White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  My bedroom seemed haunted by ghosts I could sense but not see; every episode of Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? convinced me a poltergeist might paint a message on my wall or that my mirror might house a spectral child. Into my teen years, I’d bolt around the empty upstairs at night, afraid to see creepy shadows or reflected death. At fourteen, I began waking up with night terrors. One morning, following a set of fluorescent visions, I wrote,

  Night Terrors

  Now the transparent men

  come to wake me.

  They plot, they discuss

  how they will kill me.

  I pull my blankets over me.

  Under the covers,

  I frantically seal myself

  against the bed.

  A bird beats its wings

  against my shoulders.

  (Opalescent blue woman

  tightly spins translucent yarn

  around my ankles, my neck,

  binds blankets around me.)

  The men tear all the leaves off,

  punch the birds into the sky.

  They verge upon me.

  Maybe I picked up a haunting in Belvidere, the town where Mom and Dad took Nate and me to get books from the library. Belvidere was fixated on its Victorian painted ladies, life-size dream dollhouses. The library building was an old Victorian made an eyesore by too many additions. I borrowed all kinds of books, even the scary collections with the story about the girl who wore a ribbon around her neck so her head wouldn’t fall off and the one about sleeping children choked by invisible ice fists.

  Later, in my freshman dorm, I realized that even though this new place had no mosses, lakes, mushrooms, or glacial crags, it also had no feeling of someone at the foot of my bed. I missed my see-through night people. One dead person was better company than a hundred live ones.

  CAVES

  The Jenny Jump legend is not a ghost story, but my mind files it there. Her death is the end: she doesn’t linger. But it’s possible she haunts Shades of Death Road. A few minutes’ drive from my parents’ house, the road runs between Jenny Jump State Forest and the sod fields. Growing up, I was warned about hauntings, but never heard stories about Shades specifically. The internet filled me in. Those mists rising off the road, the sod, and the water of roadside Ghost Lake are the spirits of the dead: malaria casualties, residents whose throats were cut by bandits, Natives slain by early settlers. I’ve never seen a ghost there, but to be fair, I haven’t spent much time on Shades, except for a few drives for ghost-watching and a high school party I spent playing with the WebTV until my friend and I walked out to the driveway’s end looking for ghosts, wanting something supernatural to happen. We found only the same forest darkness we lived in.

  I looked in the wrong places along the road. I haven’t been to the Fairy Hole, a cave where Lenape arrowheads and pottery shards were supposedly found, or down Lenape Lane, an unpaved dead-end road running along Shades of Death. People have seen white orbs there at night. If the orb turns red, those who see it will die. I don’t know how anybody knows this. An Indian spirit guide is said to shape-shift into a deer; if a driver doesn’t slow down, an accident with a deer follows. Never mind that Jersey deer are omnipresent, Jersey drivers reckless.

  In Hope, just a turn off Shades of Death, is the Land of Make Believe, the modest amusement park that opened in 1954 and thrilled me more than any collection of stomach-tossing roller coasters and upside-down rides. The park offered wholesome fantasy fun to smaller children, and I, mostly an indoors child, preferred the park’s dimly lit buildings that felt as if they were underground, cool and a little musty in the Jersey sun. I liked ducking into the dark of the Enchanted Christmas Village, accessed through a fake fireplace and narrow stairs, and the Haunted Halloween House, whose bats and Dracula automatons showed me the dotted line between thrill and fear. But I couldn’t enter the Jenny Jump House. Said to be the oldest structure in Warren County, it had a sign:

  Nine year old Jenny is believed to have lived in this house around 1748. While playing or picking berries on top of the rock she was chased by Indians and called for help to her father below.

  He shouted “Jump Jenny, Jump.”

  … So she jumped.

  The entire mountain range, part of it now a State Park, is known as Jenny Jump Mountain.

