GHOSTS ON THE JERSEY SHORE
By Stephen Crane
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[HERE ARE SPOOKS AND SPECTERS TO SUIT ALL TASTES.-A BLACK DOG WITH RED EYES.-THE WICKED TORY CAPTAIN, TOO, STILL KEEPS HIS KNIFE SHARP.]
Asbury Park, N.J., Nov. 9, 1894-Of all the brightly attired city people who throng this place during the summer months not one seems to care a penny for the ghosts that line New Jersey's famous stretch of seacoast. It is only in the fall, when the marshes around Barnegat turn a dreary brown and the gray autumn rains sweep among the sand hills that the slightest atten-tion is paid to the numerous phantoms that dwell here. However, some parts of this coast are fairly jammed with hobgoblins-white ladies, grave-lights, phantom ships, prowling corpses. In his cabin many an old fisher-man, wagging his head solemnly, can tell sincere and fierce tales, well calculated to freeze the blood. Around the gay modern resorts these stories have lost weight, but in the little villages of the fishermen south of here, near the salt marshes of Barnegat, a man had better think three times before he openly scorns the legends of the phantoms. Even at Branchburg, too, there are people who will pummel your features well if you deny the dim bluish light that floats above the long grave wherein lie the dead of the New Era, flickering and spluttering in spectral wrath whenever any attempt is made after the gold which is said to have been buried with the bodies of. The unfortunate sailors and emigrants. Too, if you go into the huckleberry region back of Shark River you had better not scorn the story of the great pirate ship that sails without trouble in twelve inches of water, and has skeletons dangling at the mastheads. Terrible faces peer over the bulwarks, and confound the visions of any who would witness the phantom move-ments from the shore.
In this region there is also an old Indian, dead a hundred years, who stalks through the land at night. He is looking, it is said, for his fair young bride, whom he buried in a previous century because she put too much salt in his muskrat stew. This ghost was once followed on his shadowy pilgrimage by some young men who had greatly fortified themselves with applejack, but when his pursuers came too near the ghostly Indian simply turned and looked at them. He had a stiletto-like glance, they asserted, which went straight through them as if they had been made of paper. So they ran away.
At Deal Beach a youth and a maiden, impalpable as sea mist, perambulate to and fro on the bluff, keeping their lovers' tryst while the wind swirls in the branches of the solitary tree and the stars shine through their forms of air.
Near Barnegat Light, wicked fishermen engaged in doing that which
they ought not to do, hear low chuckles, and upon looking up quickly
see an old crone, who chuckles at them for a moment and then goes
off, looking back occasionally to chuckle.
[A REPREHENSIBLE OLD SPOOK.]
At Long Beach, where men deep in slumber were killed by brave Refugees and Tories from New York, few fishermen care to lie and sleep, for then the gray specter of the Tory captain, hideous from the ancient crimes, comes and holds a knife at the throat. When they flee they hear feet crunch in the sand at their heels, and no matter how fast they run they cannot shake off this invisible pursuer, who follows them to their thre-shold.
In fact, it can truly be said that more hair has risen on the New Jersey shore than at any other place of the same geographical dimensions in the world. The fishermen are never low in their imaginative faculties. They are poets, and although they create more ghosts than any other known place they turn no butchers into specters. No dead jeweler in these villages ever comes back to wind up his clocks. No departed cobbler returns to peg at his trade. It would be incompatible with the taste of the people. To make a good ghost a man has to be old and sinister; a crone, wrinkled and wicked; a maiden, beautiful and fragile. When such die, a serviceable phantom is added to the list.
An example of the discernment of the people in their choice of
specters may be had in the famous legend of the black dog. They
created a spectral black hound in this tale and they gave him red
eyes. it was genius. No one knew better than they that a ghostly
Yorkshire terrier could have no effect upon even the most timid. The
specter must be a hound, and it must be black; no yellow dog would
answer the purpose, nor a speckled one, nor a striped one. It must be
black. Thus was built the legend.
[THE TALE OF THE BLACK DOG.]
The tradition of the black dog has been much obscured because of its great age. It relates away back prior to the Revolution, when the New Jersey coast was for the most part unpeopled. It was a desolate stretch of sand, pine forest and salt marsh. Upon the narrow strip of land that separates Barnegat Bay from the ocean there then lived men who were so villainous that they made a business of luring ships to the shore by means of false lights, that in stormy weather shone afar out to the jaded sailors, precisely as bright as the brightest beacons of hope. When a vessel would be wrecked, the pirates gayly plundered it. It was their habit to murder the crews.
