The Witches Bazaar - a spooky fun event for Halloween

The Witches Bazaar

October 18th | 4 PM - 9 PM

Mill Race Village Shops

Feeling witchy? Then join an evening for adults at the Witches Bazaar in Mill Race Village-Mount Holly from 4-9 PM. No broom required but come prepared to be joined by all kinds of witches and other creatures for the fun. Music, dancing, tarot card readers, food vendors will be on hand too! Don’t forget to enter the costume contest and show your amazing spirt!

I love the Mill Race section of Mt. Holly and one of my favorite restaurants is there - The Robin's Nest. I wonder if the original wooden Travellers Caravan is still parked there. Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Reminder 18th Century Field Day at Red Bank Battlefield National Park

18th Century Field Day/Fall Festival

2025 Schedule of Events

10am-Levram the Great Magic Show-Performance Tent

10:30am-Ned Hector-African Americans in the Revolution-Performance Tent

11:00pm-Levram the Great Magic Show-Performance Tent

11:30pm- Battle of Red Bank Reenactment-Battlefield

12:00pm-Ned Hector-African Americans in the Revolution-Performance Tent

12:00pm-Solidiers Life-Battlefield

12:30pm-Battlefield Tour-meet at the Whitall House

1:00pm-SAR Memorial Service-near FT Mercer Flag

1:30pm-Hessian Discovery Tour-meet at Whitall House

2:00pm-Officers Duel-Battlefield area

2:30pm-Battle of Red Bank Reenactment-Battlefield

Ongoing Activities-

Colonial Demonstrations-Glass blowing, Pottery, Spinning/Weaving, Hearth Cooking, Solider Encampments Kid’s Activities-Games, Crafts, Strawbale Maze, Balloon Creations, Farm Animals

Food Trucks

Whitall House Tours

Craft Vendors

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Happiness and the daily details of a humble life

There is a play called OUR TOWN, written by Thornton Wilder, and one of the themes is the immense magic and joy in the most ordinary details of daily life and how people go through them blind and unaware. That play had a huge impact on me from the first time I read it and all the times I saw it acted including the modern version which I think was called The Fantastics.

It has made me aware of those small, humble, ordinary things and moments that stay with us forever and for which we sometimes long. I think so so very often of the mornings in my mother's dining room on Roland Ave. when the other kids were at school and I was somehow home (playing sick perhaps) and the moms, Mary Armstrong, Pat Gilbreath, (the regulars) and one or two others would gather in their housedresses and slippers, menthol cigarettes in their pockets, and drink coffee made in my mother's cheerfully perking away tall gleaming rocket ship of a percolator. Steve the breadman brought the donuts, white powdered, chocolate covered, and the women sat around the coffee table and talked to one another. I can't remember their conversations, and, to be honest, it was the ambiance, the setting, that returns to me now, and I can smell the coffee aroma mixed with the menthol cigarette smoke, and I can feel the off-duty, relaxed freedom that the women friends were enjoying - the magic of it.

There are many such similar settings that I remember in a glow of magic, just like the one I mentioned in a previous post about my brother and I sitting on the carpet in the living room waiting for the magic and mystery of the Shock Theater with Roland on a dark, late night well beyond our bedtime.

And there are more recent moments of magic that I can draw up and smell the fragrance of that brief time, and feel the sense of happiness, the Pakim Pond trail in the pine woods! And I want to go there and feel it again. But I can't. The past is over, despite what FAulkner said about the past never being past. We can't go back, we can only dip into the magic of the current moment.

This morning I did the routine homely things, rinsed and re-filled the pets water bowls, made my coffee, and an egg sandwich for breakfast. I put the final flea treatment of the year on the pets - a task I hate and they hate. I hate to put poison on them, but the fleas are bad this year and they were tormented by them, so we had to do it one more month, but this should be the last time for this year and we only had to do 3 treatments this year. The fleas were so bad, I had them in the sofa and they were biting me! Once I put the Advantage flea treatment on them, within a 24 hour period or two days, the fleas are gone.

Anyhow, to get back to cozy, , my house is puposefully cozy. I am decorated for autumn with lights on the bannister and across the kitchen doorway, hand painted decorative DAy of the Dead skulls are on the bannister for Halloween, and a big grinning pumpkin is on the door of the cabinet facing the sofa. I have a scented candle ready to light and I am drinking a hot chocolate! I LOVE my house, as I have written many times in this blog. It is small, humble, with all the old wood on the door frames and the old windows, and we are embraced by the trees. Snoozing pets fill the atmosphere with their sleep and the moment has magic. I am happy.

Roland 1957

When I was around 12 years old and my brother was around 10, on Friday nights beginning in October of 1957, we would beg beg beg our parents to let us stay up past our bedrime so we could watch Roland and the scary movie show. The theme music was Monster Mash, a number one hit at the time. The movies weren't all that scary, most of them were black and white movies such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, or Lon Cheyney in The Wolfman. Also there was Bella Lugosi as Dracula.