  The house was among wonders and amusements: Colonel Corn, the Famous Talking Scarecrow; an old-fashioned carousel; a Magic Dragon ride; and a circle of canoes emblazoned with birds and suns around a gleaming brown Indian warrior statue, one hand shading his far-searching eyes, shield in the other, quiver of arrows at his feet. This ride is called Indian River, but the canoes hover above hard-packed dirt. When children are locked in and the canoes start to rotate, the fantasy begins: we make believe we’ve gone back to a time before settlers set out to scrub every Lenape man, woman, and child from this land. They didn’t, of course: the settlers scattered the Lenape, but their nations remain. I didn’t know, in that time before internet, that the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Indians, Powhatan Renape Indians, and Ramapough Lenape Indian Nation were (and are) actively self-governing in New Jersey.5 I learned about the Lenape in history class, not social studies, never in the present. I felt I might be the lone living Indian girl in New Jersey’s cupboard, a trinket like the tiny plastic drums and dyed feathers in the amusement park’s gift shop. The Land of Make Believe was where I belonged.

  Still, at first, I was too afraid to enter the Haunted Halloween House. My dad told me, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I bolted through the house so I couldn’t be caught by a girl-strangling ghost, but I think part of me always knew that the menace wasn’t real—it was suggested by the shack’s black walls and floor, flat bat shapes at the ceiling, and eerie music pumping from speakers. At the winding hall’s end, a life-size animatronic Dracula played an organ inside a glass case in the wall. I wanted to loop through again and again and again. Every time I burst out into the sun, I emerged more hardened, less afraid, more like a little skeleton, less like a flesh child.

  LAKES

  When retreating glaciers dragged their bodies across the land, melt collected in low points. Nate and I hauled inner tubes down the street to Mountain Lake every summer, remaining basement-bound the few days each year when posted signs warned us about weed-killing herbicide treatments. I wasn’t worried about toxins. I was worried about snakes. I imagined they were eight feet long, wrist-thick, and black. Grandma Kate had told me Horsethief Lake, connected to the Columbia River, was full of snakes. Mountain Lake was not, but I believed my feet would hit a fanged mouth instead of the patches of clay I shaped into poison bowls.

  Some lakes near home:

  Mountain Lake, once a summer resort, which seemed impossible because why would anyone want to relax anywhere but the mall.

  Lake Just-It, which Dad said got its name because it was just it, which made no sense because it didn’t even have a dock to jump off.

  Lake Hopatcong, near the car dealerships; a lake monster with the body of a snake or an elephant and the head of a dog or a deer once lived near its inlet, the River Styx.

  Ghost Lake, just off Shades, made not by ancient glaciers but by men who dammed a creek between their houses. The internet says its informal name (officially, it has none) comes from the wraithlike vapors that rise off the water, spirits of people murdered in a cabin or ghosts seeping up from an Indian burial ground disturbed by the white men’s lake. They say the sky is bright all the time there. I wouldn’t know. I’ve been there once. The midmorning light turned lily pads to flecks of glitter. I saw no mists, no ghosts, just an egret wading through weeds.

  Sand Pond, not really a lake, hardly known by its map label, secreted in a purse of private forest owned by a Boy Scout camp, called by a fake name and known by millions of people who couldn’t locate Warren County on a map. Most people know Sand Pond as Crystal Lake, a place where teens died on film for the world, whose watching eyes changed our place forever.r />
  But I didn’t know that when I lived there. As far as I knew, our place was secret, and so it was safe.

  By the road circling Mountain Lake, rainwater sometimes cascades down a small rock face. As a child, I recognized it as a miniature version of Multnomah Falls, the tallest waterfall in Oregon. Those falls empty into a lake connected to the Columbia River. I went to this place in my ancestral territory as a kid but only just learned from Twitter about the “Indian legend” of the falls: a chief’s daughter supposedly jumped to her death as a sacrifice to the Great Spirit to end the sickness among her people. I’ve never heard this story, and the only textual sources I can find are Wikipedia, a late-’90s-looking “Native American legends” website that does not appear to be Native-authored, and William P. Young’s evangelical Christian novel The Shack. With sales of over twenty million copies, it’s one of the best-selling books of all time.

