural oddities. Patch coverage of the site mentions ghost sightings as a standard feature of the castle's reputation, along with the suits of armor and the views over the Watchung ridge.
The Rajneesh occupation from 1980 to 1985 added a layer to the property's dark history that has proven durable in local memory. The organization that occupied the castle was, by the mid-1980s, implicated in the 1984 salmonella bioterrorism attack in The Dalles, Oregon; wire-tapping; arson; and murder conspiracy. The connection between the Montclair-area compound and those crimes — even though no crimes are documented as occurring at the Crestmont Road property itself — gives the castle's cult history genuine weight as dark tourism.
The specific paranormal claims at the site — reported apparitions, cold spots in the castle's interior rooms, anomalies associated with the stone walls — have not been the subject of formal investigation. The property's combination of genuine historical strangeness, architectural theatricality, and cult-association history generates a category of dark tourism interest that sits between documented haunting and documented history.
Walk the park grounds surrounding the Rhineland-style castle. The exterior retains original stone masonry, stained glass windows, and the elevated site with views over the Watchung ridge. Essex County occasionally opens the interior for events.
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