It is funny how such as brief period, the show only lasted from October 1957 to September 1958 could make such an impression but it was absolutely scintillating to me! I had such intense desire to see that show. What an impression it made on me. All these years later and I can still remember sitting on the carpet in the parlor raptly watching Roland and waiting for the movie of the night.

For most of my life since that time, at Halloween, I would watch those old movies again in a fright film festival using video tapes, then dvd's. For the past couple of Halloweens, though, I watched the whole series of Harry Potter films. It isn't the same, but it can never be the same because nothing is as intense as anything from that age - the desire for a specific toy, the impression of a particular film, your first albums, that you played over and over again on your first record player, and the emotions evoked! I guess that is one of the things we mourn and feel nostalgia for as we get old, that feeling of anticipation. Roland was portrayed by John Zacharle. It was a pioneering show! Do you remember it?

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com "The Shock Theatre" was a hosted horror movie show with John Zacherle as "Roland" presenting movies on WCAU-TV Channel 10, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; from 7 October 1957 to 13 September 1958.

The world of nature makes us healthier 12/12/25 Sunday

Yesterday I read an e-mail item that said spending just 20 minutes a day outdoors in nature can make a significant impact on our health both physical and emotional. I believe this. Fortunately, my dog assures me of 30 minutes a day outdoors and we frequent a lovely little park called Martin's Lake off Johnson Blvd. in Glouceter City, NJ.

For many years during my teaching career at Mary Ethel Costello School, in Gloucester City, the computer teacher, the librarian and I used our combined prep periods and lunc periods to walk around the jogging trail on Johnson Blvd. My guess would be that it is about 2/3 of a mile. We generally ent around twice and it really helped us to get through the day.

All of my life, I have been an avid walker and a passionate lover of the outdoors. My love affair began when my family moved from the concrete and brick canyons of South Philadelphia to the green and leafy suburb of Maple Shade with a corn field on the north, a wild meadown on the east, the Pennsauken Creek on the south, and a small post world war 2 housing development on the west.

Our street in Philadelphia had one tree in a small 3 foot by 3 foot square of dirt in the cement sidewalk. I feel sorry for that tree. I feel sorry for the children, who like me are raised in concrete and brick and never know the feeling of fresh new grass on their feet, or the knee high creackle and smoky fragrance of thick fallen leaves.

Every thing in the nature I discovered when we moved to New Jersey amazed me. The giant hard bulb of the thick elephant eared swamp pants that grew alongside the thick gravy like Pennsauken Creek, the thick fog that enveloped the road we drove to Ocean City to visit my Grandmother on Sundays, the forests we drove through that are now gone, turned into shopping malls and housing developments.

But I am not going to spoil this ramble through nature by dwelling on what is gone because so much is still here - the red gems of the cranberry bogs fenced in by the white sand roads at Whitesbog! You have got to go there before the harvest and see the cranberries floating atop the flooded bogs against an impossibly blue sky! Go now in October befoe it is too late!

And go to my great love, Pakim Pond. Pakim Pond was once a part of a cranberry bog operation but is now part of the Brandan T. Byrne State Forest. You will be richly rewarded EVERY season by wonders, pitcher plants on the banks of the pond, mushrooms galore in early fall, falling leaves in autumn and the fragrance of sunshine on the pine needles as your foot presses down on the ehm on the Cranberry trail.

Back in my long ago youth, you could swim at Pakim Pond. You can't swim there any longer but it is a joy to walk the trail around the edge of the pond, and to imagine living in the cabins (they can be rented and winter is best!) that you pass as your complete the circuit around the pond and back to the parking lot.

There are so many wonderful trails and woods to hike in South Jersey, and even small places nearby like Saddler's Woods which will be lovely right now. Soon I think they have their pumpkin hike. Check out the Saddler's Woods Conservation website for more info. on that.

If you are less woodsy and more asphalt path oriented, you may want to walk around Cooper River - 4 miles. Or you may like the Audubon Lake Haddon Park series of ponds, about a mile each pond adn a total of 3 to 4 miles around from Station Ave. in Haddon Heights around to Audubon. And there is Newton Creek in Collingswood and thelovely Knight's Park as well, a great assortment of beautiful trees there and a wonderful picnic shelter where you can enjoy a quiet lunch and a meditation on the seasons.

Happy Trails, my friends, where ever your trails may be - Get Outside - this is the perfect weather for it! Find a buddy, human or canine, and get going! By the way, the picture on my blog is Whitesbog in September.

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Genealogical Society of Salem County - Revolutionary War & Civil War research

The Genealogical Society of Salem County will host a presentation entitled “Researching Revolutionary and Civil War NJ Soldiers” presented by Regina Fitzpatrick on Wednesday, October 15, 2025 at 7:00 pm in the Friends Village Auditorium, 1 Friends Drive, Woodstown, NJ.

