Drivers beware.
As Halloween approaches, one New Jersey road stands apart for constant reports of paranormal activity — and it’s getting so notorious, even car rental companies are apparently warning clients to steer clear.
In a recent worldwide ranking by Sixt, a piece of pavement called Clinton Road in West Milford took the top spot — for the third year in a row.
The experts behind the list told The Post that the northern Passaic County thoroughfare is “one of the country’s most haunted roads, with a reputation built on decades of local folklore and eerie encounters.”
“The 10-mile stretch of heavily forested road is particularly unsettling after dark,” a representative explained, “when its dense tree canopy leaves parts of the route almost completely shrouded in darkness.”
The road has a macabre reputation for creepy activity that dates back more than a century.
In 1905, writer J. Percy Crayon described the area as inhabited by “robbers, witches and ghosts that made their appearance in frightful forms.”
In one famous story, Ghost Boy — a spirit said to linger beneath a bridge — returns coins that are tossed into the water below.
“Visitors continue to test the story, with coins still visible in the stream below Dead Man’s Curve,” Sixt explained, adding that the road is also associated with the appearance of “ghost lights” — mysterious floating orbs or unexplained lights that appear in the darkness and sometimes surround solo drivers.
Commuters also describe seeing phantom cars — specifically, a black Camaro and an old pickup truck —that appear in their rearview mirrors before disappearing into darkness.
Legend even holds that Clinton Road is the preferred thoroughfare of the Jersey Devil, a mysterious creature of disputed (albeit dubious) origins who has been blamed for drought, crop failure, the death of livestock and even the onset of war.
“Together, these tales give Clinton Road a fascinating mix of history, folklore and roadside mystery,” said Sixt scribes.
To determine the most haunted stretches of highway in the world, expertsanalyzed search trends on Google and TikTok, then compared the results with previously published lists of haunted roads in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Clinton Road generated more than one million searches between July 2025 and July 2026.
In 2019, Clinton Road became an indie horror movie starring Ice-T, who appeared as a Garden State firefighter whose wife goes missing on the storied New Jersey road stretch.
Can’t make a Jersey road trip?
Those further east and west can find their own spooky season drives, according to Sixt.
They’ve named the second creepiest road as Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire, which is said to be haunted by Ruth Colbath, a lovelorn New England postal worker whose husband Thomas allegedly vanished along the road in the 1800s.
For 39 years, the ever-faithful Ruth kept an oil lamp burning and her hopes high for his return. But three years she died, Thomas reportedly found his way home.
Today, visitors routinely report seeing visions of the abandoned wife, and the eerie glow of her lamp, along the remote road.
Meanwhile, the stretch of Route 66 running through California came in third for haunted highways. It made the cut for its high concentration of ghost towns and tales of missing hitchhikers, along with its proximity to the Manson Family and their killing routes in the late 1960s.
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