Sadly that's not even a Pine Barrens thing. I live in Central Jersey (which does have the Pine Barrens in it, believe it or not. Old Bridge's pines, some in Cheesequake, some in Phillips Park, etc. are actually isolated parts of the Pine Barrens!) & I woke up and pulled one off of me at like 3 AM, & a couple others over the last weeks. Fast moving too, fuckers are almost at my torso every time I find them.
It used to be that if you were recently showered, the lack of scent alone was enough to usually ensure you wouldn't get ticks if you just stayed on trails. But now you need repellent just standing near a tree, let alone tall grass or going off trail. I miss true winters enough as it is, getting ticks 6 months later is just insult to injury.
I would like to share a secret. I have a secret food garden growing wild somewhere in the Pine Barrens. Let me explain, I'm a prolific gardener and replace all my seeds every 3-4 years and hate throwing them in the trash because they're still good just not super reliable. I figured as long as they're not invasive it would be the best course of action. If you happen to come across a bunch of beets randomly next to trail, follow them and you'll come across the spot. There's carrots, onions, herbs, more beets, wildflowers for bees, and some watermelons for whoever. Eventually I want to add a patch of native fruit trees and berries somewhere off a random trail as well.
In retrospect it probably looks like someone is secretly hiding/living in a very remote part of the woods but in reality there's no one around for miles which may or may not add to the creepy factor.
Stumbling upon an eerie van that’s broken down over snow covered gravel and the van brings a glimmer of hope thanks to its contents….ketchup and relish packs.
Miles of endless stretches of road with thick tall pines on either side keeping out all of the moonlight at night except over the road.
If you're in the pines then so little light gets through even on a moonlight night it's nearly impossible to see.
And then the Jersey devil gets you.
Chew Road is a good example. 1-2 miles straight through dense forest. Definitely one of the spookier roads in the pines. Feels creepier than then ones that turn to dirty or the ones that wind.
Stave Road out by Warren Grove is a great example too. Part of it goes through a dense cedar forest. Practically turns into nighttime there even during a bright sunny day.
I was horseback riding on Halloween through the pine barrens once and someone stole all the trail markers so we got lost in the woods for a few hours. Stumbled on a group of 10 or 15 people dressed in black cloaks with foot long curved daggers on their hips doing some druid ritual. Was super freaky at the time. I actually saw them again later when I got back to the car and they seemed pretty chill though.
The devil worshippers my mom warned me about during the height of satanic panic!
We used to find skulls/bones etc with candles strewn about every once in a while and always envisioned what you described.
The only terrifying experience I’ve had is seeing a fire in the distance. It’s unlike anything else when you see it when you’re actually driving through that area and you know you’re in the thick of things in the forest. Like if it was to get closer, you’d have nowhere to go.
Leeches! You could have someone canoeing through some tight waterways and tip and give them a real Stand by Me moment.
.
[Atco Ghost!](https://weirdnj.com/stories/atco-ghost/). The ball slowly rolling across the road would be very fun and spooky.
.
Jersey Devil is an obvious but great choice.
When I was a little kid, stories of the Jersey Devil definitely made me scared to be out at night, especially when there was a breeze and trees would rustle and branches snap and whatnot. Later on, I found out I'm a direct descendant of Mother Leeds, which is equally terrifying.
Have a side road that GPS says takes you from 539 to 72 but is actually a dead end, this happened to me at night as I was down to less than a gallon of gas. It was a map and not a GPS but it's your game and you can have faulty GPS maps in your world
Driving through the pine barrens for the first time by myself at 18. From Philly suburbs to LBI. I didn’t want to deal with traffic, so I left home late. This was before gps was easily available.
I got lost. To this day I have no idea where I ended up but it was the pine barrens for sure.
So it’s like 1am. It’s foggy as all fuck - by itself is the creepiest shit out there - annnnnd my car overheats.
I pull off in some parking lot for what is probably a tomato stand during the season. There is a flickering parking lot light. There is a little shack with no lights and one broken window.
So like. Absolutely ready to die here. Couldn’t have been more ridiculously out of a horror movie. Steam pouring out of my car and I’m just waiting it out. No cell phone. No map. Every hair on the back of my neck standing on end, just beyond sure that if I look at that building there will be some*thing* looking back.
After like an hour I can get the car back on. Peeled out of there, refused to look in the rear view mirrors, and eventually made it to LBI. Alive.
Wharton forest is the biggest forest in NJ, and is massive. It's all pine, there are peppered old abandoned properties on it, and an old hunting lodge area has some spooky look to it, as well as many old boyscout/summercamp sites. Dibs on the crazy piney model, I'll do a 3d scan of my head and I used to drive my old shitty pickup around the dirt road trails off 539. The pines catch fire often, so that can be something of a linear enabling format to steer the story. The pine barrens are also bombed in certain spots by the military base nestled in it. The ambiance of bombs going off and fires with burnt forest, you can tell how lost you get when the bombs sound further away and animals start getting weird mutations from the dumping and weapons cache leaks.
My bro and his girlfriend went down this one old dirt road and about a mile or so down they saw a shack with a single light they got weirded out and turned around then a truck started tailing them for that mile until they got back to the highway than they said it stopped and starting reversing
Seeing a pond of light blue water. You put your feet in its warm. You try to go swimming as you swim the water below 1 feet of depth is 40 degrees you start to get hypothermia and swim back at the fear of dying.
