The Cobbe House part i a dark history.

The Cobbe house, for that is still how it is known to many of the folk of Bridgeton, New Jersey; rested on the top of St Joseph’s hill, on what is now known as Franklin Drive. It stood separate from most of the other houses in town. Its vantage point, overlooking most of the town but mainly down to the cross roads of West Commerce street and Atlantic Street and the lake with an air of something bordering on the uncanny.  I recall that many of the people of the town wouldn’t look up at it:  and still many don’t. They prefer to look down, or the other way, so as to avoid direct eye contact with the place.  If you ask them why there is never an answer, just an awkward scanty smile, from closed pursed lips.  

 Nevertheless, it was always enticing, for young children’s furtive imagination’s; as many wondered about and along the long winding path, that led to the rusted, wrought iron gates; that were locked -tight shut- with a heavy chain, and a heavier bolt that existed, perhaps for two reasons: - one, to stop people getting in… and two: - perhaps… just perhaps…to stop something from inside the house getting out.

My memory of the house rests both objectively, and deeply personally subjective.  Objectively, my understanding of the Cobbe house, comes through the direct evidence, of collated extensive and painfully detailed research, that my Uncle:- a Mr. Douglas Freemantle, whom at one time happened to be the town’s local chemist. He was a thick whiskered, bespectacled dry skinned and rather wiry man, as I recall him to be -whom, it has to be said-  also volunteered at the local museum as an amateur historian and researcher of some renown. He was also a man both of extreme intellect careful observation; yet had the gentlest of heart, and a wry sense of humour, that despite his death some ten years ago now, has never left me.

 However, the Cobbe house has also tainted me deeply, in ways that will never leave and despite all that has happened, despite believing now that it’s all finally over, my nights will be forever restless.

In looking at the history of the property, one has to begin in the year 1756, when a Mr. Samuel Cobbe and his family of five children: - Delores, Stephen, Marcus, Samuel Junior and Eleanor, or Nell together with his demure wife Alice Cobbe; moved into the town, from Boston, with dreams of turning the money, he had made from trading with the East India trading company, into land acquisition and property.  This is seen clearly in many of the correspondences that he made to his wife, and property partners of the autumn of the preceding year.

 It is also fair to state that during the construction of the property, while his family lived in rather cramped accommodation in the centre of town, and the first few years while the Cobbe’s were living at the house, nothing of note occurred.

 It was only after the first death of Samuel Junior, in the summer of 1777, whilst being taken to town by cart and pony on the hilly shaded dirt track to the house that luck began to change for the Sanderson family.  For not long after, in 1778, both Delores and Marcus succumbed to what was called on their death
certificates as “a wasting disease”.

in 1779 Mr. Cobbe senior himself lost his life though a sudden heart attack caused by unknown factors, leaving the tired Alice to look after baby Nell, upon whom she doted on and Stephen. Whom was now the only male heir to the estate. 

After Nell’s sudden unexpected and terrible death in the winter of 1881, Alice,  now a broken woman, lost her sanity, and was, with help from the servants, supported in the upper attic rooms of the property.  Though Samuel’s income at the time of his death was quite large, it dwindled quickly; as money needed to tend to the upkeep of Alice, and this ate into the family fortune. 

Stephen took to working wherever he could to maintain her mother within
the safety of the house that she refused to leave, yet was, when looking at Stephen’s letter’s to the local doctors’ at the time, was “in abject fear
of.” 

 Yet, despite his best efforts, he failed to keep the staff for longer than a year at a time. Many left for undisclosed reasons. Some left due to the “strange and poisonous odour” that tended to fill certain room’s such as “the cellar and the servant’s quarters” on the below floor.  Yet nothing could be found to trace the smell, that according to one servant “seemed to leak through the floorboards themselves.”  

Finally, and tragically, Alice “succumbed to her madness”. She was found by her most faithful servant, hanging by her neck from a tightly wrapped bedsheet, from one of the roof beam’s in the spring morning of 1783. 

Despite renovations that cost Stephen what was left of his father’s income; only outside parties would be interested in wanting to buy the property and even
then many of those, on hearing of the loss of fortune in relation to the Cobbe’s,
were disinclined to consider taking on a property that had: “dark connotations
associated with it.”   It was not long after this, in the late autumn of 1785, that Stephen himself disappeared. No one knew where he went.  Some say he went
mad himself, other’s that he went abroad. In truth no one really knew. However,
many of the towns local folk have said that whatever moved into that house in
the summer of 1777 has never left.  Strange and spectral images were seen at the windows and at one time a “queere fluttering” was reported to have been heard about the place.

In the end, the most hardened of people, with little imagination and   the most cynical of outlook, concluded that such sounds and images were the work of local smuggler’s, who tended to bring shipments from the Cohansey River.  (as Bridgeton was briefly known as "Cohansey Township") as they considered that the house’s unique position:- overlooking the Tumbling Dam Lake, now called Sunset Lake, near the northern boundary of the city, led to it being ideal for many
nefarious individuals, to use the property for distribution of untaxed goods.

It was briefly owned in 1886 by the Berwick family, who came from Wisconsin, though there is little direct or indirect evidence, in relation to their
ownership of the property, other than the paying for and the installation of,
the high wall and the brick pillars and the heavy wrought iron gates that after
a fall in in the year 1923 fell without repair.

In looking back there seems to be no reason as to why, after so many years, that the house itself should remain so intact.  After all, nature has always reclaimed what human beings have dared to put upon the landscape. Yet there, upon that hill, the house remained  untouched. Nothing, not even poison Ivy
claimed the dry dirt earth around the house.  It’s was if…as if…dare I say, nature herself has shunned this place, and  would forever  do so.  

My first experience of the property began as a young child, in the late spring of the year of the storm: 1923.  I was, at that time, a thin and impressionable youth; with a very fertile imagination, that, dare I say, led me into trouble more than once.

Unlike many people of the town, I would look up St Joseph’s hill and stare at the house, whose square black windows seemed, at least to me, have an unearthly dead glare about them. 

Before that spring day, my friends and I would, on dares, reach the heavy gates of the house, along the winding track and tenderly touch the cold rusted iron with our hot, hot hands and shout excitedly about how “Mad Alice would come and get you!” for stories never die in a small town.

Earlier that spring, a terrible storm had buffeted the town; leading to, amongst other things, the collapse of the old iron gates of the derelict Sanderson property, So, it was with trepidation that the four of us, Drew, Tony Cerci, Nell and I Drew Bateman,  stood, for the very first time in our short lives, in front of the Cobbe  House