  According to Wikipedia, the book’s title is a metaphor for “the house you build out of your own pain,” and its narrative functions as a parable about trusting God’s wisdom through unspeakable suffering. The “legend of the beautiful Indian maid” is introduced early: the chief’s daughter, a “princess,” is ready to marry “a young warrior chief” of another tribe, chosen by her father because she loves this man. Right before the wedding, a lethal sickness spreads among the men. A medicine man says that a long time ago, a similar sickness “could be stopped only if a pure and innocent daughter of a chief would willingly give up her life for her people. In order to fulfill the prophecy, she must voluntarily climb to a cliff above the Big River and from there jump to her death onto the rocks below.”

  The tribal council won’t ask a woman to do this. Sickness keeps spreading. Even the fiancé gets sick, and so:

  The princess who loved him knew in her heart that something had to be done, and after cooling his fever and kissing him softly on the forehead, she slipped away. It took her all night and the next day to reach the place spoken of in the legend, a towering cliff overlooking the Big River and the lands beyond. After praying and giving herself to the Great Spirit, she fulfilled the prophecy by jumping without hesitation to her death on the rocks below. Back at the villages the next morning, those who had been sick arose well and strong. There was great joy and celebration until the young warrior discovered that his beloved bride was missing. As the awareness of what had happened spread rapidly among the people, many began the journey to the place where they knew they would find her. As they silently gathered around her broken body at the base of the cliff, her grief-stricken father cried out to the Great Spirit, asking that her sacrifice would always be remembered. At that moment, water began to fall from the place where she had jumped, turning into a fine mist that fell at their feet, slowly forming a beautiful pool.

  The book says she’s like Jesus, driven by love to make a sacrifice. I’ve tried to find out whether this story has any basis in our real oral tradition, but I’ve found nothing. I suspect this is a white fantasy. Settlers love a martyr girl. Our stories, though, are never so easy.

  In particular, settlers love a girl who goes over a cliff. My Twitter timeline was overtaken one day with jokes about Cliff Wife. YouTube celebrity Shaun McBride was vacationing with his influencer family in Hawaii. (I can’t say more. I don’t understand.) During a hike, his wife, Jenny, slipped and fell off a cliff. Really, a small hill. A knoll. “Here’s the video of Jenny falling off the cliff,” he says after an introduction in which she’s in tears and he’s solemn, saying, “We want Jenny’s near-death experience to be motivation for you guys to make every single day the best day ever and make life the best ever, ’cause it can just change, like that.” I lost count of how many times they called it a “life-changing experience.” We see her slip and tumble about twelve to sixteen feet, then see it in slow motion. She gets up unharmed. There is much more video.

  Twitter took hold of the swollen melodrama of the clickbait. Some thought she took the fall as a sacrifice at the altar of YouTube views. People threaded her into memes and rewrote song lyrics. My contribution: “You have to learn to fall off cliffs alone before you’re ready to fall off a cliff with somebody else.”

  This never would’ve happened to me. I would not walk a cliff’s edge. I’m afraid of heights. America would love to shove me off. No, actually, America asks me to do it myself.

  FENS

  Shades of Death Road runs along the sod fields, a massive expanse of hyper-lush lawn where a marshy lake was drained in the 1880s after a deadly malaria outbreak. The sod farms, neon green long after trees have given up their leaves, supply rolls of Kentucky bluegrass for faraway dirt plots. A peat company concocts clay-mound mixes used by more than a hundred pro baseball teams. The owner doesn’t list the Shades of Death address on the website.

  Across the fields from Shades, down Hope Road, you’ll find the unincorporated community of Great Meadows, home to a general store, the Polish church I went to for eighteen years, the Ukrainian church, the tactical supply store, the strip club that was called Cannonballs for ages but is now named Stage Dolls. I assume the old name is a double entendre, its less obviously apparent meaning inspired by the Revolutionary War ammunition shaped from the hills’ iron. Some nights, near Cannonballs and the fields, lights shoot across the horizon. Not ghosts, not specters, just cars racing at the dragway open to anyone with cash, a vehicle, and a license. When I lived in New Jersey, I didn’t understand what the strip club and dragway were for: lighting up the limbic system when the days fail to keep life in the living.

