The Devil's Tree

People have tried to cut this oak down with axes and with chainsaws, and it is still standing, carrying the marks. That is the part of the Devil's Tree that is not folklore. The rest is. New Jersey tells a set of stories about it: that a car parked nearby will not start again, that the trunk stays warm in cold weather, that visitors go home with scratches nobody gave them. One local outlet has called it the most haunted place in the state. The stories are widely told, long-standing and unverified, and they are why most people come. What they find is a single oak alone in an open field off Mountain Road, ringed by a chain-link fence the township put up after years of vandalism and night-time visits. The field is public open space and a sign gives the hours, closing about half an hour after sunset, which is presumably aimed at the visitors who made the fence necessary. It is at least two hundred years old. No botanical survey has recorded which oak it is, so the species on this page reads simply as Quercus. If you know the answer from the leaves or the bark, we would like to hear it. One clarification, because the two are confused constantly: this is not the Basking Ridge oak, the 600 year old white oak a few miles away that died in 2016 and was taken down the next year. This one is alive.