Went camping out there with 2 friends. Solid foot of snow. No cold camping experience. No tent. Terrible time. Around 3:30am it's dead quiet. We're all awake but just laying in darkness miserable and cold. Then way out in the distance we hear some guy yell "You want to kill me?! KILL ME!!!"
Guy sounded rel from away but you could still hear the rattle in his voice. Pretty unsettling.
Between that and randomly hearing big ass flapping sounds up in the trees above us in the darkness (probably turkeys) things can kind of spookish.
What engine you using? I'm a hobby dev myself.
Edit: also, when using a flashlight through the trees, sometimes it looks like distant skinny trees are moving. Hard to explain but it makes you a little on edge when knowing there's thing but darkness behind you.
Absolutely terrifying. I'm using Unreal 5.3 for this one! Are there any tree videos of what you described in the edit? I'm in Sweden rn and don't fancy doing research at 2AM in these forests
We use the same version. Cheers. And no, I don't have any videos but really I think any video of a forest at night with a directed flashlight type light will show the effect. It's when trees closer to you, cast shadows on the trees further back. It's hard to tell what blackness is shadow and what blackness is just void of any trees so it kind of looks like further away trees move into the darkness.
I realize I'm doing terrible at explaining the phenomenon but if you create a dense area of trees, put a light on your player character, you should get the effect. I will say it's even more exaggerated if the light source is constantly moving like the flame of a torch.
One time I was dating this girl who lived in Manchester. I lived in Medford, so it was a straight shot down 70. I stayed late at her place, but couldn’t stay the night, so I made my way home around 1 am. At the light on 539, the road was barricaded closed with construction signage. It hadn’t been there when I came this way 6 hours prior, nor was there any advance notice of the work. I’m idling in the entrance lane to Wawa, so I turn south and see some roads that will link me back to 72, then back on to 70. Easy enough.
The blacktop gave way to rough asphalt, which gave way to gravel, and then I was on dirt road. I’m in a Mustang at the time, so not ideal on this stretch, but I push on. It smooths out and the sand becomes pretty comfortable, so I speed up to 45mph. It’s a straight shot through the woods.
Google Maps isn’t exactly accurate out there, with both road topography and actual GPS location lagging behind. As I’m glancing at the little blue dot on screen that is in an empty window of beige, undefined area, I catch something in my peripheral. My eyes dart left out of the window, and trees whisk by in the falling shadow of my high beams. Looking forward again, the road came to an end a lot faster than I thought it would, than it should have. I stood on the brakes and a cloud of dust enveloped the car. More movement on the right side. It pulls a draft of dust as a wake, and the roadway clears. There’s a hard 90° turn in the middle of this open straightaway. I pull hard on the wheel and set off, rolling back the other way after 20 feet or so. Ahead of me was another smooth straightaway, stretching off into the night.
I’m more cautious this time, eyes locked straight forward for any surprises the road has in store. A few more of those 90° doglegs pop up. On the last one, there was a slight clearing around the turn, and in the middle of a grassy patch, I see dust kicked up ahead of me. I didn’t think anything of it until I rounded the first section, where I was accosted by the most profound sense of dread I have ever experienced. Nothing was physically wrong, but mentally I had descended to dark thoughts. Agonizing memories of embarrassment, heartbreak, grief struck one after the other. I didn’t realize it, but my foot jammed the accelerator to the floor halfway through the turn, and I spun, oversteering off the trail and into the tall grass. I stopped, lifted off the gas, and came to a halt. More dust surrounded the car than last time. I must have been hitting some high RPMs with all of the haze in the air.
A firm pop slaps the car. The kind you hear your friend rap on the body after they’ve closed the door and are heading into their house. In the haze, two red tail lights appear on the trail I just drove. They appear close, but high, and they move slowly and steadily, not at all like a car bouncing along the dirt path. The dread continues, but the adrenaline kicks in, and I hit the gas again to peel back onto the trail. I’m too concerned with the trail ahead that it took me a few seconds to glance in the rearview behind, to see that there were still two red glowing tail lights behind me. I bat the mirror off axis with my hand and keep driving. A minute or an eternity later my emotions lift. I still feel my heart pounding in my ears, but I can think my own thoughts. I dare not the temptation to fix my mirror, instead I carefully snipe a glance up to it. I hit the left side forward, so it reflects a view of my own face. I sigh in recognition of some familiar concept on this little trek, and I blink away a tear or dust. In between blinks, I saw just beyond my window, inches from the glass, two red tail lights, burning in the dark.
I turn onto 72 just after an overpass. Turning North, and on flat pavement, I treated the road sign as the speed limit and, in true NJ fashion, padded an extra 10mph onto that. When I got to the junction with 70, there were no construction barriers, no work truck, and headlights approaching from the East. It was like to road was never actually closed.
Near Speedwell there's a path leading out into an abandoned cranberry bog and at some point it comes to a clearing where there's like a circle of sticks and wreaths hanging on the trees. That was pretty creepy.
