![]() The rowdy high schoolers were often drunk and stoned when they left the grave yard at midnight, and the shadowy rumors about the place grew darker and scarier when a car full of teens crashed tragically on Possum Run Road. ![]() The cemetery was profoundly isolated at the dead end of Tucker Road, and ideal for nefarious activities because there was only one way in and you could see headlights coming if the sheriff was on his way. The popularity of Mary Jane’s grave blossomed in no small part because the term “Mary Jane” was a hippie era code word for marijuana. Youngsters from the youth camp grew up to be teenagers in their parents’ cars, and they all knew that a dead-end road was a perfect hangout for smoking dope in the hazy drug-blurred days of the ’60s-’70s. The legend sprouted roots almost immediately. Once the camp had an actual graveyard on its premises, a likely headstone was selected for a ghost story about a witch, and Mary Jane’s Grave began its strange rise to fame. There was no cemetery at the original site, so they improvised (as reported in this column from 1953.) ![]() Their annual Halloween-in-July activities originated at the camp’s first location, today Happy Hollow Camp on Hull Road. No one paid any particular attention to the grave of Mary Jane Hendrickson until 1960 when the Friendly House moved their Hidden Hollow Camp to Possum Run Road, and in the process acquired the Mt. Who could have imagined in 1960 what the seed of that party-game would sprout into by the ’70s, and what a bizarre, thorny and poisonous vine would emerge through the 2000s to choke the life out of a once-lovely peaceful country bone yard. It was so popular the spook hike became a yearly, and then a weekly event at camp for thousands of youngsters through the ensuing decades. It all began so simply, as harmless fun for a Halloween-in-July theme day activity, when kids took a spooky hike through the nighttime forest to a haunted graveyard. The tale concluded with a cautionary curse intended to protect the tree and her grave from mischievous trespassers. The fictional campfire tale recounted at Hidden Hollow told of Mary Jane abusing her evil powers until the neighbors finally rose up against her and hung her in the cemetery from a mighty pine. The only reason the tremendously dark aura coalesced about her name is because in the summer of 1960 a camp counselor at Hidden Hollow Camp nearby looked around the graveyard for a stone upon which to hang a story, and chose the humble headstone under a big old spruce marked Mary Jane as a suitable landmark for a witch story, to give young campers the creeps. Her headstone stone, long since diappeared, read: She was membered of the Evangelical Association, and passed away quietly from the effects of cancer. ![]() Mary Jane Hendrickson, one of nine children, had relatives in Hastings, and spent a large part of her life in the area as a maiden aunt. ![]() Olive Cemetery is situated about halfway between two villages that no longer exist: Hastings and Newville. She was somebody’s sweet old aunt who died of cancer in 1898. There isn’t a great deal known about her because there wasn’t hardly anything in her life to distinguish her from any other of the farm women of the Monroe Township countryside around Hastings. That’s actually an apt analogy of the story of Mary Jane’s Grave-because all the elements of the tale rage around the periphery, and the unfolding of the troubled history is all about everything except what’s at the very core: Mary Jane herself.īecause she was most certainly not burned as a witch, nor did she take to her grave a life story any more malevolent than that which the trials of life bring to any other hapless soul in the graveyard. If you picture a storm-dark and destructive and vaguely sinister-it is easy to impute this evil force as emanating from Mary Jane’s Grave but if you do, then you also have to picture the eye of the storm: where all is peaceful, still and, comparatively speaking, rather boring. The history of her graveyard is much like a whirlwind that starts innocently enough as a summer breeze only to take on unexpected strength and gain unruly power to threaten the landscape as a raging and destructive twister. It might have been appropriate if the scarred old tree had been taken out by a fierce storm: there would have been a certain kind of poetry in that. The end of an era came at Mary Jane’s Grave in the fall of 2014 when the huge and famous spruce that marked her resting place sadly crashed down among the stones. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |