In 2013, I read Susan Orlean’s My Kind of Place, and by the end of the second paragraph of her 2002 New Yorker essay about the tiger, I was thinking, “Oh yeah, I know that tiger.” My dad was a fish biologist for the division, so there were familiar source names in the news stories. I remember imagining a gleaming lab table filled with a tiger ready for necropsy.
Byron-Marasek never admitted the escaped tiger was hers, and it couldn’t be proven. According to Orlean, some people believe the tiger could have been a drug dealer’s guard animal, an abandoned pet, or even a Six Flags escapee whose flight was covered up; “In the end, however, the tiger has simply been relegated to the annals of suburban oddities—a lost soul, out of his element, doomed to his unhappy end, whose provenance will never be known.” I mean, same.
Orlean’s essay, published the year before game wardens seized and relocated Byron-Marasek’s sick and filthy tigers, ends like this:
You really could live your life here in the most usual way and never know what extraordinary thing was afoot just a few yards away; you would dismiss the occasional whiff of something weird or a roar at midnight because the alternative was simply too strange. Everything about the story was so surreal—Marasek’s personal history, the idea of collecting these creatures, the image of a tiger walking through the suburbs—that I decided I really wanted to see one of the animals, to assure myself that they really existed, and mostly because I know that sooner or later, by the irreversible order of the New Jersey courts, these tigers will be taken away from this strange little patch in New Jersey.
Orlean is from Ohio, and her website’s “About me” page doesn’t list Jersey among the places she’s lived, so it makes sense that she’d consider this so strange. Nearly a decade later, she wrote a brief New Yorker piece that begins, “A small, drowsy town in Ohio, a pile of dead Bengal tigers.” The animals massacred in Zanesville, fifty-five miles down Route 70 from the house I now own, actually included seventeen lions, eight bears, three cougars, two wolves, a baboon, and a macaque, but the news of eighteen dead Bengal tigers hit people harder, there being fewer than 2,500 alive worldwide then. They were killed because Terry Thompson, owner of the Muskingum County Animal Farm, freed fifty of his animals before shooting himself. Cops killed the roaming animals, by order of the sheriff.
Some people consider the New Jersey bear hunt an annual massacre. From long before my birth until three months after I left for college, black bears could not be hunted in New Jersey, and the bear population climbed. I’m in favor of the bear hunt as a means of controlling a stressed population in a densely packed area with dwindling wilderness. I don’t consider hunting inherently unethical, and I don’t understand why people object to the bear hunt more than the turkey hunt or the deer hunt.
Orlean writes, “I love wild animals, but if I knew there might be a bear in my backyard, I would understand that it might need to be killed.” I like wild animals. I love this picture I just saved of a black bear sitting in a patch of skunk cabbage it’s going to eat. I’ve eaten bear meat and I’ve eaten salmon cooked in skunk cabbage. I’ve known there was a bear in my backyard, but it didn’t cross my mind that it might need to be killed; we let it know it was too close to us and should go back across the road into the thicker woods, private property stretching south, mostly unbroken, to the bog. Orlean recalls, “When I wrote about the Tiger Lady of New Jersey, I realized that every possible outcome for her tigers was sad—even sending the animals to a sanctuary that could provide them with better care. There should never have been twenty-seven tigers in suburban New Jersey to begin with.”
Every probable outcome for the New Jersey black bears seems sad. They should be there, but should the people?
