Sunday Pastries With the Dead 37

Wandering the 1768-era cemetery made famous by "Friday the 13th."

Today’s Sunday Pastries is notable in that, as you can see, it’s not happening on a Sunday. Instead, we’re celebrating that it’s Friday the 13th—and what better way to lean into the superstition of this unlucky day than by following in the footsteps of the doomed Crystal Lake campers from the 1980 cult classic film Friday the 13th? The movie was shot at a few New Jersey locations—a small town’s main street, a popular scout camp, and a cemetery—all of which I visited. So let’s take a tour and hope Jason Voorhees leaves us well enough alone for the duration…

ch ch ch ah ah ah

Early in the film’s opening, would-be Crystal Lake counselor and cook Annie Phillips walks the main street of Blairstown, NJ donning her heavy backpack and a massive, naïve grin. We first see her cross a bridge…

…onto a charming street with an old bank and lovely stone structure…

…then dip inside the arches of said structure…

…and turn in front of a few more buildings on the main drag (the left-most is now a theater that hosts a popular Friday the 13th viewing party).

Also in Blairstown is a diner featured later in the film—it’s currently for sale, if any of you are in the market for the ultimate piece of movie memorabilia.

Annie eventually hitches a ride with a truck driver, who drops her off in front of a cemetery with a now-iconic wrought iron gate. This is the Moravian Cemetery in Hope, NJ—it’s 12 minutes away from Blairstown—and we’ll explore some of the headstones inside after the movie location tour. Unlike Annie, I lived to tell about it.

The filming location for Camp Crystal Lake is a very popular 380-acre Boy Scout camp called Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, in Hardwick Township, NJ—21 minutes away from the cemetery. It’s private property owned by the Northern New Jersey Council, BSA, and they often have to contend with trespassers trying to catch a glimpse of the real Crystal Lake. To curb them a bit, they created a separate tour and event branch to welcome film lovers during the off-season.

That concludes our movie location portion—now, on to the cemetery! Hope, NJ is a fascinating place—it’s one of America’s first planned communities, and was settled and established by German Moravians in 1769. They came through the area from Bethlehem, PA en route to New England, and a bunch of them decided to stick around. They changed the town name from Greenland to Hope in 1775, in reference to their church’s “hope of immortality.” The Moravian “experiment” lasted 40 years before the dwindling members lost their subsidization from the German church, sold the town, and moved back to Pennsylvania. But the name—and plenty of the early deceased church members—stuck.

The original 1781-era stone Moravian church is down the road a bit (it’s now a bank)—the lovely white wood Methodist church beside the cemetery was built long after the German congregation left, in 1832. The burial ground was started before the stone church was erected, as is the custom (buildings take a while to create and people usually die before they’re completed!) It’s a general rule to date a cemetery to the year a town or initial main structure was established; in this case, I’m working with the oldest burial date in the plot, which is 1768.

62 Moravians are buried here—there’s a corner of the graveyard devoted to their remaining twenty-some slate markers, which are now fallen and flush with the ground. The carving is expert but simple (no symbology here!) and the varying fonts—for which I’m becoming quite a nerd—are really lovely. The earliest one that I could read was from 1776…America years old!

I love that so many of these include where the interred was born—from Hope to New York to Pennsylvania to Germany to Yorkshire, England.

I can’t get over the typography. How about those J’s as 1’s?! I’m used to seeing the Old English f’s as s’s, but this was a new one. SWOON.

Until next Sunday, fellow taphophiles!

A quick author’s note to send heaps of thanks to my friend Jon, who stepped in to help me with a host of technical issues after my computer unceremoniously died this week (can I blame Jason Voorhees for that??) Without Jon, this piece never would’ve happened on time. Let’s all send him a hearty Sunday Pastries salute!