A stone marker set into a hillside at Newton Cemetery seals what was once the entrance to a limestone cave, inscribed with the names of James, Margaret, and J. Howard Lewis — three people who entered in 1909 and never returned.
Newton Cemetery, SE of Main Street (US Route 206), Newton, NJ 07860
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Newton Cemetery is publicly accessible at no charge.
Access
Limited Access
The cave grave marker is approximately fifty yards into the woods beyond the cemetery boundary, on uneven ground over a rock outcropping. The cemetery itself has maintained paths.
Equipment
Photos OK
Sussex County limestone cave system access point sealed after 1909 · Unusual sealed-cave memorial marker at Newton Cemetery
Newton sits atop a limestone belt in Sussex County, and the town's underlying geology includes cave systems that were known to local residents in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Newton Cemetery, founded in 1860 and located southeast of Main Street, contains a cave grave that falls outside the ordinary category of burial marker.
Approximately fifty yards into the woods on the cemetery property, a stone is set into the face of a rock outcropping. It is inscribed with the names James W. Lewis, Margaret Lewis, and J. Howard Lewis, and the year 1909. The stone is not a gravestone in the conventional sense — no bodies were recovered. It marks the sealed entrance to a cave.
The historical record on what actually happened in 1909 is more complicated than the local legend suggests. Census records from 1895 identify James W. Lewis and Margaret Lewis as adults — not children — along with an adoptive son, James Howard Lewis. The circumstances of the 1909 disappearance, whether it involved one person or three, and the ages of those involved, are not clearly established in publicly available documentary sources. The stone itself is the primary artifact. Weird NJ, which documented the marker in detail, noted the gap between the legend's child narrative and the census evidence for adult names.
The cave entrance sealed by the stone is not accessible to the public. The surrounding woods are on cemetery property.
Sources
The paranormal tradition at the Newton cave grave describes a single apparition: a girl in a dirty white dress, seen near the rock face where the stone is set. In the accounts collected by Weird NJ and in reader-submitted reports on regional paranormal sites, the figure stands still, faces the stone, and is described as clutching her throat. She does not appear to interact with witnesses before vanishing.
The ghost narrative is built on the folk version of the 1909 story — the version in which children entered the cave and were lost. The census evidence complicating that narrative does not appear in the ghost-lore tradition, which has circulated independently of the historical record.
The sealed cave entrance, the absence of recovered remains, and the remote location of the marker in the woods beyond the cemetery boundary give the site an unusual character among New Jersey burial sites. The ambiguity about who the Lewises were and what exactly happened creates a gap that local legend fills with the image of a lost child.
Newton Cemetery sits southeast of Main Street in Newton. The Lewis cave grave marker — a stone set into a rock face bearing three names and the year 1909 — is located approximately fifty yards into the woods on the cemetery property, past the maintained grounds. The cave entrance it seals is no longer accessible. Bring a flashlight for the wooded section.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Forest Park, IL
Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, grew from two adjacent cemeteries — German Waldheim (established 1873) and Forest Home (1876) — which merged in February 1969. The 220-acre site was chosen as a non-denominational burial ground, a policy that made it the only Chicago-area cemetery willing to accept the bodies of the Haymarket defendants in 1887.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPHackettstown, NJ
Union Cemetery was established in 1859 on East Avenue in Hackettstown, Warren County. It holds the grave of Matilda 'Tillie' Smith, the 18-year-old kitchen worker murdered at Centenary Collegiate Institute on April 9, 1886. Her headstone — bearing the phrase 'She died in defense of her honor' — was placed by community members and has become one of the most recognized grave markers in New Jersey's paranormal landscape.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPWashington, NJ
Washington Cemetery is a community cemetery off Route 57 in Washington Borough, Warren County, New Jersey. The Shadowlands narrative attributes the burial of the victims of the 1843 Changewater Murders to this cemetery, but contemporary historical research, including by the GraveMatters project, identifies the victims' burial site as Mansfield Cemetery elsewhere in Warren County.