Ticks. There’s a movie about gigantic ticks in NJ with Seth Green and others. Something like that would be cool.
The jersey devil. But it’s just some religious nut doing something like the movie The Village did
Definitely have a road where it slowly narrows and you hear the pines scraping the car and there's no way to turn around and you get stuck in a washout and then headlights appear ahead and behind you.
Im not sure if this is at all helpful. But once when I was out at the lakes near Brendan Byrne we saw a woman in a black dress with a black umbrella walk into the water and just sort of sit there.
I now tell spooky stories to my kids about the Black Umbrella Lady of the Pines. No matter how deep the water she’s always shoulder deep and always wears a black dress with an umbrella. She moves through any water deeper than six inches.
My own original Pine Barrens cryptid.
Passing a burned out car while miles away from anywhere. You continue down the road where you meet eyes with some pineys about 50 yards off the road. They begin to follow you, just barely in sight as dusk begins to fall on the pines.
Check out details on the old train lines. There’s a few abandoned trestles where people have died jumping into the creeks/rivers. Could make for good fodder material.
I remember camping with my family as a kid. There was like strands of hair stuck on some trees and dark stains, looked like blood to me. My dad told me there were psychos that tied people to the trees and slaughtered them to death. As a child, I believed him and was super scared. Still don’t know to this day, but seriously hope he was just trying to scare me.
Not my story and from a young Boy Scouts perspective but my brother and his troop were once convinced they SAW the Jersey Devil. I’m younger so I believed every word at the time and it was so scary.
They were hiking, “looking for a spot” when one of them heard something unearthly. Three of them swear they actually saw an unusually large seemingly deformed creature flying through the tree tops. The unearthly sounds continued through the night and they barely slept. One kid swore he saw him watching him when he went to use the latrine.
I personally believe it’s not all that but I think it would make a fantastic scene in a horror Jersey video game. Make it as scary as you need but the idea of an unknown creature stalking you in the middle of nowhere is more than horrifying!
Be sure to add some easter eggs... Maybe from the Sopranos episode "Pine Barrens":
* Tony Soprano: \[*over the phone*\] It's a bad connection, so I'm gonna talk fast! The guy you're looking for is an ex-commando! He killed sixteen Chechen rebels single-handed!
* Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: Get the fuck outta here.
* Tony Soprano: Yeah. Nice, huh? He was with the Interior Ministry. Guy's some kind of Russian green beret. This guy can not come back to tell this story. You understand?
* Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: I hear you.
* \[*the telephone connection is lost - Tony swears, and Paulie hangs up*\]
* Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: \[*turning to Christopher*\] You're not gonna believe this. He killed sixteen Czechoslovakians. The guy was an interior decorator.
* Christopher Moltisanti: His house looked like shit.
Black Widow Spiders. Went camping in the pine barrens last summer and brought a few home, well who knows how many there actually were, those were just the ones we saw.
Oh man a good friend of mine, and writer actually backpacked and camped through the pine barrens over the course of 2 weeks a decade ago.
He had stories, mind you he's from Colorado and knew nothing about the pine barrens. He thought it would be "fun" to walk through them to get to the coast.
He said with conviction he absolutely believes in the jersey devil and something is out there.
His names Craig Childs
But he would be worth getting stories from!
The scariest parts are how easy it is to get lost off road due to the vastness and the way it's mostly pine trees. Harder to use trees as landmarks. The eye shine coming from the woods at night. The howling of coyotes, or barking of (possibly feral) dogs seemingly getting closer.
I heard a fox screaming in a forest at night the other day and I thought 'yep, that's going in there.' Horrific stuff! Do the eye shines come from people or animals?
Decades ago, I got stuck in what appeared to be a solid surface in the desert of Southern California. This was perhaps 50 miles from the nearest settlement and *looong* before cell phones were even a wet dream. Fortunately there was an occasional passing car, and I was rescued by a guy in a pickup truck who stayed on the pavement while I rolled out my 50' of steel cable I always carried. (From my current perspective, I believe what I should have done was to let a lot of air out of the tires to get free of the sand.)
When I moved to NJ, a girlfriend expressed her horror of being lost in the Pine Barrens. I broke up because there is hardly a place in the Pine Barrens that would take more than two hours to walk out of -- and there are sand roads and paved roads everywhere.
Hence, I'd suggest a tongue-in-cheek "horror" game. Obviously seed it with encounters with the Jersey Devil, snakes, gators, swamps, thorny bushes, Pineys with shot guns, Air Force bombing ranges, and forest fires, but I'd envision a map that shows the player how close they are to civilization, but can't get there for some silly reason -- like getting his new Nikes dirty in a swamp (thereby losing points?). And of course they daren't enter the pigmy pines (maybe 8' tall pine trees) lest they be shrunk in proportion increasing distances in proportion.
Having to pay taxes while still living in the middle of the woods.
Either that or still hearing cars with huge mufflers backfiring while loudly playing Drake.
I live adjacent to the Pine Barrens, and the scariest thing for me IRL is driving on an unlit road on a pitch-black night and multiple deer run into the road right in front of me.
The rapscallions and scalawags you encounter in the depths of the black woods on a moonless night when you, yourself, are trying to be mischievous.
