Gravity Hill, Spook Hill

gravityhillThis is my own experience with Gravity Hill in Jackson NJ.

A friend of mine from work lived in Jackson and I drove her home one night when we got out of work late. She wanted to show me “Gravity Hill” which was close to where she lived. On the way to Jackson from the Point Pleasant boardwalk, she told me a story about a teenage girl named Helen who lived with her father. Her mother had died when she was very young and her father raised her. He was a truck driver and would sometimes have to leave town for days at a time. Helen was used to being home alone.

One night a man came to their door and asked for help. He was having car trouble and needed a place to stay so Helen’s father offered their couch for the night.

The next morning Helen woke to find her father gone. The stranger tried to calm her and tell her that he had left to go on a long haul. He told her that her dad had said he could stay as long as he liked. Helen grew suspicious and felt the man had hurt, or possibly killed her dad! She argued with the man and when he charged at her she ran for her life out of the house. As she passed the hall table, she grabbed her father’s keys to the car in the driveway. Somehow, she started the car and pulled out onto the road but they lived on a hill and when she shifted the car into drive to make her escape, she stalled just as the man burst through the front door and began to cross the lawn.

Helen was terrified and thought she would be caught for sure when suddenly, the ghost of her father who had been murdered by the stranger during the night, pushed her car up the hill. She was able to start the car and escape the man who killed her father.

During the last part of the story, we had been driving down some secluded streets without any streetlights. When she finished telling the tale I had stopped the car at a stop sign and was waiting for her to tell me which way to turn. All she said was “Ok, now put the car in neutral and take your foot off the brake.”

I was driving a 1985 Lincoln Town car and it had a digital speedometer. I realized we were actually there. We were facing the bottom of the hill! I shifted into neutral and lifted my foot. The car rolled slowly up the hill – backwards – and the digital gauge read 1 mile per hour. We rolled uphill approx. 30 ft and then just hovered there for a few seconds before I threw the car into drive and found us some streetlights!

Another Version – Spook Hill

  • There is a place in MT Cotton Brisbane Australia that everyone calls Spook Hill. You apparently have to stop your car halfway up the dead-end road and turn your car off and put it in neutral. your car then rolls uphill by itself. It is said that children that where killed in a bus accident push the car up and you can hear feet scrambling beside your car.
  • Another story is the magnetism in the mountains is high there and that can pull a car up the hill.
  • A couple of towns over in an area outside of Boonesboro off rt 67, there is a small town that prides itself on civil war heritage. You can put your car in neutral on “spook hill” and the ghosts of civil war soldiers will push it up the hill thinking it is a cannon. All the local teenagers try it some even putting flour on their freshly washed cars to verify the existence of ghostly handprints.
  • The legend goes that not too long ago some school kids in a school bus were on the way to school when they were horrifically killed in an accident. So in order to prevent you from facing the same fate, these school children came back as ghosts to push you up the hill to “save” you. Now, every time you come here your car will naturally roll up the hill instead of down, defying the laws of physics.

    How this works is quite simple. First, you find the mystical spot and put your car’s gearbox to neutral. The car will roll up the hill confirming that the hill is in fact haunted. Gravity Hill: 1054 E Loma Alta Dr. Altadena, CA 91003

  • Reader Submitted by,
    Lisa from Brick, NJ
    Lola from Smithsburg MD
    Scott from Brisbane Australia