barnegat

Hi, I'm relatively new here. Just saw Pirates of the Carribean. I seriously love this movie. Johnny Depp, though a wee bit hard to figure out where his character is coming from at first, he kind of grows on you. I don't care how inaccurate some of the details are. I love the POTC ride and have for many years and often thought about the bigger picture. BTW, if anyone cares, in the card & gift shops like Hallmark, they sell these little porcelain houses, usually and mostly with a Christmas theme. However, there is a Halloween line and they have a pirate wreck with sound effects. The line is under the Dept. 56 name. The thing is $80 but I love the sounds it produces because it puts me very much in mind of the POTC ride. I also ran across something similiar in Michael's crafts stores. It's a little larger, rocks back and forth, also with sound and the pirates sing 15 Men On A Dead Man's Chest. This one is $50. Aauughh, very tempting. I need more junk around the house. Loved the Yoda photos. Other pirate movies favorites- Treasure Island (Charleton Heston 1985?) Captain Blood Muppets Treasure Island

Capt Flint, Sorry but I have been remiss in responding. Anyway, with regards to Decatur. I am about to bear my soul - so don't laugh. Ok, I am primarily looking for info on Decatur. I write fanfiction and I've got Decatur as major character in a sequel. I've got the basics on him but I was sort of hoping to find some little nugget that would inspire something interesting that would move the plot along. Just a thought. I have been stuck for a while and the story has been sitting in limbo and I'm getting hassled from a few people who want to see the story completed. Anything on the War of 1812 would be good too. The little bit of research that I have done is fascinating. Barnegat

Redhand, Thanks for the all the info. This is great.

I found The Ghostly Sphinx of Metedeconk in a fantastic book ( which is stolen but we won't go into that) entitled Down Barnegat Bay; A Nor'easter Midnight Reader by Robert Jahn, published by Beachecomber Press, 1980. The story itself by Stephen Crane is exerpted from The New York Press, 1895. Sadly, the book is out of print. The story, some of which I will quote, goes this a-way: "About a mile south of here, on the brown bluff that overlooks the ocean, there is an old house to which the inhabitants of the place have attached a portentious gruesome legend. It is here that the white lady, a moaning, mourning thing of the mist, walks to and fro, haunting the beach at the edge of the surf in midnight searches for the body of her. The legend was born, it was said, in 1815, and since that time Metedeconk has devoted much breath to the discussion of it, orating in the village stores, haranguing in the post office, until the story has become a religion, a sacred tale, and he who scorns it receives the opprobrium of all Metedeconk. It is claimed that when this phantom meets a human being face to face, she asks a question - a terrible, direct interrogation. She will ask concerning the body of her lover, who was drowned in 1815, and if the chattering mortal cannot at once give her an intelligent answer, containing terse information relating to the corpse, he is forthwith doomed, and his friends will find him the next day lying pallid upon the shore. So, for fear of being being nonplused by this sphinx, the man of Metedeconk, when he sees white at night, runs like a hare." I wanted to share some of the language of the story. -----Standard ghost story fare, the rest of the story: She didn't say good-bye to her lover because he was leaving for Buenos Aires and she was pissed. His ship went down some 60 miles south of Metedeconk on the return trip but soon as he left she felt tremendous forboding. She walked the beach continually until she happened to stumble upon his corpse. The book is full of exerpts from like this from various places like Harpers Weekly & old photos and I was very surprised to how much was written about this area which was terribly remote back in the day. It was remote when I was growing up there. Not anymore, unfortunately. Just as an aside, Robert Louis Stevenson spent 2 summers at the Union House in Brielle, NJ which is just on the otherside of the Manasquan River not far from Metedeconk. He was working on The Master of Ballentrae in 1888. He enjoyed sailing catboats with his friend Will Low. Twenty years later Low wrote this in his autobiography: "One afternoon we landed on an island a little way up the river, whose shore upon one side was protected by a bulkhead. As the island was nameless, we proceeded to repair the oversight and christened it Treasure island, after which we fell to with pocketknives to carve the name upon the bulkhead, together with our initials and the date. This inscription was there some years after, and if the winter tempests have spared it, I am pleased to signal it for some one in quest of a Stevenson autograph, as it might figure as a unique specimen in almost any collection." Last time I looked, traces of the bulkhead still showed. Locally, the island is called Treasure Island though on the map, it is written as Osborn Island. And, local stories say that pirates buried trasure there. If anyone is interested, I have a web site for the Jersey Devil - not just a hockey team! - very interesting. I can't get it to come up right now or I would give it here. Well, I hope I didn't bore anyone. I just love sharing this stuff with anyone who'd listen. Be happy that I'm not standing in front of you talking.

Hi. The real reason I came to post: I am in the process of developing an SCA personna. I keep running into dead ends. I understand that the village of Baltimore (Baile Ti Mor) in the south of Ireland was raided by Algerian pirates in 1631 and approx. 100 people were carried off and sold into slavery. I want to know if this happened a lot and when this type of event started. I'm trying to fix a date for my personna as being born in 1592 and if I can't establish these raids as happening by this date then I'm going to have to think of something else and start over. Any information, if you can give me a legit. reference (as I have to document all this), would be greatly appreciated.

Hi, I'm new here. There are bunches & bunches of ghost stories on the Jersey Shore where many ships went down. Blackbeard's ship, Queen Anne's Revenge ( I think that's the one) is suppose to appear on certain moonless nights on the Shark River. Capt. Kidd is suppose to have buried treasure on Money Island on the Toms River and killed a sailor so that the ghost would guard it. Wreckers made a living salvaging stranded vessels though at the time, word was that many ships were lured on to the bars. Then there is The Ghostly Sphinx of Metedeconk as written about by Stephen Crane. I love this stuff.

Hi, I am brand new to this forum. Just registered a few minutes ago. I'm a writer of fan fiction and I have been looking for info on Stephen Decatur, who as you might know, successfully fought Algerian pirates and was highly decorated during the War of 1812. I find this period of American history fascinating and have been banging my head against a brick wall looking for good resources. I understand there are personal letters of Decatur's in the Lib. of Congress but I don't have the means to get there. Other than that, I have run across only a few books and mostly out of print. Can anybody pinpoint some good sources? Thanks.