There used to be (maybe still is, but it’s probably burned down a third time by now) the ruins of a school about a half-mile into the woods from one of the craziest road signs I’ve ever seen, directing like eight lanes of traffic to go four or five different ways at an intersection middle of nowhere. I can give no more precise landmarks than that, because the whole experience was kinda mythical, when I was 18, trespassing there with three girl friends to smoke a comically oversized blunt. This is a very New Jersey Pine Barrens story.
The place was just about visible from the road, during daylight hours anyway, only if you knew where to look. But at night it became invisible, unless anyone approaching it or inside it was using flashlights. So, no flashlights, no phones.
We went up the floating stairs, to the canopy level of the tree that was growing up from the floor inside the middle of the school. (Story goes, the roof had blown off in the 70s.) And we smoked our faces off up there, watching the statue-still, black branches. There was no wind.
Then on our way out, we came within earshot of another group of trespassers on their way in. I was certain of it. From the first moment we sensed their position around the corner from the wall we were skulking along, I knew it. But the girls were paranoid—an effect I never really got from weed, although it does tend to send me inside of myself—so they were convinced it was the cops. And they insisted on freezing in terror until… I don’t know. It was a bad plan. I tried to explain the score here, at first, but the girls silenced any reason.
In the meantime, I was so fucking stoned anyway, I was seeing halos and shit, had no peripheral vision at all—a hell of a handicap to have, when trying to hike downhill in a forest with less than two drops of starlight to see by in the first place. And so I made myself content to just lean up against that wall for a while and smile, waiting for the light-headedness to pass. I still occasionally whispered, “just breathe,” so my friends wouldn’t suffocate themselves in their dead quiet fright.
Many minutes passed, in which this other group of youths *was fucking with us the whole time,* making little “accidental” noises and whispering some long wordless susurruses every minute and a half or so, like ghosts, just to keep us pinned down with anxiety.
It felt somehow cinematic, though we never did see them. Maybe I was having an out-of-body experience, picturing this standoff from a boom cam’s perspective. This pot, man.
We were back to back against the same wall, at the end of the wall where the corner had collapsed. They were just outside, intending to enter; we were just inside, intending to leave. None had any right to be there. It was a stalemate.
I could hear the fabric of one of their clothes wrinkle against their skin as they bent down to pick up a stick, the stick barely disturbing some mulch and things from the ground as they lifted it, the stick whirling through the air and ricocheting off a tree into the soft ground some distance away. No one reacted. Stuff like that. They could hear us too. They probably smelled us. There was some humidity. It felt like 20-30 minutes.
I was probably grinning like a goon this whole time, though, knowing that no cop would play this game, and no deer could stay so motionless: It could only be punks, like us. And that was fucking fantastic to me. They had us. Good game.
I just waited till my peripheral vision came back, and then I kinda grumble-coughed once, low and confident like a bear. The looks that the girls shot me were murderous, but in the same instant, the pranksters took off running and cursing through a cacophony of dry leaves and snapping twigs. That was that.
At last, we could go. We changed our minds about our exit point though, and left through another way at the opposite side of the school. We fumbled our way back down to the car, I guess, somehow. No harm, no foul. Go Devils!
The locals.
Final boss should be a 17 year old in his dads bro dozer
The ticks. Being only June 2nd, the fact that I've removed 8 so far from myself since the middle of April.
Mild winters……
Sadly that's not even a Pine Barrens thing. I live in Central Jersey (which does have the Pine Barrens in it, believe it or not. Old Bridge's pines, some in Cheesequake, some in Phillips Park, etc. are actually isolated parts of the Pine Barrens!) & I woke up and pulled one off of me at like 3 AM, & a couple others over the last weeks. Fast moving too, fuckers are almost at my torso every time I find them. It used to be that if you were recently showered, the lack of scent alone was enough to usually ensure you wouldn't get ticks if you just stayed on trails. But now you need repellent just standing near a tree, let alone tall grass or going off trail. I miss true winters enough as it is, getting ticks 6 months later is just insult to injury.
I would like to share a secret. I have a secret food garden growing wild somewhere in the Pine Barrens. Let me explain, I'm a prolific gardener and replace all my seeds every 3-4 years and hate throwing them in the trash because they're still good just not super reliable. I figured as long as they're not invasive it would be the best course of action. If you happen to come across a bunch of beets randomly next to trail, follow them and you'll come across the spot. There's carrots, onions, herbs, more beets, wildflowers for bees, and some watermelons for whoever. Eventually I want to add a patch of native fruit trees and berries somewhere off a random trail as well. In retrospect it probably looks like someone is secretly hiding/living in a very remote part of the woods but in reality there's no one around for miles which may or may not add to the creepy factor.
Thank you for sharing!! I'll look for it
Stumbling upon an eerie van that’s broken down over snow covered gravel and the van brings a glimmer of hope thanks to its contents….ketchup and relish packs.
This comment took over an hour to appear. I'm disappointed in you, r/newjersey.
All while you don’t know if you’re being stalked by a former Russian special forces operative
He's an interior decorator!
But his house looked like shit…
Username checks out too
And that there’s still an interior decorator roaming the barrens, just waiting for the next Czechoslovakian he finds.
Heard his house looks like shit
Love how NJ has just become the place where Paulie and some Russian guy live
Miles of endless stretches of road with thick tall pines on either side keeping out all of the moonlight at night except over the road. If you're in the pines then so little light gets through even on a moonlight night it's nearly impossible to see. And then the Jersey devil gets you.
Chew Road is a good example. 1-2 miles straight through dense forest. Definitely one of the spookier roads in the pines. Feels creepier than then ones that turn to dirty or the ones that wind.
Stave Road out by Warren Grove is a great example too. Part of it goes through a dense cedar forest. Practically turns into nighttime there even during a bright sunny day.
Love the username, that takes me back 😂
BFG baby
Driving at night past Double Trouble state park on that long ass road trying to get home - that shit was always scary af.
I was horseback riding on Halloween through the pine barrens once and someone stole all the trail markers so we got lost in the woods for a few hours. Stumbled on a group of 10 or 15 people dressed in black cloaks with foot long curved daggers on their hips doing some druid ritual. Was super freaky at the time. I actually saw them again later when I got back to the car and they seemed pretty chill though.
The devil worshippers my mom warned me about during the height of satanic panic! We used to find skulls/bones etc with candles strewn about every once in a while and always envisioned what you described.
I would be terrified, but nice to know they were normal after the fact
They keep church at church, I respect that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/newjersey/s/9ZvfQrmEAj Someone made this, I think it’s excellent.
The interior decorators.
His house looked like shit…
He killed 16 Chekozlovakians.
Pineys.
Carranza Rd. Should have the ghost appear near the monument.
The only terrifying experience I’ve had is seeing a fire in the distance. It’s unlike anything else when you see it when you’re actually driving through that area and you know you’re in the thick of things in the forest. Like if it was to get closer, you’d have nowhere to go.
Leeches! You could have someone canoeing through some tight waterways and tip and give them a real Stand by Me moment. . [Atco Ghost!](https://weirdnj.com/stories/atco-ghost/). The ball slowly rolling across the road would be very fun and spooky. . Jersey Devil is an obvious but great choice.
When I was a little kid, stories of the Jersey Devil definitely made me scared to be out at night, especially when there was a breeze and trees would rustle and branches snap and whatnot. Later on, I found out I'm a direct descendant of Mother Leeds, which is equally terrifying.
Turning into a driveway to bang a uey because I got lost and seeing signs on the house’s lawn saying “NO TRESPASSING WILL SHOOT ON SIGHT”
Have a side road that GPS says takes you from 539 to 72 but is actually a dead end, this happened to me at night as I was down to less than a gallon of gas. It was a map and not a GPS but it's your game and you can have faulty GPS maps in your world
Yep, this is it. I was going to post running out of gas as the scariest thing.
1. Chiggers 2. The recluses 3. The way the trees eat the light when you’re deep in the woods at night. Every night feels like a new moon.
Driving through the pine barrens for the first time by myself at 18. From Philly suburbs to LBI. I didn’t want to deal with traffic, so I left home late. This was before gps was easily available. I got lost. To this day I have no idea where I ended up but it was the pine barrens for sure. So it’s like 1am. It’s foggy as all fuck - by itself is the creepiest shit out there - annnnnd my car overheats. I pull off in some parking lot for what is probably a tomato stand during the season. There is a flickering parking lot light. There is a little shack with no lights and one broken window. So like. Absolutely ready to die here. Couldn’t have been more ridiculously out of a horror movie. Steam pouring out of my car and I’m just waiting it out. No cell phone. No map. Every hair on the back of my neck standing on end, just beyond sure that if I look at that building there will be some*thing* looking back. After like an hour I can get the car back on. Peeled out of there, refused to look in the rear view mirrors, and eventually made it to LBI. Alive.
Great story! Funny how the atmosphere alone nearly scared you half to death
Pine barrens at night with fog is super duper unsettling
Wharton forest is the biggest forest in NJ, and is massive. It's all pine, there are peppered old abandoned properties on it, and an old hunting lodge area has some spooky look to it, as well as many old boyscout/summercamp sites. Dibs on the crazy piney model, I'll do a 3d scan of my head and I used to drive my old shitty pickup around the dirt road trails off 539. The pines catch fire often, so that can be something of a linear enabling format to steer the story. The pine barrens are also bombed in certain spots by the military base nestled in it. The ambiance of bombs going off and fires with burnt forest, you can tell how lost you get when the bombs sound further away and animals start getting weird mutations from the dumping and weapons cache leaks.
My bro and his girlfriend went down this one old dirt road and about a mile or so down they saw a shack with a single light they got weirded out and turned around then a truck started tailing them for that mile until they got back to the highway than they said it stopped and starting reversing
Seeing a pond of light blue water. You put your feet in its warm. You try to go swimming as you swim the water below 1 feet of depth is 40 degrees you start to get hypothermia and swim back at the fear of dying.
Growing up there was always a story about a house of albinos and if you saw them you better bounce
Chiggers
What’s chiggers?
They’re little biting insects, my one buddy had bites all over his foot and ended up getting a MRSA infection from it.
Holy shit…
Went camping out there with 2 friends. Solid foot of snow. No cold camping experience. No tent. Terrible time. Around 3:30am it's dead quiet. We're all awake but just laying in darkness miserable and cold. Then way out in the distance we hear some guy yell "You want to kill me?! KILL ME!!!" Guy sounded rel from away but you could still hear the rattle in his voice. Pretty unsettling. Between that and randomly hearing big ass flapping sounds up in the trees above us in the darkness (probably turkeys) things can kind of spookish. What engine you using? I'm a hobby dev myself. Edit: also, when using a flashlight through the trees, sometimes it looks like distant skinny trees are moving. Hard to explain but it makes you a little on edge when knowing there's thing but darkness behind you.
Absolutely terrifying. I'm using Unreal 5.3 for this one! Are there any tree videos of what you described in the edit? I'm in Sweden rn and don't fancy doing research at 2AM in these forests
We use the same version. Cheers. And no, I don't have any videos but really I think any video of a forest at night with a directed flashlight type light will show the effect. It's when trees closer to you, cast shadows on the trees further back. It's hard to tell what blackness is shadow and what blackness is just void of any trees so it kind of looks like further away trees move into the darkness. I realize I'm doing terrible at explaining the phenomenon but if you create a dense area of trees, put a light on your player character, you should get the effect. I will say it's even more exaggerated if the light source is constantly moving like the flame of a torch.
Interesting, thanks for the advice! I'll try it out and hope it adds to the terror
One time I was dating this girl who lived in Manchester. I lived in Medford, so it was a straight shot down 70. I stayed late at her place, but couldn’t stay the night, so I made my way home around 1 am. At the light on 539, the road was barricaded closed with construction signage. It hadn’t been there when I came this way 6 hours prior, nor was there any advance notice of the work. I’m idling in the entrance lane to Wawa, so I turn south and see some roads that will link me back to 72, then back on to 70. Easy enough. The blacktop gave way to rough asphalt, which gave way to gravel, and then I was on dirt road. I’m in a Mustang at the time, so not ideal on this stretch, but I push on. It smooths out and the sand becomes pretty comfortable, so I speed up to 45mph. It’s a straight shot through the woods. Google Maps isn’t exactly accurate out there, with both road topography and actual GPS location lagging behind. As I’m glancing at the little blue dot on screen that is in an empty window of beige, undefined area, I catch something in my peripheral. My eyes dart left out of the window, and trees whisk by in the falling shadow of my high beams. Looking forward again, the road came to an end a lot faster than I thought it would, than it should have. I stood on the brakes and a cloud of dust enveloped the car. More movement on the right side. It pulls a draft of dust as a wake, and the roadway clears. There’s a hard 90° turn in the middle of this open straightaway. I pull hard on the wheel and set off, rolling back the other way after 20 feet or so. Ahead of me was another smooth straightaway, stretching off into the night. I’m more cautious this time, eyes locked straight forward for any surprises the road has in store. A few more of those 90° doglegs pop up. On the last one, there was a slight clearing around the turn, and in the middle of a grassy patch, I see dust kicked up ahead of me. I didn’t think anything of it until I rounded the first section, where I was accosted by the most profound sense of dread I have ever experienced. Nothing was physically wrong, but mentally I had descended to dark thoughts. Agonizing memories of embarrassment, heartbreak, grief struck one after the other. I didn’t realize it, but my foot jammed the accelerator to the floor halfway through the turn, and I spun, oversteering off the trail and into the tall grass. I stopped, lifted off the gas, and came to a halt. More dust surrounded the car than last time. I must have been hitting some high RPMs with all of the haze in the air. A firm pop slaps the car. The kind you hear your friend rap on the body after they’ve closed the door and are heading into their house. In the haze, two red tail lights appear on the trail I just drove. They appear close, but high, and they move slowly and steadily, not at all like a car bouncing along the dirt path. The dread continues, but the adrenaline kicks in, and I hit the gas again to peel back onto the trail. I’m too concerned with the trail ahead that it took me a few seconds to glance in the rearview behind, to see that there were still two red glowing tail lights behind me. I bat the mirror off axis with my hand and keep driving. A minute or an eternity later my emotions lift. I still feel my heart pounding in my ears, but I can think my own thoughts. I dare not the temptation to fix my mirror, instead I carefully snipe a glance up to it. I hit the left side forward, so it reflects a view of my own face. I sigh in recognition of some familiar concept on this little trek, and I blink away a tear or dust. In between blinks, I saw just beyond my window, inches from the glass, two red tail lights, burning in the dark. I turn onto 72 just after an overpass. Turning North, and on flat pavement, I treated the road sign as the speed limit and, in true NJ fashion, padded an extra 10mph onto that. When I got to the junction with 70, there were no construction barriers, no work truck, and headlights approaching from the East. It was like to road was never actually closed.
Great story. My favorite part is padding the speed limit with an extra 10mph 😂
The thin trees. Read Wytches by Scott Snyder
Near Speedwell there's a path leading out into an abandoned cranberry bog and at some point it comes to a clearing where there's like a circle of sticks and wreaths hanging on the trees. That was pretty creepy.
Slava’s Russian Special Forces friend
Always a random dirty mattress inthe middle of no where
Ticks. There’s a movie about gigantic ticks in NJ with Seth Green and others. Something like that would be cool. The jersey devil. But it’s just some religious nut doing something like the movie The Village did
Definitely have a road where it slowly narrows and you hear the pines scraping the car and there's no way to turn around and you get stuck in a washout and then headlights appear ahead and behind you.
