MULLICA HILL — On Saturday, Oct. 3, the Harrison Township Historical Society will hold the 24th Annual Mullica Hill Ghost Walk, a guided evening walking tour of historic South Main Street.
Tours leave the High Street Delicatessen located at 46 South Main Street every 10 minutes from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. and run about an hour and a half on foot. Last year’s walk drew just over 700 people, and the earliest departures fill first.
Tickets are $13 per person, children 6 and under are free, and groups are capped at 35. Tickets are available at harrisonhistorical.com or https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/harrisonhistorical/mullica-hill-ghostwalk-2026.
This year’s stories follow how a small town used to handle its dead, and how that changed. Before there were funeral homes, people were laid out at home, in the front parlor. The man who built your coffin was very often the same man who built your furniture, because he was the one in town with the lumber and the tools.
Mullica Hill has that history on one block. Jacob Turner ran a cabinet shop on South Main and also served as the undertaker. The Wolf Funeral Home stands a few doors away. The route walks the transition from the parlor in the house to the funeral home on the street.
Each group walks with a guide and stops at eight sites along the route. Storytellers are stationed in and outside the buildings in character, telling that building’s story to each group as it arrives.
The Jersey Unique Minds Paranormal Society returns to the Stratton House, as it has in past years.
There is more for families than the tour itself. Children carry a printed activity sheet and hunt for a small ghost hidden at every stop on the route, each one marked with a letter to collect and unscramble at the end. There is also face painting and photo opportunities at the start. PNB Financial Service Center joins this year as the walk’s first presenting sponsor.
“The stories are ours. They come out of the buildings people walk past every day without thinking about them,” said David Tinney, president of the Harrison Township Historical Society. “Everybody who puts this on is a volunteer, and they have been doing it for years.”
The walk runs entirely on volunteers. Paul Showers has researched and written the scripts for more than 20 years and runs the guide training.
Guides, storytellers and door teams are recruited and scheduled through the summer and fall, every stop on the route requires the property owner’s permission, and the Society coordinates with Harrison Township Police on the street crossings. Nobody involved is paid.
The Ghost Walk is one of the two largest annual fundraisers for the Harrison Township Historical Society, an all-volunteer 501(c)(3) founded in 1971 to save Mullica Hill’s Old Town Hall. All proceeds support the Society, which operates the Old Town Hall Museum and the lecture and performance series at the Richwood Academy Cultural Center, both free to attend. In 2023 the American Association for State and Local History named the Society the winner of its Albert B. Corey Award, the first New Jersey organization to receive it.
