Burnt Mill Road - The Atco Ghost

On Burnt Mill Road in Atco, flash your lights three times and honk three times. A kid with a basketball appears. His parents still live there.

You drive to the end of Burnt Mill Road. It's a dead-end cut through the Pine Barrens in Atco, Camden County, and at night there is nothing out there except pines and the crack in the pavement that everyone's come to find. You park near the crack. Flash the headlights three times. Hit the horn three times. Then you sit in the dark and wait for the kid with the basketball.

The legend says he was hit by a car on Christmas night. He'd just unwrapped a basketball and was bouncing it in front of the house when it got away from him and rolled into the road. A drunk driver clipped him, drove all the way to the dead end, turned around, drove past the dying kid, and kept going. No name has ever been attached to him. No police report has ever surfaced. The story has been told on Burnt Mill Road for decades regardless, documented in Weird NJ more than once, and it is the reason a steady line of cars pulls in every October.

The basketball ritual isn't the only way to call him. Another version says to park at the shoulder, cut the engine and all the lights, walk twenty feet from the car and turn around. The boy runs toward you and disappears before he reaches you. A third version holds that if you park at the dead end with your lights off, he comes up to the car and looks in through the window, checking whether yours is the vehicle that hit him.

What people most often report without ritual is simpler. A small figure in the headlights. They slow down. It's gone.

The road has a few other ghosts keeping him company, whether the stories are connected or not. A blonde woman in a white dress walks along the shoulder. A black dog runs alongside cars and then isn't there. Children's laughter gets heard in the pines on foggy nights by people who are alone. Leeds Point, where the Jersey Devil was born, sits about thirty miles south, and the local assumption is that if you're going to see him anywhere in South Jersey, Burnt Mill Road is a reasonable place.

Waterford Township police handle the October traffic. They also confirm the part of the story that complicates it morally. The parents of the boy, per local reports, still live in a house along the road. They call the police on anyone they catch trying to summon their son. That detail is the hardest part of the whole legend, because it treats the haunting as real and the mourning as current. If there was a boy, somebody is still his mother.

The crack in the pavement is still there. The houses along the road are lived in. On a weeknight in November, well after the high-school season has died down, it is quiet enough to hear a basketball bounce from a long way off.