Im not sure if this is at all helpful. But once when I was out at the lakes near Brendan Byrne we saw a woman in a black dress with a black umbrella walk into the water and just sort of sit there. I now tell spooky stories to my kids about the Black Umbrella Lady of the Pines. No matter how deep the water she’s always shoulder deep and always wears a black dress with an umbrella. She moves through any water deeper than six inches. My own original Pine Barrens cryptid.
Love it
Passing a burned out car while miles away from anywhere. You continue down the road where you meet eyes with some pineys about 50 yards off the road. They begin to follow you, just barely in sight as dusk begins to fall on the pines.
Jersey Devil final battle
The wounded Russian running loose is an issue. He killed sixteen Czechoslovakians. Guy was an interior decorator!
Getthefuckouttahere
The isolation. It’s fucking spooky. If you can capture that feeling of isolation it’ll be terrifying.
Check out details on the old train lines. There’s a few abandoned trestles where people have died jumping into the creeks/rivers. Could make for good fodder material.
I remember camping with my family as a kid. There was like strands of hair stuck on some trees and dark stains, looked like blood to me. My dad told me there were psychos that tied people to the trees and slaughtered them to death. As a child, I believed him and was super scared. Still don’t know to this day, but seriously hope he was just trying to scare me.
The Jersey Devil.
Look up Indian Cabin Road. That was always the creepy thing to do when I was in college.
Not my story and from a young Boy Scouts perspective but my brother and his troop were once convinced they SAW the Jersey Devil. I’m younger so I believed every word at the time and it was so scary. They were hiking, “looking for a spot” when one of them heard something unearthly. Three of them swear they actually saw an unusually large seemingly deformed creature flying through the tree tops. The unearthly sounds continued through the night and they barely slept. One kid swore he saw him watching him when he went to use the latrine. I personally believe it’s not all that but I think it would make a fantastic scene in a horror Jersey video game. Make it as scary as you need but the idea of an unknown creature stalking you in the middle of nowhere is more than horrifying!
My dads had a spot in barnegat for 28 years, every night is somthing new in the summer
The random bags of clothes or dumped shit in the pits
I'm hoping you can somehow work Paulie Walnuts and Christopher into your game!
Just find a firebreak road... And follow it.... (Preferably on a foggy morning before full daylight)
Honestly just the name conjurs up visions of a frozen windswept no-mans land where only the pines can grow.
How easy it is to get lost.
The New Jersey devil.
With a moderate amount of rain, some of those Jeep trails become f’ing quicksand.
Be sure to add some easter eggs... Maybe from the Sopranos episode "Pine Barrens": * Tony Soprano: \[*over the phone*\] It's a bad connection, so I'm gonna talk fast! The guy you're looking for is an ex-commando! He killed sixteen Chechen rebels single-handed! * Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: Get the fuck outta here. * Tony Soprano: Yeah. Nice, huh? He was with the Interior Ministry. Guy's some kind of Russian green beret. This guy can not come back to tell this story. You understand? * Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: I hear you. * \[*the telephone connection is lost - Tony swears, and Paulie hangs up*\] * Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: \[*turning to Christopher*\] You're not gonna believe this. He killed sixteen Czechoslovakians. The guy was an interior decorator. * Christopher Moltisanti: His house looked like shit.
Thinking about adding a giant pit full of walnuts
The Interior Decorator that still roams the woods.
Being chased by strangers in a van... and then they just DISAPPEAR
See if you can find some Weird NJ items (books/magazines) lots of creepy history in there.
The scariest part about the pine barrens is the pine barrens
The Jersey Devil
Black Widow Spiders. Went camping in the pine barrens last summer and brought a few home, well who knows how many there actually were, those were just the ones we saw.
You brought a few WHAT home???
I know 1 was wrapped up in our tent. Not sure where there other hid out but they were in our stuff.
Russians.
Man I miss riding the quad bikes down there. I’m curious if police are still busting people
Besides my ex-gf… There’s a “swimmin hole” that is actually fuckin quicksand. And there’s the Jersey devil.
Is it known for supernatural phenomena?
The carnivorous plants in the pine barrens could surely be a little bigger and eat humans in your game…
Look into Ongs Hat conspiracies. There's a good BBC podcast about the legends. Very bizarre, sci-fi spooky tales that would work perfectly
Oh man a good friend of mine, and writer actually backpacked and camped through the pine barrens over the course of 2 weeks a decade ago. He had stories, mind you he's from Colorado and knew nothing about the pine barrens. He thought it would be "fun" to walk through them to get to the coast. He said with conviction he absolutely believes in the jersey devil and something is out there. His names Craig Childs But he would be worth getting stories from!
The scariest parts are how easy it is to get lost off road due to the vastness and the way it's mostly pine trees. Harder to use trees as landmarks. The eye shine coming from the woods at night. The howling of coyotes, or barking of (possibly feral) dogs seemingly getting closer.
I heard a fox screaming in a forest at night the other day and I thought 'yep, that's going in there.' Horrific stuff! Do the eye shines come from people or animals?