Our bog and our woods feel closer than most New Jersey landscapes to resembling the place that belonged to the bears before colonization. The New Jersey Natural Lands Trust website says the Mountain Lake Bog Preserve is “steeped in botanical history”: beginning in the nineteenth century, naturalists and botanists visited this glacially formed wetland to document rare plants like the leathery grape fern and bog willow. The bog, home to mosses, swamp trees, beavers, and ducks, hasn’t really changed. With no traffic, the drive to New York City would take about an hour and a half; to Newark, an hour. I still don’t get cell service at my parents’ house on cloudy days, and the nearest grocery store is a twenty-minute drive. Any number I pull from New Jersey feels impossible. A place can’t be so wild and so densely built, so desolate and so populous. Living in contradictions, we learn to want the strange and nonsensical. We covet and hoard rare things—rare bogs, rare rocks, rare lakes. I blossomed toxic, emerging a person of rare traits: unusually thick skin, say nurses with needles; a remarkably movable jaw, says the dentist; a bent cervix; extreme astigmatism; a uterus that grew tinier, throttling the IUD that once fit; severe and plentiful environmental allergies—the list goes on. Maybe it’s not that I’m so strange; it’s just that I catalog pieces of strangeness and, through them, bring my body into focus in a way I can’t when I look into the mirror.
Maybe wanting to be special is an American condition, the swamp of entitlement from which the American dream is supposed to be able to grow. Orlean sees it in Zanesville’s Terry Thompson: “There will always be vain, obsessive people who want to own rare and extraordinary things whatever the cost; there will always be people for whom owning beautiful, dangerous animals brings a sense of power and magic. It must be like having a comet in your backyard, a piece of the universe that is dazzling and untouchable right outside your door.”
What should happen to the bears? Am I special or what, and is it wrong to want to know? Can pain be special? What’s wrong with me, really, though? All the questions I still can’t answer were born in Jersey.
DENS
Technically, New Jersey black bears don’t hibernate; they den. Their winter sleep, torpor, is shallower than true hibernation, and while a hibernating bear wouldn’t be roused by activity around it, a bear in torpor is easily stirred. In Jersey, they might be up and about all winter if they find enough to eat. Usually, though, bears go dormant in autumn, making tight dens in spaces like holes, caves, leaf beds, tree hollows, or built nests. Bears like to be alone. In torpor, a bear’s heart slows, its body cools, and its fat feeds it.
I was like a bear. In winter, I spent most of my time in the basement. Mom, Dad, Nate, and I made separate dens of desks and couches. I rarely ate, living instead off the internet, sometimes rising to get the wax-wrapped cheeses and baby carrots I tallied in a composition book. Sometimes, I shut myself in my bedroom with my tiny TV. While Fleetwood Mac’s The Dance special looped on VH1, I pored over printouts from witchcraft websites, studying binding spells as dutifully as my biology textbook because before I learned about mitochondria and osmosis, I learned that the veil between worlds was thin and full of holes. The other side reached into the known world of New Jersey all the time; I decided to reach back.
Twine, an index card, the name of a boy who took me down to his basement one afternoon and held me so close our bodies nearly melded from ankles to necks. It wasn’t like in a movie: we didn’t kiss. Upstairs later, he wouldn’t look at me. Later still, when I asked to touch him again, he taunted and derided me, asking how I could possibly think he wanted me. I couldn’t figure out whether he’d changed his mind or I’d misunderstood all along; I couldn’t believe both his lie and my intuition. So: an incantation. I bind you, Spencer. I bind you from hurting yourself and others. Trying not to think, I am being punished because I want. Trying to think only, I bind you. Wrapping him, and without meaning to, wrapping myself into a bundle, hoping nobody would see my desire ever again.
SHADES OF DEATH
I’ve been trying to write as if I’m an expert on Mountain Lake and the surrounding area, but that fell apart when my parents mentioned that Friday the 13th was filmed at a nearly identical lake seventeen miles north of our house, with some scenes filmed in Hope, the township directly northwest of mine. I thou
ght I could have the place mostly to myself, but fandom involves claiming through an imagined sense of knowing.
Friday the 13th, an early tone-setter for the slasher-movie genre and an establisher of the concept of summer camp on film, grossed nearly $60 million at the box office. I always thought Mountain Lake looked like a movie summer camp setting, and I’ve described our forest as “horror movie woods.” Now I realize my notions of summer camp lake and horror movie woods were built from pop depictions of scared humans in hostile natural settings, most of these stories driven by tropes made famous by a movie filmed in woods that bled into mine. As long as I’ve been alive, Warren County has been lodged in the national consciousness as a remote location where screams go unheard. I just didn’t know that until age thirty-three.
