Hello, all, new user here. Thank you to the moderator(s) for allowing me to participate.
I stumbled across this site when Googling "Cranberry House," the old school that was near the intersection of Hopewell Road, Breakneck Rd., and Taunton Blvd., below Blue Lake and Taunton Lake and above Lake Pine. I grew up in the area in the '70s, and I remember hearing kind of a "haunted house" story about the Cranberry House:
The story, as I remember it, was that someone bought the Cranberry House, and when they did, the large attic of the place was nailed shut. The new owners asked someone about it (the previous owners maybe?) and were told something to the effect of, "There's nothing up there, don't bother" or "Don't go up there." So of course they did. When they did, they found old mattresses that were stained with blood. Apparently no one could ever explain the blood-stained mattresses, and the adults seemed to be pretty creeped out about it, though it occurred to me that maybe the mattresses were bloody simply because someone had given birth on them...?
Did anyone else ever hear this story or does anyone know anything about it?
Also, it's interesting that the story about Artie Lightfine should come up. My brother had worked for Bob Lightfine at the gas station across from the Cranberry House, and we too had heard the story about his son falling through the ice. The story as I remember it was that a kid had fallen through the ice (no one knew who) and Bob Lightfine was on the rescue crew, and went to rescue the boy...and unexpectingly pulled up his own son. I used to ice skate a lot as a kid, and I remember my parents saying how dangerous it was to fall through ice because (they said) the current would pull you under the ice and then you wouldn't be able to find the hole to get back out (never mind that there's no current in a lake) so one day when I fell through the ice on Blue Lake, I nearly panicked, remembering my parents' warnings along with the story about Bob Lightfine's son. I fell through, and when I tried to climb back out, the ice kept breaking off. The water was deep -- I couldn't touch bottom -- and it was also cold, so I was afraid that even if I didn't go under the ice, I would quickly lose control over my muscles from hypothermia. And there was nobody else around (I guess they had the good sense not to skate yet). So I started yelling for help, so that at least someone would know I was out there if I fell under the ice. A neighbor came out and told me to use my hockey stick to spread out my weight on the ice and use that to try to climb up, and then spread out my arms and legs as wide as possible to reduce the PSI on the ice. It took a few tries, but eventually it worked. I remember skating back home as fast as I could...and by the time I got home, my pant legs were getting stiff with ice. That was on Christmas eve, if I recall right...
Also remember exploring some of the old ghost towns (I think John McPhee described them in one of his books?) out on the other side of Rt. 206 past Atsion Lake and beyond in the 70s...and snorkeling in the "Boy Scout Lake" above Mimosa Lake, the water in that lake was clearer than the water in any other lake in the area as I recall. Somebody mentioned Braddock Mill Lake ... I remember hearing (again, in the 70s) that game wardens had discovered a colony of water moccasins in Braddock Mill Lake, which was a disturbing surprise to me at the time, since I didn't know they ranged that far north. I remember seeing (and trying to catch) lots of ordinary water snakes, but water moccasins are a whole 'nother ball game, being even more poisonous than rattlers or copperheads...I also often think of going back to West Jersey Bogs (to the east of the then-dirt Jackson Road between Medford and Atco) back in the '70s, where a man named Henry Applegate lived with no electricity, no telephone, no running water. I guess he was the custodian of the place. He lived alone there in an old cabin with a propane refrigerator and propane light fixtures on the walls. I can still see Henry sitting in a chair below a propane light sconce on the wall, shrouded in shadow, with moths bouncing off the lamp chimney and throwing big shadows on the old-timey wallpapered walls in the summer heat, telling stories about "the old times" in the bogs (we visited him in the mid '70s, and I believe he had lived there for 20 years or longer before that)... Visiting him was like stepping back in time, and the place was so wild looking that you never would have believed in a million years that you were just 30 miles or whatever from Camden and Phila... There was also an
old abandoned house next to Henry's cabin (I just found it on Google Maps, I can't believe it's still there!), it was falling down, but I remember there were bars on the windows of the basement and this always puzzled me... There were also "wild dogs" that lived back in the West Jersey bogs, or at least that's what my father and his friends called them, but in hindsight, I suspect they were coyotes judging from how they described them (
"They always begin to look like German shepherds after a generation or two in the wild!")...
Another interesting fellow I remember was a man named Tim (Brennan maybe?) who I think was an excavation equipment operator and he lived in a cabin near Little Mill Country Club (off Hopewell Road not far from "Stony Mountain"... BTW is that hill still there? and does anyone know how it
got there?), it was the strangest place. Dad and I went there to ask permission to hunt on the property, and when we drove up, all these guinea fowl started screaming at us from the treetops. We knocked on the door of Tim's little house there, and I can still see the bullet holes in the door -- at chest level, with the torn teeth of sheetmetal curling outward ("OUTCOMING!") There was an old lake there whose dam had been washed out or the boards taken out -- it was getting overgrown with trees by the 70s -- and I believe that there had once been some kind of amusement park there. It was all in ruins then. There was this old building whose foundation was made out of bog iron -- the building was wide open and empty and uninhabited, and looked long-disused, but there was also a fluorescent light fixture burning in it in the middle of the day. ??? Bizarro. Also, there was a road carved out of the woods nearby, and it was lined with (seemingly) dozens of truck tractors (from tractor trailers) with all the glass broken out of all the windows. (My dad and I went hunting back there and I remember it well.) That broken up safety glass seemed to be six inches deep on the sand road. Again, everything about this place just screamed WHY WHY WHY? None of it made sense. It was surreal.
Then there were the huge parties kids used to have in the woods out at Jungle Jim's and The Maze off Atsion Road in those days, with generators and bands and all kinds of lunatic stuff going on...I remember riding a dirt bike back there one night, and I got turned around and wasn't sure where I was, and somebody in a 4WD just kept following me and following me until it started to freak me out...another time, a friend of mine went to a nighttime keg party out on the Pole Lines off Jackson Road, and he said that when he drove back out, his headlights swept across a guy walking along the road dressed all in black and carrying a bow and arrows...the pines were a great place for ghost stories...
Another weird old story: My brother and I were out at the sand pit off Atsion Road riding around and drinking beer one night around '82 or '83, and my car battery died and we had to walk out. We were walking across the sand pit and all of a sudden here we found something about the size of a golf ball or baseball glowing orange -- like embers from a fire -- but there was no ash from a fire there. We didn't have a flashlight, but we looked at it and looked at it and kicked around it, and we couldn't see any ash or anything that would have indicated a fire. The only thing I could figure was that maybe it was a meteorite? I wish we had investigated it more!
I haven't been back to the area in probably close 35 years, so it would probably be sad to see how much different and built-up it has become...That's a shame about Settler's Inn...that place was a real landmark when I was coming up.