What Crossed Route 542 in the Rain?

Keyara Klawitter was driving through the New Jersey Pine Barrens on 11 October when her high beams picked out something stepping into Route 542. She was coming around the bend near Loveland Lane, outside New Gretna. The figure entered from her right. She braked. By the time it reached the other side, she had seen enough to pick out long arms, hands she thought looked human and a coat of black fur that shone in the headlights. She remembered the fur looking soaked. Her children slept through it in the back seat.

Klawitter estimated the figure at about eight feet tall. In her account to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, its arms swung as it walked and it carried itself with a slight hunch. It took so few steps to get across the road that she almost wanted to describe it as gliding. She was careful on that point. The arms swung and the legs stepped. It was the speed with which those steps took it across the road that made the movement so hard to reconcile with its size. She asked her husband, Jason, whether he was seeing it too. He said he was.

There is a moment in her account after the figure has vanished that I keep coming back to. She drove on and, once they had put some distance between themselves and the crossing, called her mother. The question of what to call the thing came up between the couple on the drive home. Klawitter said she had known very little about Sasquatch before that evening. The shape in the headlights came first. The name for it came later, along with the matter of finding someone who would take the report.

Back at the bend

The couple contacted New Jersey State Park Police and the state Department of Environmental Protection, according to the investigator’s notes. The latter referred them to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. Investigator Jacob Korbel and a colleague met them at the bend about a week later. In November, as South Jersey radio stations picked up the story, it became possible to read both Klawitter’s account and Korbel’s description of what happened when the couple went back.

From the road the investigators could see a game trail on either side. They found broken branches and a few impressions, though they could attach none of them confidently to the crossing. The ground had been through heavy rain. The couple pointed out where the figure had appeared and where it had gone. Using a nearby pole as a reference, the investigators came away with an estimated height of seven and a half to eight feet and a viewing time of four or five seconds. Those figures came from the reconstruction. The most concrete things the couple could give them were the positions on the road and the way the figure moved between them.

Korbel remembered the couple watching the woods while the group was there. That detail makes sense in a way the height estimate never quite can. You can revisit a bend and find the same road and the same trees. In daylight you can walk to the spot where something stepped out and see how a trail continues on the other side. The act of standing there also puts you back within a few strides of the place where you last saw it. For the couple the crossing had ended at the edge of the headlights. Going back meant spending time on both sides of that line.

A game trail can be almost invisible when you are travelling on a road. From inside a car the woods appear as a continuous verge until a deer, or something larger, comes through it. A driver sees that opening from one direction, for as long as the headlights and the bend allow. An animal following the trail would have an entirely different view of the same place. It would see the road as a brief interruption in the cover. That difference in vantage point runs through several reports from this part of New Jersey. Sometimes the witness is on the paved road. Sometimes the witness is the one moving through the trees.

Behind the sand pit

On 5 November 2024 a man was walking his dog near the Clayton sand pit in Lacey Township. They were on a lightly travelled path. The dog went ahead towards something in the brush, and the man followed, expecting to see a deer. By the time he got close enough to make out what was moving, it was already heading away. He described a dark figure with a wide back, little apparent neck and no visible ears. He had a view of it working its way uphill through vegetation.

The man’s account has none of the certainty about height that Klawitter brought back from Route 542. The investigators’ reconstruction suggested a shorter figure, and he was looking at it from behind while it moved through brush. He remembered the way it used its limbs to get through the growth. The investigator described the motion as resembling swimming. There was a game trail nearby, as there would be at the Route 542 crossing. Korbel and fellow investigator Eric Spinner searched for impressions and came away without tracks they could use.

There is a temptation, once the two accounts appear together, to use the clearer description to fill in the other. The driver remembered hands, so it is easy to give the figure on the hill those same hands. The hiker saw something move through brush, so it is easy to picture the taller figure doing exactly that after it left the road. The details the witnesses actually gave us are more interesting. The shape on the hill was turning away from the man as he approached. The shape in the headlights was seen from the side, with its arms in motion. The hiker had the better light. The couple had the clearer outline. Neither could supply the face.

The gravel road

An older report from near Bass River State Forest begins with two boys walking on a gravel road near their scout camp. One of them, writing as an adult, placed the incident in August 1970. He remembered a warm night and a full moon. The two saw a large, hairy silhouette run across the road. He estimated it at seven feet or more and remembered a heavy stride. They went back to camp and told their scoutmaster, who laughed and sent them to bed. It stayed with the witness, though he went years without talking about it. Another report from southern New Jersey eventually prompted him to write down what he remembered.

The gap between experience and report changes what can be recovered. There was no quick return to the gravel road with someone to stand where the figure had crossed. The account was kept in a boy’s memory until he had a place to put it. What stayed with him was the size, the stride and the feeling of being out there with another person who had seen it too. On Route 542 there was an immediate submission and a site visit. Both stories still hinge on an exchange between two people at the edge of a road, when each had a chance to look at the other and see whether the encounter belonged to them both.

In November the New Gretna story travelled well beyond the bend. The older Lacey Township account came back with it, as did the familiar question of whether Bigfoot belongs in the New Jersey woods. At the crossing itself the two sides of the trail still face each other across a strip of asphalt. It takes a few seconds to drive through that stretch. If Klawitter and her husband had arrived those few seconds earlier or later, the road ahead would have been empty. Whatever came through the pines that night would have had the same route into the trees.

Further Reading

The Route 542 Witness Report

The Lacey Township Encounter

The Bass River Scout Camp Account

South Jersey Coverage

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