The movie was set on already bloodied ground. Land of unhappy ghosts. Land of genocidal fairy tales. Land of white guilt mistaken for poltergeists. Land of young white men with Facebook photos of assault weapons longer than torsos, with This is my rifle, with unmufflered cars peeling down the drag strip between expanses of sod meant to adorn lawns in some other place. Land of hot-air balloons. Land suffering from some of the biggest environmental releases of industrial toxins in a significantly toxic state. Land whose roadside corn stands justify the Garden State thing. Land of iron, land of malingerers, land of pink Victorians settled into soil wicking chemical waste, land of diners at the edges of dark forests. Land of the impossible: my young body riddled with rot, doing what a body shouldn’t, ovaries blooming with cysts, gallbladder dying, nasal passages twisted, teeth turning dried-blood red from the inside, skin so impervious to what D.A.R.E. and Cosmo told me would age it that I may have been born embalmed. Land of waters so pristine that it seems you shouldn’t imagine something lurking below the lake’s glassy surface: monsters, undead persons, bad molecules, snakes. New Jersey: Only the strong survive.
X
I’ve seen eleven horror movies, including Friday the 13th, which I first watched a few days ago. I don’t like them. They’re too real. A hallway in The Sixth Sense looked like my family’s, a room in The Ring like my first bedroom. In “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film,” Isabel Pinedo writes:
A film promises a contained experience. Regardless of how open a film’s ending may be, the film ends and in this there is a modicum of closure.
A film is not only a time-bound experience, it is also an imaginary one. The screen constitutes the spatial frame on which a film is projected. It marks off a bounded reality, one that need not conform strictly to lived experience. The borders of the screen establish parameters that free the viewer to engage in fantasy.
Pinedo argues that horror pushes viewers to accept the disruption of the rational order of things, experiencing “a simulation of danger not unlike a roller coaster ride. In both, the conviction that there is nothing to fear turns stress/arousal into a pleasurable experience. Fear and pleasure commingle.”
But for me there is no pleasure, only suggestions of terrors living in my woods and walls. I can’t tell myself, It’s only a movie, when the tangible stuff of my life—wood, water, darkness—convinces me it isn’t.
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In Friday the 13th, kids die by knife, arrows, an axe to the head. Mrs. Voorhees is beheaded. Screenwriter Victor Miller said that, until the adoption of CGI, “everybody cooperate[d] in fooling themselves.” Director Sean Cunningham said of the beheading, “Now that had never been done before. Today it’s just absolutely common. But the question is, how could you cut somebody’s head off in the movies and not have to cut around it … It’s the equivalent of sawing a girl in half on stage. People know you didn’t saw the girl in half but they’re just looking at it and they just saw her cut in half. It’s doing the things that magicians do.”
The kids sliced up a snake on film. This wasn’t scripted or faked. Special effects artist Tom Savini came up with the idea after encountering a snake in his cabin. Harry Crosby, son of Bing, took a machete to the body of a living, writhing snake. According to IMDb, “When they filmed the scene, the snake’s owner was standing off to the side and crying.”
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Two years after the release of Friday the 13th, in Blairstown (the filming location for the just-far-enough-from-camp fictional town), a real teenage girl’s dead body was found by a gravedigger at work. The bludgeoned body could not be identified, so she is known as Princess Doe. She was named by primary investigator Lt. Eric Kranz, who, according to a fan site (but nowhere else, IMDb included), appears in Friday the 13th as a cop who calls to Alice from the lakeshore as she drapes herself over the side of a canoe.
Princess Doe’s grave in the cemetery where her body was found reads:
MISSING FROM HOME
DEAD AMONG STRANGERS
REMEMBERED BY ALL
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Approaching the movie’s climax, a cop drives the camp owner back from the Blairstown Diner (a real diner, one I’ve probably eaten at) to camp, saying, “Bad enough it’s Friday the thirteenth, we got a full moon too. They keep statistics. We get more accidents, more rapes, more robberies, more homicides, more of everything when there’s a full moon. It upsets people. Makes ’em nuts.”
