Ghosts on the Coast

Beach front view of Brigantine Castle

For roughly a decade, on the island of Brigantine in New Jersey, the view of a pier overlooking the ocean was conspicuously dominated by an imposing gray five-story medieval structure known to all as Brigantine Castle.

With over a million visitors a year stopping in for some bonafide frights and chills, the haunted house amusement was a popular sensation on the former site of what was initially known as the Seahorse Fishing Pier.

Promotional poster

In 1976, businessman Carmen Ricci noticed the derelict pier and knew something was missing. It needed appeal. It needed renewal. It needed... a deranged maniac wielding a bloody axe? Ricci certainly thought so. He began construction of the wooden castle alongside accompanying eateries, shops and attractions similarly developed for the revitalized summer recreation area.

The castle boasted 100-foot high turrets and housed mad laboratories, dungeons and torture chambers which came to life through the tireless work of 35 performers, mostly drama students, some of who played zombies, witches and werewolves. Many of the cast and crew also crafted their costumes and make-up and even assisted in the castle’s initial construction.

Promotional brochure

Another crucial key to the attraction’s success was Ricci’s smart and prolific ad campaigns which featured the castle’s famed East Coast radio and TV spots ensuring visitors that “It’s alive!”

Following costly storm damage and tightening federal regulations after a haunted house tragedy at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, NJ, Ricci closed the castle and sold the pier for $1 million. Eerily, the structure burned completely down during the week that a complete demolition was scheduled.

The heyday of the spook-tacular seaside horror attractions may be long gone, but for those who remember those grisly thrills and scares, Brigantine Castle’s memories have never ceased to haunt.

The Wolf Man - Dressed to kill

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Christopher Robinson

Future Warnings

Indoctrination schooling, cancel culture, tech dominance, history erasure, government-dictated media, de-platforming— nightmarish realities seemingly emerging without any precedent or justification. No one had foreseen the arrival of any of these disturbing trends, no one except perhaps, Eric Arthur Blair, later to be known by the pseudonym George Orwell.

Born in India to European parents in 1903, Orwell studied in England before serving with the colonial police in Burma in 1922. Resigning in 1928, Orwell retreated to the slums of London and Paris, living a willfully meager existence as a conscious reaction to his personal attitudes on his experiences in Burma. This inspired his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933.

The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937, cemented Orwell’s socialist agenda while he enlisted in the militia of the Spanish Civil War. These experiences soon inspired Orwell’s newfound fears regarding communism which he expounded on in Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938.

In 1943, Orwell became literary editor of the socialist newspaper, The Tribune. The novella Animal Farm followed, which allegorically depicted the Russian Revolution with an array of farm animals. This paved the way for the work his name would forever be synonymous with. Nineteen Eighty-four, published in 1949, addressed the threat of Nazism and totalitarianism in a not-so-distant future.

In the novel, the story’s protagonist clashes with a draconian government which alters and censors previous accounts of history and monitors citizens by employing ‘Thought Police’ who seek to brainwash and eradicate any elements of individuality. Orwell’s greatest contribution to literature would also be his last. He succumbed to tuberculosis in London in 1950 at 46.

To now say that Nineteen Eighty-four fortuitously prophesied present developments is an arguable understatement. A rapidly evolving political climate where any dissent from those in power is immediately labeled as “misinformation” and even “immoral” obviates how many of Orwell’s 20th Century fears have been realized thus far.

The symbiotic development of these ideas within one year of Covid lockdowns can’t be chalked up to coincidence. A grimly premeditated power grab has clearly been made by those eager to take advantage of a dire global crisis.

Ironically, young Americans whose predecessors once burned draft cards have moved on to burning books. Presently, one wouldn’t exactly be alarmist to imagine Orwell’s work itself as the next pile on the bonfire.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Will their utopia become your dystopia? By George, let’s hope not.

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Christopher Robinson