New Jersey - Fairy Tale Forest

Fairy Tale Forest


The idea was endearing enough: a small village of miniature fairy tale scenes, intricately rendered and gently arranged to please generations of children, with fairy tale rides (think carousel) and even a Santa village. Unfortunately, add in the latest hyper generation that needs constant distraction and stimulation, and walking through the village with small kids no longer generates the kind of revenue to sustain the place. Enter...


Hot Diggity, who welcomes you to the Creepiest Place on Earth. Who is Hot Diggity, anyway, and why does it matter whose Fairy Tale Forest it is? What else do or did they ever own anyway? These guys took the storybook and whacked it out on psilocybin. Seriously. See that mushroom there on the left? The idea was to try to make the place relevant in the modern age, but they didn't consider that the stuffed rabbits and goats (actual animals, mind you) were getting kind of stale after 50 years out. Ever left meat out a week by accident? Multiply it by 2500. So, yeah, even with all the wacky colors and the shapes that seem to move the more you stare at them, the place closed only a few years later. See the bottom of the sign? This is Shoebox Self Storage. And despite the name, you can't in fact stash your belongings in the Old Woman's house on the right. Which her grandkid tricked out on an all-night acid binge.


As the paint, concrete, and everything else about the place peel away, the mystique dies a little, and in fact everything becomes a little creepier thanks to the abandonedness.


I'm sure this is a fairy tale representation in some form, but why is Jesus threatening the Old Woman Who Lived In a Shoe with a rock? Or is that a stale communion wafer?

Blatant psychedelia.


Poor knight, trapped inside a shoe with a dragon. This is a true casualty of neglect.


Childhood innocence can be destroyed just by walking around the side of the building. This is clearly a ramshackle concrete hut with dollops of lollipop paint scattered on it. Fake bricks, too, and I don't think that tower on the roof spews rainbows and unicorns. Maybe the smoke of dead goats and rabbits. Continue beyond the last LSD tower and see every element of the Forest strewn about haphazardly, often shattered and dangerously pointy, certainly never to be resurrected. Sorry, there is no Tooth Fairy; she died when Rapunzel's tower collapsed.


Farewell from the land of magical mushrooms!

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