In Brief
Estell Manor Park in southern New Jersey holds a WWI munitions city in the swamp — 199 buildings thrown up in three months, run for barely a year, then stripped to concrete. Wrapped inside it sits a Revolutionary soldier's grave that has outlasted the whole thing.
The Full Story
Local paranormal investigators say they keep coming back to Estell Manor Park in southern New Jersey, and they keep recording things near the old church and the lake. "Orb activity like crazy," one of them told a reporter, "(recordings) from screams to people talking right there by the church." The article that carried his account has since slipped behind a paywall, so take the screams as a story people tell. The thing under the story is real enough.
The park sits in the swamp south of Mays Landing, and it is mostly ruins. In 1918, the federal government threw up a munitions plant here — the Bethlehem Loading Company, a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel, built from April to July of that year, 199 buildings on 1,700 acres of marsh. It loaded shells in three sizes, 75mm, 155mm, and 8-inch, and a company town called Belcoville went up beside it in roughly six months to hold the workers, hundreds of families and thousands of single men. Eleven hundred soldiers guarded it. By November they had shipped 56,000 of the larger shells overseas.
Then the war ended. The plant ran into 1919 and shut down, and during the next war crews came back and stripped it for the steel and iron — pulled the rails, took the buildings apart. What they left is what you find now: concrete foundations sitting in the trees, rail beds going nowhere.
Deeper in the park, behind a fence the county put up, is a small burying ground that was here long before any of it. Japhet Ireland, a soldier in the Revolution, was laid in the Smith-Ireland cemetery when he died in February 1810, age 66, more than a century before the plant existed. His wife Mary is there, and other Smiths and Irelands. The stones have worn down until most of them can't be read, and the ground has gone so spongy over two centuries that some of the headstones are sinking into it. Community groups come out to clean it up; the swamp keeps pulling it back down.
Out in the wider Pine Barrens, about thirty miles off near Tabernacle, people still drive to a stone monument, flash their headlights three times, and call for Emilio Carranza — a Mexican aviator who crashed there in a 1928 storm. That one isn't on park land. But it belongs to the same dark woods.
The munitions city lasted barely a year. Japhet Ireland has been in the ground since 1810, and he is still the oldest thing standing.