  Across the river in Pennsylvania, my second-favorite amusement park, Bushkill Park, was built in the crook of a creek that flooded the park over and over. Alongside the standard carousels, bumper cars, and skating rink were oddities like the Barl of Fun, one of America’s oldest fun houses, with tilted floors, unsettling wall paintings of strange clowns and toothy faces, a moving cylinder to climb in, a shifting staircase, fun-house mirrors, and a wooden floor sloping into a slide. I can’t imagine a time when the building didn’t seem old. Another ride, the Haunted Pretzel, carried people in small cars on tracks through a structure’s dim interior.

  In 2011, the park appeared in the movie The Fields, a semiautobiographical thriller inspired by screenwriter Harrison Smith’s childhood memories of the area. Shot and set there, the film is about a child temporarily living with his grandparents after seeing his father point a gun at his mother’s head. He’s warned not to venture into the cornfields around the farmhouse because some menace lurks there, but he does. Scene after scene opens with sinister rows of secret-keeping corn. The boy finds a dead woman; then, on the other side of the fields, he finds Bushkill Park. The film takes place in 1973, but we see the gutted, flooded park of the 2000s. The boy creeps through the devastated fun house, where, we later learn, a group of squatters lives, one of them homicidal.

  I couldn’t follow the plot or feel the menace of the cornfield’s unknowns. I was hung up on the mother at the end of the gun and the grandfather who said, “I could bury your nanny in this garden and no one would ever know.” I kept waiting for the fun-house mirrors I remembered. What makes a fun house fun? That what we expect doesn’t match what we see. That we can feel flat reality bent under our feet.

  BOGS

  Adjoining my lake, three-quarters of a mile from my parents’ house, are fifty-seven bog acres where the bears live. Really, black bears live everywhere in that part of Jersey, tossing garbage cans, breaking car windows to get food, entering houses. When I lived there, they strolled through our yard while we barbecued; one came up to the cellar door to look in at my cat. For thirty years, the bear hunt was outlawed in New Jersey after their population dropped under fifty; as it swelled to thousands of bears, I learned how to live among them. Stay alert in the spring, when they’re hungry. If they approach, be calm, yell, raise your arms, look big, back away slowly.

  Now, New Jersey’s bear population is likely the densest of any US state; the human population is certainly th
e densest of any US state. As New Jerseyan humans push farther into bear habitat, the more inevitable it seems that people will die. In 2014, a hiker in another county did die by bear. Placed as crown jewels of quirky and cutesy news stories are photos of bears enacting my childhood terrors: “Brownie-Loving Bear Pokes Head in Parked Car for Snack in N.J. Neighborhood.” “Massive Black Bears Brawl on Front Lawn of Man’s N.J. Home.” I’ve seen the photo of a bear my mom took from the porch and posted to Instagram; taped to my parents’ basement door, there’s a bumper sticker with an illustrated bear and the words, If you really care, don’t feed the bears.

  The bog is a sunken swamp that I’ve always considered to be none of my business: low, wet, inaccessible, a good place for bears to hide out. West Nile carrier mosquitos lived there, too. I want to say people will never live there. But it’s hard to be sure what people will do in Jersey.

  Like—the lady with all the tigers. In 1999, a huge Bengal tiger got loose and took a few hours’ walk around a central Jersey subdivision. After eight hours of searching in yards and woods, authorities found it but couldn’t tranquilize it, so they shot and killed it. The New York Times reported, “The day after the authorities shot and killed a 600-pound Bengal tiger that had escaped into the woods, residents awoke today to learn that a one-square-mile area here has a surprising concentration of tigers.” The Division of Fish, Game, & Wildlife was aware of nine (all accounted for) at Six Flags Great Adventure and twenty-three at a private tiger compound “run by Joan Byron-Marasek, who has earned a place in local lore and among local children as the mysterious ‘Tiger Lady.’ But her existence was often doubted by many adults.”