One night there came a great storm which tossed the vessels upon the sea like little chips. The Jersey coast was strewn with wreckage and many strong ships lay dying upon the bar. No coast has proved so formidable to navigation as this New Jersey shore, just a brown lip of land rearing from the sea. From a vessel the coast looks so low that one wonders why each wave has not swallowed it.
During this storm a fine full rigged ship struck the bar directly
opposite the stronghold of the band of pirates. They ran down to the
beach and cheered and caroused, for they had not even been put to the
trouble of deceiving the pilot and decoying the ship upon the bar.
The thing had happened without labor or plan. They gathered in a
crowd at the edge of the surf and watched the ship's people clinging
to the rigging and looking to-ward the shore. They clung in bunches,
lines, irregular groups, reminding one of some kind of insects.
Sometimes a monstrous white wave would thunder over the ship, bearing
off perhaps two or three sailors whose grasp it had torn away and
tumbling the bodies into the wide swirl of foam that covered the sea.
Soon they grew so weary that they began to drop off one by one into
the water, unable to stand the strain of the terrific rushes of the
waves. The pirates on the shore laughed when they saw a mass of men
try to launch the boats, for they knew that none could live in that
sea. Presently, the bodies of sailors and passengers began to wash up
at the feet of the pirates, who searched them for jewels and money.
The hull of the ship was hidden in the white smothering riot of
water, but the rigging, with its lessening burden of men, was faintly
outlined upon the dead black sky. The pirates became busily engaged
in overhauling the corpses.
[ENTER THE HOUND.]
At last a fine black hound emerged slowly from the water and crawled painfully up the beach. He was dragging the body of a young man by the shirt collar. The dog had fought a tremendous battle. It seemed incredible that he could have forced his way to shore with the body through the wild surf. The young man's face was ghastly in death. There was a grievous red wound in his temple where, perhaps, he had been flung against some wreckage by the waves. The dog hauled the body out of reach of the water and then went to whine and sniff at the dead man's hand. He wagged his tail expectantly. At last he settled, shivering, back upon his haunches and gave vent to a long howl, a dog's cry of death and despair and fear, that cry that is in the most indescribable key of woe. It made the pirates turn their heads instantly, startled. They gathered about the dead body and the dog to stare curiously. At the approach of this band of assassins, vagabonds and outcasts the hound braced himself, the hair on his neck ruffled and his teeth gleaming. For a moment they confronted each other, the pirates and the dog, guardian of his master's corpse. There stood the dog, a tempest of water behind him and the evil crowd of men before him, and not even a caress possible from the pallid hand at his feet. No doubt he did not comprehend the odds of his battle. He knew only one thing - to be faithful until he was dead.
Then one particularly precious villain perceived the glitter of gems upon the dead man's hand. He reached covetously forward, and the dog lunged for his throat. An instant later, there were many curses and the thud of blows and then, suddenly, a human like scream from the dog. He crawled until he could lay his head upon the dead man's chest, and there he died, as the robbers were pulling the rings off his master's fingers.
The phantom of this black hound is what the fishermen see as they
return home from their boats and nets later at night. There is a
dreadful hatchet wound in the animal's head, and from it the phantom
blood bubbles. His jaws drip angry foam and his eyes are lit with
crimson fire. He gallops continually with his nose to the ground as
if he were trailing some one. If you are ever down upon the New
Jersey coast at midnight and meet this specter, you had better run.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Stephen Crane is one of the most celebrated witers associated with the State of New Jersey. He was born the day after Halloween in 1871, in Newark, the last of fourteen children. His father, a minister, moved the family to Paterson in 1876, and after his death in 1880, Stephen's widowed mother moved the family to Asbury Park, where he remained until he entered college in 1890. After only one semester at Syracuse University, Stephen began working for the New York Tribune as a journalist, and as author of a few well reviewed, but not commercially successful novels. In 1893, he wrote the "The Red Badge of Courage" which was a bestseller here and in Europe. He continued to pen novels, poems, short stories, and newspaper articles at a tremendous pace until his death in 1900, at the age of 29, from tuberculosis. The only memorial to him in New Jersey is the Stephen Crane Museum, 508 Fourth Avenue, Asbury Park, which is the house where he grew up. A wall which commemerated his birth place in downtown Newark was bulldozed in 1996 to make way for a new parking lot.]
SOURCES:
Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings
Edited by: Olav W. Fryckstaedt
Upsula College, East Orange, NJ, 1963
TITLE PHOTO FROM:
Lure of Long Beach
By: George B. Somerville
Board of Trade, Long Beach, NJ, 1914 ---- BUY
THIS BOOK!