“You’ve made a science out of coincidence,” the camp owner replies.
X
I just learned that in 2000, when I was in high school, MTV’s Fear, a paranormal investigation reality show, featured Blairstown. A text overlay introduces the show:
The people are real.
The place is real.
The fear is real.
The next screen tells us:
Five people have been
sent to a campground
23 miles from the
nearest town to
determine if it is haunted.
They’re at Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, renamed Camp Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th, six or seven miles from Blairstown. The reality show cabins are the movie cabins, which are the IRL cabins. The contestants watch a video informing them they’re at “Camp Spirit Lake”: “For forty-seven years, this site has been home to numerous missing persons and cult activity, until authorities finally closed the camp in 1976.” A talking head billed as a “local hunter” says it’s “a place where bodies were dumped.” A “former camper” describes a body with head, hands, and feet cut off. A “local priest” says, “There certainly are cases going on today where people get involved with the occult and evil in terms of worshipping Satan himself.” A “cult specialist” talks about how people “use the entrails as different Satanic offerings to the different demons and stuff like that that they’re trying to conjure up.”
Supposed area residents say Princess Doe was the victim of a cult sacrifice and now haunts the campground in a spot known as “The Devil’s Dancing Ground.” One person says she was found headless (wrong); another says she was pulled from the lake with teeth knocked out and hands cut off (wrong); the clip about entrails gets recycled.
The contestants, competing for a cash prize, must venture into the woods and around the burnt “ruins” of cabins named Lakota, Pawnee, and Hopi, “investigating extreme cult rituals that have taken place at this notoriously haunted campsite.” The dares:
1. Dig up a grave and sit silently next to the bones for ten minutes.
2. Contact the dead through a black mirror.
3. Recite a chant and behead a dead chicken while a teammate paints a pentagram onto the floor.
4. Stand with head in a cage onto which rats climb.
5. Prick a finger and drip blood onto a pentagram.
6. Lie in a coffin while the others shovel dirt on.
7. Perform a ceremony to facilitate the passage of ghosts of the cult’s torture victims, reciting incantations like, “Spirits, use me as a portal if they wish to speak,” and asking, “Spirits, do you wish to cross over?”
Nothing scary happens. One contestant hears voices, but at the end, she says, “I didn’t feel any spirits. I think I just felt
memories.” Contestants are certain there’s something going on in those woods, which is not untrue, because television is going on.
All this cult stuff is make-believe. Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco has been owned and operated by the Boy Scouts of America since 1927. The only real part: the call of cicadas at night, males asking for mates, the only sound I’ve ever been able to sleep through.
If I saw the episode in 2000, I wouldn’t have known it was filmed in Warren County. Through the window behind the TV, I would’ve seen woods that stretched all the way to Jenny Jump Mountain, touching the sod farms and the Land of Make Believe and Shades. I didn’t know about Princess Doe or the wicked Indian spirits supposedly clinging to Shades. I only knew about Jenny with her skull bashed at the cliff bottom. Maybe it never occurred to anyone that her spirit might haunt those woods because in death, she served her purpose, continued the trope, and could rest easy in the afterlife knowing her death scene would live forever as the looping retelling’s end.
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Two Weird NJ magazine readers found hundreds of Polaroids in the woods off Shades. Most are of women, none smiling, not posing, sometimes lying down, but not, it appears, sleeping or dead.
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At the end of Friday the 13th, Alice, sole survivor because she wasn’t distracted by fornication, floats in a canoe on a glassy lake nearly identical to mine. It can’t be June 13 with leaves that fiery, but the lake is real to me, close kin to the body of water where I caught sunfish, unwrapped weeds from my ankles, and dared Nate to swim with me under the algae-scummed dock. I wasn’t startled when Jason burst from the water; I’d been bracing myself for as long as I’d known the shock of cool lake under hot sun.
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