Mountain Road climbs the first ridge of the Watchungs on the Martinsville side of Bernards Township, out in Somerset County, New Jersey. Where it levels out near the Bridgewater line, a single oak stands by itself in an open field at number 181, across from a housing development. The tree is big, old and badly damaged: its trunk carries axe cuts, chainsaw scars, burn marks and graffiti, and one long limb that once ran almost parallel to the ground has been lost. For at least half a century it has been known as the Devil’s Tree.
What happened
Nothing is documented to have happened at the tree at all, which is the heart of the matter. The legend comes in layers. The oldest layer says a farmer who lived in a white farmhouse beside the field killed his family and then hanged himself from the oak, and that other suicides and murders followed. A second layer says the Ku Klux Klan, which had a real presence in central New Jersey in the 1920s, held meetings and cross burnings in the field and lynched Black residents from the low horizontal branch. A third layer is the curse: anyone who tries to cut the tree down meets an untimely end; the ground beneath it stays bare when snow lies everywhere else; a boulder beside it, nicknamed Heat Rock, is warm to the touch in any season and marks a gate to hell; and visitors who urinate on the trunk, mock it, or take a piece of bark suffer car breakdowns and accidents on the way home, or find their hands stained black at the next restaurant.
The most repeated story is the sentinel. People who linger at the tree after dark report being chased down Mountain Road by an old pickup truck, usually described as black but sometimes white, whose headlights vanish as soon as they reach the main road. Weird NJ, which printed a collection of reader accounts in 2012, received versions of all of these, including one from a man who said he broke an ankle when something threw him out of the tree while he was cutting down a noose someone had tied to it.
The investigation
No police or academic inquiry has ever been made into the tree. The closest thing is the work of Brooks Betz, a Basking Ridge historian who runs the Mr. Local History Project and has gone through the township’s records and old newspapers. Speaking to Patch in 2021, Betz said he could find no report of a farmer murdering his family on Mountain Road at any date. On the Klan, he found something more concrete: an active chapter operated just down the road on the Bridgewater side, near the junction of Routes 202 and 206 and Brown Road, where a Hindu temple now stands, and a man rumored to be a local Klan leader owned property nearby. Cross burnings and rallies in that part of Somerset County are consistent with what is known about the Klan’s brief boom in New Jersey during the 1920s. What Betz could not find was anything placing a Klan gathering, let alone a lynching, at the oak itself.
The phantom truck has the clearest origin. According to Betz, a group of local boys in the 1960s invented the story of a killer pickup and then drove one up and down the road to scare people away so they could drink in the field undisturbed; one of them later admitted it. Wikipedia’s summary adds that a family living nearby used a pickup to chase off trespassers, which fits the same account.
The explanations
The tree is an ordinary oak in an exposed field. A large, isolated tree with a bare canopy and dark bark absorbs and radiates more heat than open snow, which can thin the cover beneath it; the same goes for a dark boulder in full sun. The scars on the trunk are real, but they are the result of the legend rather than evidence for it, since decades of visitors have hacked at the tree to test the curse.
The Klan element gives the legend its weight. Somerset County did have Klan activity in the 1920s, and a story that turns a real episode of local racism into a cursed tree is a way of remembering it without naming anyone. But a hanging leaves records, and a lynching in a northern suburb in the twentieth century would have been reported. None has been found.
Where it stands
Bernards Township considered developing the field, which would probably have meant removing the oak, and chose instead to keep the land as a protected park with the tree standing. Repeated vandalism led the township to wrap the base of the trunk in chain-link fencing and to post signs giving the hours the site is open. The park is now closed, marked with keep-out and private-property notices, and patrolled by township police, who told Patch in 2021 that trespassing had not increased despite the tree’s growing fame. Thrillist has called it the most haunted place in New Jersey. The Devil’s Tree is best read as a legend built on a real and uncomfortable piece of county history, attached to a tree that has suffered more from the story than anyone has suffered from the tree.