Tuesday's Creatove Adventure

Hello from the New Jersey shore on this fine October day!
The sun is shining, the weather is too humid and too warm but it is a lovely day anyway.
I am joining Toni for her great adventure today as I try to do every week.
Click her graphic to join in!

So, here we go:

An Autumn Hike To Remember

Blue Hole located in the New Jersey Pine Barrens

1.   While hiking in Autumn through one of the many trails in the State Forest, you come across a  pond said to have no bottom at all.
It is called the Blue Hole and many scary stories surround it.
You find a notebook bound in leather on the shore.



2.   You pick it up to study the object more carefully, when you hear a voice call to you from just over the rise.

You walk through the woods and over to see what or who it is. You come to the wooded top of the rise where you can see down into the little valley below.


3.   Just below the clearing you see this wondrous village filled with people. There are houses, shops and horse and buggies going up and oown the street.
You run back to pick up the notebook you had left behind.  It's cover has the title and name of the author:  The Blue Hole is no Myth by Joesph Mulliner.
Inside you read the story of a man seemingly from that village describing his trek to find the Blue Hole and how he discovered  a world outside his village populated with people who drove in horseless carriages! He was describing modern day times.
Stunned, you put the notebook in your backpack and hurry back to the top of the rise where you saw the little village in the valley.   
The village was obviously from the 1800's and you had thought it was a reproduction you'd never known about.  
But now you wondered what in the world was going on. Was the notebook a joke of some kind?
At the top of the rise you look down into the valley and see nothing other than a valley.
The village and its busy inhabitants are gone.
You know what you saw.  You know it was no hallucination but there's nothing there now except ruins of a once propserous Pine Barren town.
Near the edge of the rise is  a grave stone.
You rcognize the name as that of the *NJ Pine Barren Robin Hood....

 

Joe Mulliner, hung 1781

 
4.   And with much to remember on this Autumn hiking trip in the State Forest, you head back home and realize that only a few people will be told this tale and even most of them will never believe you.

*From the Weird NJ magazine (Read the whole article HERE):

Often referred to as “The Robin Hood Of The Pine Barrens,” Joe Mulliner was a Tory outlaw who was forced to flee his home in 1779 to avoid arrest, then went on a crime spree throughout the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey, burning farmhouses, kidnapping, and holding up stagecoaches. But he often left poorer folks alone and preyed on the rich. He was captured in the Indian Cabin Mill Inn in Nesco after a night of drinking, dancing and debauchery. Convicted of high treason on August 8, 1781, he was sentence to be hanged the same day at Gallow’s Hill. Afterward, his body was delivered by wagon, along the very route that he had terrorized, to his wife at Sweetwater, where he was buried along a high bank overlooking the Mullica River and the Cold Spring Swamp. His final resting place is a lonely grave in the pines marked by the stone seen here at the right, the most recent monument in a long line of stones, the previous markers having all been stolen over the years.

A Tory or Loyalist: Loyalists were American colonists who remained loyal to the British Crown during the American Revolutionary War. At the time they were often called Tories, Royalists, or King's Men.
They did much damage to American patriots during the Revolutionary war. Many of them ended up moving to Canada.