Tag Archives: New Jersey

Whippoorwill Road

Nationality: Italian-American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles/New Jersey
Performance Date: April 25, 2014
Primary Language: English

I collected this folklore from my friend who grew up in New Jersey, in Monmouth County. She told a story about a road near her county (she believed the road was either in Middletown or Navesink)

“In my town in New Jersey, well not my town, but my county essentially, there’s a street that we call Whippoorwill, I believe on a map it would come up as Cooper Road, but it’s called Whippoorwill. And it’s a dirt road behind a lot of farm type areas, a lot of small horse farms and stuff, but it’s also off a major highway which is kind of strange…

So, teenagers have a tradition of driving down Whippoorwill at night and the rumor is that weird things always happen when you drive there. People will drive down it, and it’s narrow enough that it’s almost a one-way, so a really common thing that people say happens is that you’ll park, just to look around or to scare the crap out of whoever’s in the car with you, and you’ll sit there and people say that cars will come and facing you will turn on and off their lights and do creepy things and then turn around and disappear.

Other people have said that the reason people used to get creeped out by the road is because through the woods that surround you on Whippoorwill, if you walked through you would end up at a house that used to be a Ku Klux Klan meeting house. Don’t know if that’s actually true…but people would claim they saw scary things or people in hoods or scary looking people or maybe like a fire in a distance and it was assumed that you were possibly stumbling upon a KKK meeting, which is obviously a very frightening thing to stumble upon.

I’ve driven down it multiple times with multiple different people and it’s usually that whoever’s driving the car is usually the one in control and they park, shut off their lights to scare whoever else is in the car, I’ve seen people get out and run through the woods to scare the people in the car and things like that.”

Q: How do you decide to go down that road?

“It’s kind of one of those things where you know, you’re like 17, 18, you just got your license and you want to drive but you don’t have anywhere to go, so it’s like nighttime and there’s no parties or anything, so you say, oh let’s drive down Whippoorwill. So someone in the car is obviously going to protest and say please, no, don’t take me there and then you have to take them there to scare them”

There a few different types of folklore happening in this piece. First, the behavior of the teenages driving down the road seems like a folk ritual or folk game, since there are certain kinds of things that are supposed to happen on the road, and those things are passed between the different teenagers who take each other there. The belief about the KKK meeting house is a kind of legend, since it might be true, but it would be difficult to verify or prove it.

 

The Jersey Devil

Nationality: Italian-American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles/New Jersey
Performance Date: April 25, 2014
Primary Language: English

This piece was collected from my friend who grew up in New Jersey. To her, it wasn’t a very important part of her life, but it was well-known where she was from because it’s one of the most popular pieces of folklore from New Jersey.

This is how she explained it to me:

“I’m from New Jersey, and there’s a southern part of the state called the Pine Barrens, it’s filled with trees, it’s a very forest-y area. And for years and years it’s been said that there’s the Jersey Devil that lives in the pine barrens, hence the name the New Jersey Devils, the hockey team… there’s ben songs written about it…stories written about it. There are lot of versions of what it actually is. Some say it’s an actual devil or it’s more like a beast, like an animal. It’s kind of like a yeti or something, to this day people still say they see when they go to the pine barrens. I think I learned about it honestly in school when we learned about New Jersey myths, I’m pretty sure it was mentioned, and the only way is just through word of mouth”

Even though the Jersey Devil is very popular, there’s still not a consensus on what it looks like (or even what it is exactly) So, the legend can be interpreted differently by each person. However, it has been incorporated into things like sports teams, where it might become less folkloric because it would be portrayed in a certain way and would probably be trademarked. Also, the informant described it as a New Jersey myth, however, it would more accurately be categorized as a local legend or folk belief.

The Formaldehyde Bucket

Nationality: American (ethnicity: half Swedish, half Chinese)
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California (Originally from Montclair, New Jersey)
Performance Date: 4/29/2013
Primary Language: English

Item:

“So in my town, Montclair, New Jersey, we have a street called Mission street, and it is broadly known as the ‘crime street’ in town. So, I’ve never actually been down this street. I know that there’s crime there (I read police reports about it), someone got shot there last year, he died. So anyways the story is, this person is at the corner of Mission and Bloomfield, the cross street. And there’s this man standing there with a bucket. So the person, whoever was the originator of this story, goes over to the man with the bucket and said ‘what’s in the bucket?’ And the man with the bucket explains that it’s formaldehyde and that for five dollars the guy can dip his cigarette into the formaldehyde and smoke it.”

