Ong’s Hat

The ghost town that became the first internet hoax

Ong's Hat is a ghost town on Magnolia Road in Pemberton Township, deep in the Burlington County Pine Barrens of New Jersey, and the northern end of the Batona Trail. There is almost nothing to see. Its fame comes from a name and from two very different kinds of story.

The name is old. The Ong family were Quakers who reached Boston in 1631, and Jacob Ong, a farmer born around 1672, bought 100 acres of cedar swamp along the Stop the Jade Creek in 1700, probably to harvest the timber. The oldest maps, including a 1778 map of Hessian encampments, mark the spot simply as "Ongs"; the hat seems to appear first in Thomas Gordon's gazetteer of 1834. Folklore has Ong as a dandy in a silk hat whose dance partner stomped it flat, after which he flung it into a pine where it hung for years as a landmark. The Pine Barrens writer Ben Ruset points out that no tavern stood there until the early 1800s, and prefers a tavern sign painted with a hat. An Ong descendant wrote to The New York Times in 1968 that the family built a hut halfway on their grain route to Burlington, and that Ong's Hut became Ong's Hat on the maps.

Darker tales gathered around it. Around 1917 a couple vanished from their cabin near Ong's Hat; years later deer hunters found the woman's skull by a cranberry bog, and the county detective Ellis Parker, unable to close the case, kept the skull in his office. In the Prohibition years three young men from Easton, Pennsylvania, who shook down bootleggers' stills were found shot dead in and beside their car on the road nearby. When the reporter Henry Charlton Beck came looking for the town, he found a clearing with broken brick and bits of roofing and one last settler, Eli Freed, a 79-year-old from Chicago fighting the deer for his crops. Beck later admitted he had fallen for elaborate traps, called his own earlier account a fairy tale, and settled on the hut.

Then, from the 1980s, came the second story. Through bulletin boards, zines, photocopied pamphlets and later the web, Joseph Matheny and a few collaborators spread the Incunabula papers, a tale of renegade Princeton scientists at an ashram in the pines who built a sensory-deprivation chamber called the Egg and slipped through it to an Earth without people. Matheny meant it as fiction, an experiment in culture jamming, but many readers took it as fact and his denials as a cover-up. It is often called the first alternate reality game, and it made a clearing in the pines famous all over again.