Kirk Moore

@KirkMooreAPP

PEMBERTON – The strange name persists — on old highway maps, in local legends, and now in Internet mythology. Type Ong's Hat into Google Maps, and it lands you at the newly renovated Magnolia Bar.

"Two weeks ago there were these young kids, like 19 or 20, who came by asking about Ong's Hat," said bartender Jacky Colon. "I looked it up on my phone. It was this weird interdimensional thing. Hold on, I have to look it up, this is how I got all my information on Google."

Very short synopsis of said legend: Mash-up of religious sects, jazz musicians, native Pineys and rogue physicists settle in Ong's Hat, open a portal to other dimensions. More on this later. First, that name.

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"Although Ong's Hat had been a name for the best part of a century, no one had ever taken it seriously, apparently," wrote Henry Charlton Beck, a newspaperman at the Courier-Post in Camden whose "Forgotten Towns" travelogues through the Pine Barrens in the 1930s were a hit with readers and led to a series of books.

The curious name on maps inspired a search when "the foreman of a newspaper composing-room, always ready with ideas for making busy people busier, proposed that an honest effort should be made to locate the town still indicated on maps of New Jersey by the mysterious name of Ong's Hat," Beck recalled in his first book "Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey." Ong's Hat was Beck's first foray into the deep Pine Barren, near the border of Pemberton and Southampton townships.

The Ong. Sounds like a species from "Star Trek." But the family were early colonial settlers in Burlington County. The story, says Mark Grover, is all about a girl.

One of the younger male Ongs, a fancy dresser, frequented country dances in what during the early 1800s was a crossroads village, Grover recounted, at the farm stand on Magnolia Road he runs with his father Joseph..

At one dance, "the girl he was courting was either happy or angry, and threw his hat in a tree. It was a big, giant oak tree. It stayed there for years. Every time someone would ride by, they would say, 'There's Ong's Hat.' "

That hat story is the most popular explanation for the name. But years later Beck himself wrote that it may have been a linguistic corruption of "Ong's Hut," referring to a cabin or work camp that members of the family used during lumbering operations in the forest.

Grover's farm stand is its own landmark just up Magnolia Road. It started as a blueberry farm packing house in 1937, in mid-summer packed to the rafters with crates of cobalt-blue fruit. Berry strains bred by Elizabeth Whiting, the blueberry pioneer at nearby Whitesbog, and native families had a reputation.

"This area is known for the sweetest blueberries. It's something to do with the ground and acidity," Grover said.

His father Joseph, 91, started the farm stand around 1963 as part of his own blueberry operation.

"I had about 85 acres," Joe Grover said. Business was good for a time. "They came from Camden, Philadelphia. Sometimes I've had three busloads of people here. ... It's not like it used to be. I had 20 or 30 cars here."

But the margin costs for small family blueberry farms got tough in the late 1970s, he said. "By the time I paid for pruning, (pesticide) dusting and spraying, we couldn't make any money on them."

Still there were the blueberries this summer, the season now ending. "It's coming to the end, everybody. We're doing the best we can," Mark called to customers as he sorted some last boxes of fruit into the plastic buckets that market customers use and bring back over and over.

During a lull, you can ask about those legends. The modern one about Ong's Hat — that portal to another dimension somewhere out in the pitch pines — was popularized in the 2002 book "Ong's Hat: The Beginning" by writer Joseph Matheny, who creates transmedia works and is a prominent figure in alternative reality gaming.

"Nineteen eighty-nine, I think this started. I had a friend who had a cabin out there in the Pine Barrens, and he hosted these parties. He was very bohemian and had artists and writers of all kinds out there," Matheny said. 'He gave me a pamphlet that purported to be this story about Princeton scientists and something called the Ong's Hat Rod and Gun Club, where they used to hang out and relax."

During World War II the Pine Barrens were a testing ground for weapons development. Princeton scientists did explosives and ballistics work in the Forked Ruiver Mountains, and a Johns Hopkins University team fired crude surface-to-air missiles from the Project Bumblebee site at Island Beach. "There are kernels of reality to this legend," Matheny said.

With Matheny and other contributors writing, the story line arose ithrough the 1990s, first on computer bulletin boards frequented by gaming enthusiasts, generating online versions of urban legend that's grown to an elaborate body of work. One consequence is an uptick in younger visitors seeking Ong's Hat. Hence Colon's close encounter at the Magnolia Bar.

That for her was a new story. "They usually come in here and ask about the Jersey Devil," she said.

Folklorists call it legend tripping — the urge to visit supposedly haunted houses and the like. One infamous place is Leed's Point near Smithville in Atlantic County. The supposed birthplace of the Jersey Devil — a half-human monster said to haunt the forest since the 1700s — attracts people around Halloween.

But the Ong's Hat story is one of the first examples of "legend tripping online," said Michael Kinsella, a scholar who studies new religions, paranormal beliefs and folk traditions at the University of California Santa Barbara. He's author of the 2011 book "Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong's Hat," published by the University Press of Mississippi.

"I've always been fascinated by supernatural beliefs," said Kinsella, who like Ong's Hat enthusiasts stumbled across the story online, and wrote a whole dissertation on it for his master's degree in 2007, which led to the book. The cross-connections of various enthusiast websites — whether gaming, UFOs or conspiracy theories — lead like a trail of digital bread crumbs to Ong's Hat.

He sees it as technology simply extending an ancient human compulsion. "People really want to seek out the eerie and paranormal," Kinsela said.

There are other snippets from actual history in the Ong's Hat portal legend, like radioactive waste. Around the time the legend was developing, the Department of Defense was figuring out what to do with thousands of tons of soil contaminated with plutonium when a nuclear missile burned up a few miles away at Fort Dix in 1961. That's how modern legends grow, Kinsella said.

"It's typical for these kinds of stories to mix up history and facts and legend," he said. "So much weird stuff and stories seems to come out of the Pine Barrens, they reinforce each other."

"If nothing else, it is a vortex of mysteries, legends, tradition and folklore...I'm interested in tracking it back as far as I can, but I don't wnat to puncture that bubble," Matheny said. "There's nothing in the structure of the story that I haven't heard, in one form or another, from people in the area."

"There's a lot of stories, like people being abducted by aliens around here," Mark Grover confirmed. He, for one, is a believer in the traditional Jersey Devil.

Local stories tell of chicken coops and livestock wiped out. "Back then you didn't have coyotes. But everything was destroyed, and people heard a lot of screeching in the woods," he said.

There are sounds that alarm experienced woodsmen who grew up here.

"I haven't seen him. But I've heard sounds that are not explainable," Grover said. He recalled breaking into a fast trot one night on a lonely sand road: "I did that for about a quarter-mile."

"There's a lot of swamp area here. There's places you can't get to. Even if you were flying over, you couldn't see in," he said. "I'm a believer. There's something out there."

Beck always cautioned that his "sketches" of southern New Jersey were not history but folklore — perhaps an early form of oral history, as later generations of researchers and journalists would call it. Talk to people out there now, and they tell you the narrative is still alive and changing.

"Today there are four different legends of how Ong's Hat, or Ong's Hut, got its name," Beck wrote in 1961, "and I have a notion that I may hear of at least one more."

Kirk Moore: 609-709-5036; kmoore@app.com