Bordentown New Jersey Ghost

Bordentown Ghost:

Abode of Jersey Hermit Blossoms Into New Fairyland

Written by Henry Charlton Beck

If the ghost of Turner Brakeley is as benign as I feel he must be, he must approve, I feel very sure, of the La-Ha-Way he knew in the quiet days he passed there more than 50 years ago. For, I must report to you, a gentleman whose name is Stanley Switlik has not only restored what first were the La-Ha-Way plantations to the glories Turner evolved but, in terms of peacocks, swans, trustful deer, lakes, cranberry bogs and even piney retreats themselves, the present has exceeded every dream of the past. There was a time when I began to doubt some of the things that had been told [to] me about the Bordentown man who, disappointed in love as they say, deserted his fathers fashionable school for young women to hurry away to this woodsy retreat, grow a beard, and chronicle the goings and comings of birds and flowers and other seasonal indices. There are some who have said that Turner Brakeley seemed to emerge as a kind of ogre from the records that remained and the rumors that went around. For my part, I never thought of Turner, the hermit, as an ogre but rather a sensitive soul having much in common with my friend, the Boston man who deserted almost certain success at the bar to fall in love with a mountain in Maine.

Many of my doubts were dispelled when, at one of those services in which you may have joined me at St. Thomas's, Alexandria, the little church near Pittstown where we will hold our first reunion of another year May 24, a kinsman of Turner Brakeley, journeying over from Easton, PA, thrust a sheaf of the hermit's notes into my hand. Until then I had been told that all such records had been lost, presumably in a cleanup of La-Ha-Way after the hermit had died. From all that I have learned since then these may be the only writings of a truly unusual man -- and I shall quote from them for your benefit anon.

Other doubts were dispelled, I remember, when, after I had mentioned the hermit in Newark, new corroboration was supplied.

from nine barrons