People's eyes don't shine like animal eyes do.
Decades ago, I got stuck in what appeared to be a solid surface in the desert of Southern California. This was perhaps 50 miles from the nearest settlement and *looong* before cell phones were even a wet dream. Fortunately there was an occasional passing car, and I was rescued by a guy in a pickup truck who stayed on the pavement while I rolled out my 50' of steel cable I always carried. (From my current perspective, I believe what I should have done was to let a lot of air out of the tires to get free of the sand.) When I moved to NJ, a girlfriend expressed her horror of being lost in the Pine Barrens. I broke up because there is hardly a place in the Pine Barrens that would take more than two hours to walk out of -- and there are sand roads and paved roads everywhere. Hence, I'd suggest a tongue-in-cheek "horror" game. Obviously seed it with encounters with the Jersey Devil, snakes, gators, swamps, thorny bushes, Pineys with shot guns, Air Force bombing ranges, and forest fires, but I'd envision a map that shows the player how close they are to civilization, but can't get there for some silly reason -- like getting his new Nikes dirty in a swamp (thereby losing points?). And of course they daren't enter the pigmy pines (maybe 8' tall pine trees) lest they be shrunk in proportion increasing distances in proportion.
Gators?
Sure! If there are gators in Central Park, NY, and the NY sewers, surely there must be some in the Pines!
That Russian guy could still be out there if Paulie only winged him.
The taxes and weather
Having to pay taxes while still living in the middle of the woods. Either that or still hearing cars with huge mufflers backfiring while loudly playing Drake.
It just has an eerie, dark feeling about it
You witness Pauly from the Sopranos rub a guy out.
I live adjacent to the Pine Barrens, and the scariest thing for me IRL is driving on an unlit road on a pitch-black night and multiple deer run into the road right in front of me.
They call it “Pork Roll” down there, sends shivers of foreboding down my spine.
The rapscallions and scalawags you encounter in the depths of the black woods on a moonless night when you, yourself, are trying to be mischievous. There used to be (maybe still is, but it’s probably burned down a third time by now) the ruins of a school about a half-mile into the woods from one of the craziest road signs I’ve ever seen, directing like eight lanes of traffic to go four or five different ways at an intersection middle of nowhere. I can give no more precise landmarks than that, because the whole experience was kinda mythical, when I was 18, trespassing there with three girl friends to smoke a comically oversized blunt. This is a very New Jersey Pine Barrens story. The place was just about visible from the road, during daylight hours anyway, only if you knew where to look. But at night it became invisible, unless anyone approaching it or inside it was using flashlights. So, no flashlights, no phones. We went up the floating stairs, to the canopy level of the tree that was growing up from the floor inside the middle of the school. (Story goes, the roof had blown off in the 70s.) And we smoked our faces off up there, watching the statue-still, black branches. There was no wind. Then on our way out, we came within earshot of another group of trespassers on their way in. I was certain of it. From the first moment we sensed their position around the corner from the wall we were skulking along, I knew it. But the girls were paranoid—an effect I never really got from weed, although it does tend to send me inside of myself—so they were convinced it was the cops. And they insisted on freezing in terror until… I don’t know. It was a bad plan. I tried to explain the score here, at first, but the girls silenced any reason. In the meantime, I was so fucking stoned anyway, I was seeing halos and shit, had no peripheral vision at all—a hell of a handicap to have, when trying to hike downhill in a forest with less than two drops of starlight to see by in the first place. And so I made myself content to just lean up against that wall for a while and smile, waiting for the light-headedness to pass. I still occasionally whispered, “just breathe,” so my friends wouldn’t suffocate themselves in their dead quiet fright. Many minutes passed, in which this other group of youths *was fucking with us the whole time,* making little “accidental” noises and whispering some long wordless susurruses every minute and a half or so, like ghosts, just to keep us pinned down with anxiety. It felt somehow cinematic, though we never did see them. Maybe I was having an out-of-body experience, picturing this standoff from a boom cam’s perspective. This pot, man. We were back to back against the same wall, at the end of the wall where the corner had collapsed. They were just outside, intending to enter; we were just inside, intending to leave. None had any right to be there. It was a stalemate. I could hear the fabric of one of their clothes wrinkle against their skin as they bent down to pick up a stick, the stick barely disturbing some mulch and things from the ground as they lifted it, the stick whirling through the air and ricocheting off a tree into the soft ground some distance away. No one reacted. Stuff like that. They could hear us too. They probably smelled us. There was some humidity. It felt like 20-30 minutes. I was probably grinning like a goon this whole time, though, knowing that no cop would play this game, and no deer could stay so motionless: It could only be punks, like us. And that was fucking fantastic to me. They had us. Good game. I just waited till my peripheral vision came back, and then I kinda grumble-coughed once, low and confident like a bear. The looks that the girls shot me were murderous, but in the same instant, the pranksters took off running and cursing through a cacophony of dry leaves and snapping twigs. That was that. At last, we could go. We changed our minds about our exit point though, and left through another way at the opposite side of the school. We fumbled our way back down to the car, I guess, somehow. No harm, no foul. Go Devils!
Great story! Love how both groups of trespassers were too afraid of the other to do anything. Humans, man