I was born in South Jersey in the early 1960s and raised as a bottle digger/collector. My father Lee Hansell and his friends Dick Watson, Eddy Glassman, Boyd Hitchner and others used to use old topo (and other types of) maps as well as Beck's very famous books to locate old towns around the pines. We would spend HOURS driving dirt and sand roads discovering pits, privies and places where people would dump their trash. We wold dig these areas and collect the bottles and stuff... I had a love for the pines almost since my birth. Years passed and I would explore the Pines myself with friends or other bottle diggers or geocaching companions.
Sometime around 2003 a couple of friends and I found a road near the Batsto Lookout Tower that we decided to investigate. My memory is a little sketchy about how close to the tower the road actually was. It was paved, at first, then turned into a hard seemingly well traveled dirt road. It seemed to go on for miles but nothing of huge interest was found. We decided to find a place to turn around and head back. It was just starting to get a tiny bit dark and way up in the distance I could see the tail lights of another car. Se we were discussing that they were on one of the cross road and were heading out before it got dark... so I remember focusing on the taillights when all of a sudden something big and dark crossed the road infront of us... I remember that for a second it blocked out the tail light of the car ahead... I stopped quickly first because I thought I was going to hit it and secondly my brain wasn't processing what it was. I asked my friends if they saw that and the guy infront said yes but the girl in back said no. She asked what it was and I said I wasn't sure... I pulled ahead a tiny bit to where it crossed and there was no crossroad, path or trail... there was nothing to indicate that something was just there moving... I remember saying that it was fast like a horse, but that it appeared to be... well... a big black mattress... like someone was carrying it across the road BUT FAST! But no one was around and no one could have gotten out of sight that fast. It wasn't dark enough that they could have ducked down without being seen.
So to this day I have no idea what that was.
Sometime around 2003 a couple of friends and I found a road near the Batsto Lookout Tower that we decided to investigate. My memory is a little sketchy about how close to the tower the road actually was. It was paved, at first, then turned into a hard seemingly well traveled dirt road. It seemed to go on for miles but nothing of huge interest was found. We decided to find a place to turn around and head back. It was just starting to get a tiny bit dark and way up in the distance I could see the tail lights of another car. Se we were discussing that they were on one of the cross road and were heading out before it got dark... so I remember focusing on the taillights when all of a sudden something big and dark crossed the road infront of us... I remember that for a second it blocked out the tail light of the car ahead... I stopped quickly first because I thought I was going to hit it and secondly my brain wasn't processing what it was. I asked my friends if they saw that and the guy infront said yes but the girl in back said no. She asked what it was and I said I wasn't sure... I pulled ahead a tiny bit to where it crossed and there was no crossroad, path or trail... there was nothing to indicate that something was just there moving... I remember saying that it was fast like a horse, but that it appeared to be... well... a big black mattress... like someone was carrying it across the road BUT FAST! But no one was around and no one could have gotten out of sight that fast. It wasn't dark enough that they could have ducked down without being seen.
So to this day I have no idea what that was.