Context:

This anecdote is a rumor that the informant overheard at his high school.

Analysis:

This story a great example of a wacky, neighborhood urban legend. Regardless of where you are from, everyone knows little anecdotes like this that may or may not be true, but are remembered and passed down because of their originality and tie to the specific area that they circulate within.

 

Grovers Mill Haunted House

Nationality: Indian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 26, 2013
Primary Language: English

Interview Extract: 

Informant: So there’s this legend in my community, and I don’t know if people outside of it would really know about it, but definitely all the kids in my class know about this because we all went to a field trip and we learned about the history of our little town in class and like, ok do you know H. G. Wells’ book, War of the Worlds?”

Me: “Yeah, I know it.”

Informant: “Well in 1938 Orson Welles did a reading of it on the radio, and he read in the style of a news report. And this was in Grover’s Mill, this small town inNew Jersey, but people didn’t realize that like, it was fiction, so they all actually thought that like aliens were coming in and invading earth, and people legit thought it was real, since it like, sounded like a news report. They all were running out of their houses, shooting with guns, and basically, it was just like, a huge disaster.

So in my elementary school, they taught us all about this, and I guess it was like, the history of our town. Also, so in the 80s, they created a time capsule and buried it in the area where the hysteria culminated, and it’s by this park that I always used to pass like everyday after my mom dropped off my dad, and there was this um, water tower behind this creepy-looking house painted gray. And it’s pretty big too. And like, I passed it all the time without ever really thinking about it, but I guess back then people thought it was a spaceship and started shooting at it.

And with my friends, we made up all these stories about it, because we didn’t actually know what the house was for or who it really belonged to. Like we’d see a car in front of it always, but never anyone actually going in and out, you know. It was just a staple in our community and everyone thought it was really old and weird. We made up stories, like ‘Oh, aliens live there, Oh, it’s haunted,’ that kind of thing.

It’s just the kind of creepy house and I have friends that definitely still believe in some of the stories, or the ones from before when people actually thought it was a spaceship. And like, honestly, if it turned out that aliens really did live there, we wouldn’t be surprised.

In the end, we learned when we were older that a chiropractor lived in the house, which took away from some of the creepiness, and he repainted the house a different gray so it’s less run-down looking. But there still is that vibe of creepiness, I mean, at night also, you see the lights come on inside but still you’d never see anyone inside!”

Analysis:

This is a good example of a memorate, or how someone will create a memory of an incident, such as a haunting or alien invasion, after hearing previous legends regarding the area or situation. My informant has been told about the mass panic in her town since she was a child, so it’s natural for her and her friends to fabricate stories about real aliens or sinister people in the strange house they often pass.

It also shows how important it is for a small town such as hers to distinguish itself in whatever way it can. Orson Welles may have done a reading there, but that was nearly a century ago, so new stories and legends have to be made up to keep people’s interest in the town. This is why the time capsule was buried in the 80s and why the children were led on field trips to visit the supposedly haunted house, which they in turn also believed was ghostly or inhabited by extraterrestrials. It provides interesting locations to visit for tourists and gives a sense of pride to townsfolk who live there.

I find it interesting that my informant remembered seeing a car parked in front of the “haunted” house, but because she and her classmates never saw a living person, they still had probable cause to believe something out of the ordinary was going on. This brings up the question of how much “creepiness” is necessary for a person to believe a haunting is real. My informant says the house was a strange gray color, but had she not heard that it was the location for the climax of hysteria in 1938, it’s doubtful she would have noticed what color the house was painted. It’s likely that the house itself would never have attracted any attention had she and her classmates not been taught about their peculiar town history.

Jersey pizza

Nationality: American
Age: 85
Occupation: postcard collector
Residence: Howell, New Jersey
Performance Date: March 13, 2012
Primary Language: English

My grandfather called a new pizza parlor in the neighborhood to order a pizza pie (a lot of people in Jersey just refer to a pizza as “pie”) and when he asked for a large plain pie, they told him that they were sorry, but they didn’t serve pie.

My grandpa said it’s just something you know growing up in the area.