There is a wealth of military service records especially for those interested in Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers. Regina Fitzpatrick, Genealogy Librarian at the New Jersey State Library will eplain useful resources related to these conflicts from the National Archives, the New Jersey State Archives, and the New Jersey State Library. This program is free and open to the public. For more information about the program, please visit www.gsscnj.org, email genealogicalsocietysalemcounty@gmail.com, or call 609-670-0407.

Gloucester County Historical Society has some spooky events coming this month, October 2025

On the evening of October 10th at 6:00 p.m. Edgar Allen Poe (Is it really him?) will be reciting his eerie tales and poems at the Woodbury Friends Meeting House on Broad Street in Woodbury NJ . The Woodbury Friends Meeting House is over 300 years old and worth a visit in itself. For more information and tickets please contact Gloucester County Historical Society

gchsnj.org

Civil War reenactor Vince DeCicco looks back at the war's haunted sites, eerie encounters, and tales of apparitions in battlefields and other historic locations

Friday, Oct. 17, 6:30 PM >p/> at the Gloucester County Historical Society Museum

See Full Details, Directions, and Buy Ticket online ($10)

Red Bank Battlefield Field Day

Schedule of Events on October 19th 2025

Am Levram the Great Magic Show - Performance Tent

10:30 Ned Heckter - African Americans in the Revolution - Performance Tent

Chidren's Muster Drill Battlefield

11:00 Levram - the Great Magic Show

11:30 Battle Reenactment - battlefield

12:00 Ned Hector

12:00 A Soldier's Life - battlefield

12:30 Battlefield Tour - Whitall House

1:00 S.A.R. Memorial Service - near Fort flag

1:30 - Hessian Discovery tour - Whitall House

2:00 Officer's Duel

2:30 - Reenactment repeated

Crafts, vendors, walk around and enjoy all the wonderful offerings on this special and spectacular day!

Happy Trails - back through time to the magnificent beginning of our Democratic Republic of the United States of America! Down with Tyrants and Kings - Long Live the Revolution! wrightj45@yahoo.com

El Sidon Cave, Spain and The Social Contract

The twilight of theNeanderthals - Studying the many relatives in the human family tree never gets old. Constantly new finds are yielding new information about our earliest ancestors and our near cousins. Several stories recently hav revealed that there was cannibalism among Neanderthals. We had already been advised that although our near relatives, the Neanderthals, had become extinct, we all (North of sub-saharan Africa) share some of their dna, about 3 to 5 percent. People in the Phillippines share a small percentage of the dna of the other group of humans existing at the same time that we were moving across the earth, the Denisovans. The Neanderthals were throughout Europe while the Denisovans were mostly in Asia and Mongolia regions.

The finidings from the fossils of the last groups of Neanderthals that have been discovered in the El Sidon Cave in Spain is that they both interbred closely causing inbreeding genetic deformaties, and they had been killed and butchered and eaten by a rival band of Neanderthals. So Neanderthals wer practicing cannibalism. They weren't he only ones, however.

Lately several groups of fossilized remains in England and other places in Europe have revealed human fossil bones that show marks of butchering "Cut marks" and bone crushing to extract marrow, as well as the marks of teeth.

This all makes me think about htat most essential philosophical idea of civilization - the Social Contract! The beginning of laws, restraints on behavior agreed upon by all for the better of all. Hence we believe it is wrong to eat our own kind, and we also believe it is wrong to interbreed in our families, among many other taboos or laws.

NOVA (pbs) has a new series on Human origins which is well worth your time. There have been two episodes so far, the first on homo-sapiens migration out of Africa and the second on Neanderthal interactions.

By the way, a not unconnected idea about the evolution of systems is the theme of a fascinating program, also available via pbs "Particles of Thought." We are all familia with the Darwinian idea of evolution through natural selection of biological forms best adapted for their environments. The idea on the latest Particles of Thought program is about the second Arrow of Time,the evolution of systems in response to the funcitonality of the system. Societies, languages, and a variety of other systems may well exist or disappear according to the external pressures exerted on them as desribed in the latest discussion. I strongly recommend this episode!

Happy Trails, wrightj45@yahoo.com

"Quoth the Raven, Nevermore"

The Gloucester County Historical Society features an October 10 performance by retired U.S. National Park Poe House Interpretive Ranger Helen McKenna-Uff in character as Edgar Allen Poe, bringing his macabre tales to life and sharing insights into his fascinating life.

McKenna-Uff was a Park Ranger long assigned to the Edgar Allen Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia. She has been studying the author’s tortured life and gruesome works since her acting classes in high school, where she became “Poe-sessed” after memorizing “The Raven.”

A professional actress, she’s been performing the author’s spine-tingling tales on stage, radio and television since 1999.

The Oct. 10 Historical Society event will take place at 6:30 p.m. in the Woodbury Friends Meetinghouse at 124 North Broad Street in Woodbury. Light refreshments will be provided.

The massive, 310-year-old log-beam Friends Meeting House is a destination attraction in itself.