The Blue Hole
Winslow Township
July 5, 2003

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The Blue Hole, located off of Piney Hollow Road in Winslow, NJ, has long been the subject of legends. Children were warned not to swim in it, for not only was it supposed to be bottomless, but should you swim out into the hole, the devil will pull you to the bottom. A story was told to Henry Beck that a team of scientists had come to Blue Hole with a large weight and a long line of cable, to be used to find out how deep the Blue Hole was. The cable went down, down, down, until it ran out. Puzzled, the scientists found some more cable, but the results repeated themselves.

Outside of local legend, what makes this particular body of water so strange? Well, most of the water in the Pinelands is a murky brown color, locally referred to as "cedar water". The Blue Hole, on the other hand, lacks this brown tint, made all the stranger by the fact that the Egg Harbor River, which runs not fifty feet from the Blue Hole, runs the same murky brown color as most of the Pine Barren's water. In addition, even on the hottest summer days, the water of the Blue Hole still remains quite chilly, as we discovered firsthand on a hot July day.


Old bridge across the river. The collapse of this bridge hid the Blue Hole from all but the most adventurous until a way was discovered from the opposite direction.


Left: The Blue Hole, and a very phallic stump. Right: Red taking a breather at the Hole, after we missed the turn in the path and walked alot further than we needed to


Two more shots of the Blue Hole


The path to the Blue Hole

Sources:

Beck, Henry Charlton, More Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1937.

Walsh, Daniel. "Getting to the bottom of the myths of the Blue Hole in the Pine Barrens." Camden Courier-Post 7 Feb. 2003.
Article available online here