Return to the Jersey Devil’s Blue Hole

A little bit of Piney paradise spoilt

The first place I visited on my explorations after migrating to South Jersey was the rumored bathing pool for the Jersey Devil. The Winslow blue hole has been part of the state cryptid’s lore at least since the ‘30s, when journalist and ghost town explorer Henry Charlton Beck reported it as the spot where locals were said to have spied old J.D. himself. It’s still one of my favorite spots to visit.

The area is known as Inskip’s, after a farmer who owned a mill on the land. All evidence of dwellings was long gone when Beck visited, and today you find the hole by turning right as soon as you pass the outdoor archery range on Piney Hollow Road that’s run by the state, and free to use by anyone with a hunting license. I took my old Bear Kodiak recurve out there and shot at the targets to see if I still had any skill. I only lost one arrow, and had to dig one out of the wooden frame with my pocket knife. The deer are safe from me. But it’s fun to play Robin Hood with hay bales now and then.

Not far from here is Inskip Road, which I traveled just to see what I could see. It’s your typical Pine Barrens road, sandy hard pack with fallen boughs and washouts. I measured them and they weren’t too deep for my Squatcharu¹, so I followed it back to the road. It seems mostly used by hunters and workers at a nearby crushed stone supplier who has dug their own blue hole in the sand. I found a scorched tree stump with a conch shell next to it that reminded me of Lord of the Flies. Piggy’s glasses were nowhere to be found.

If you take Inskip Road, you can bushwhack to the blue hole of lore, but you’ll be on the wrong side of the Great Egg Harbor river, which is more of a creek here, but would require a kayak to cross. In fact, I met someone who did exactly that, when I took the easy way round, from the road past the archery range parking lot. Take that road past a guard rail, and keep your eyes peeled for a peculiar blaze on the pine trees: a blue square with a white or silver border. I imagine so many people have gotten lost that some locals decided to be kind and make it obvious. The trail to the blue hole is a trail of… blue holes. Here I am parked next to one:

Once you see these, park and go on foot. You could get a vehicle down the trail but it’s narrow and there’s no safe turn-around. This is also a popular spot for dog walkers, and you’d be that jerk who makes people jump off the trail into the weeds to let you by. I didn’t meet any puppies this day, but I did meet two Van Life Instagrammers and a couple who parked their red Jeep next to my car and followed me in. This spot is no secret. In fact there are three brick fire pits around it. As you can see, if the Jersey Devil still bathes here, it isn’t very shy:

The Instagrammers came by kayak, and had a drone to take video. Which is illegal, in Wildlife Management Areas, but who’s enforcing? (The video hasn’t shown up on their feed yet, either). The hole has seen better days. Beck described it as “crystal blue” but the feeder from the creek keeps getting clogged, and it is mostly stagnant these days, covered in algae and too dangerous to swim across, not for fear of the chill from its “bottomless” depths, but from tangling your legs in the weeds and drowning. According to Beck, scientists lowered a cable with a weight and found this bottomless; no one has tested this as far as I know. He also claimed that some locals said it was created by a meteor, but like many “facts” that begin with some say, the only sayer is the one claiming that some say.²

If you zoom in you can see a hint of the depths; all blue holes are deceptively deep because they are usually sand pits dug out for building material. If there was a mill here, maybe this was the raceway, or the wheel spun on the nearby river and this was the pond, dug out by Mr. John Inskip Brown, the alleged owner. There was also tell of a lunker pike that inhabited the waters and never took the bait, but that might just be a fish story.

Speaking of fish stories, when I visited the hole in January, I found footprints that looked suspiciously like hoofprints in the sand near where I parked, among the many dirt bike tracks:

I shared these on Twitter, and writer-director John Fusco—who attended the Tom Brown Tracker School in the Pine Barrens—said these were “definitely human.” This can only mean one thing: the Jersey Devil is part human. Not a cryptid, but the 13th child of Mother Leeds.

Across the road from this legendary spot is a much larger, crystal clear blue hole on the grounds of an abandoned factory for making concrete sewer pipes. The evidence is all over the place. The part of the Winslow Wildlife Management Area was recently closed to visitors, and you’ll see why.

Beyond the concrete dump, it’s a beautiful spot, a little bit of Piney Paradise. Good for blueberry picking, or being spooked by that nefarious avian Jersey Devil impostor, the sandhill crane. That happened to me the first time I hiked around the lake. I came upon a reedy spot and was met by a great flapping of gray wings. The bird landed on the other side of the lake, and I spied it through my binoculars. I had never seen one in person before, but one of the books I loved as an ‘80s kid prepping for nuclear apocalypse was Strange Companion: A Story of Survival by Dayton Ogden Hyde, in which a boy runs away from his abusive stepfather by stowing on a cargo plane that crashes in the wilderness, where he must learn bushcraft to survive, and his only companion is a spooky sandhill crane. It follows him from afar, and I think he saves its egg from predators.

It was a memorable moment, and partly inspired by story “There Are Things in the Woods.” This particular blue hole is a favorite spot for dog walkers, blueberry pickers, and litterbugs, who like to grill and leave piles of trash and beer cans next to their folding chairs. This is probably why the Department of Environmental Protection has marked this section closed for the foreseeable future. They can’t patrol everything, and while I was there, I saw people in the water with their dogs. Blue holes claim lives every year by drowning, so between this and the mounds of trash, it’s now ruined for everybody.

Which as you can see, is a a shame, because it’s really a beautiful spot. The Pine Barrens are not pristine woods; they are a post-industrial forest. But that doesn’t mean they should be turned into mudholes by reckless out of state off-roaders (you see a lot of Virginia and Pennsylvania plates) and jerks of any origin. Here is a photo by Guy Thompson of the NJ Pine Barrens forums showing why Hidden Lakes is now off-limits to everyone:

I’ve removed trash when I can. Recently the local Subaru group held a trash cleanup in the Collier’s section of the Pine Barrens where they removed 8400 pounds of trash in one weekend. The documentary Pine Mud shows the damage being done, roads left in unpassable conditions so no one can use them. I ran into this myself when I tried to follow the old stagecoach road. I’m going to try to reach the ghost town of Mount and the site of the original Indian King tavern soon, but I don’t have high hopes. Even off-roaders with 30” tires have had trouble getting around in the Pinelands these days.

One thing you can see in any vehicle is vintage American roadside kitsch, and this “Mortimer Snerd” muffler man statue at Mr Bill’s ice cream and hot dog stand is a perfect specimen:

And finally, this is why I call the car the SQUATCHARU:

Don’t worry, this won’t be turning into a Squatching substack.

See you next week with a visit to two 200-year-old taverns!

1. I put Sasquatch decals over the Subaru emblems, as you’ll see. Thus, Squatcharu.

2. Say again?