Received my ‘Mycellium Parish News 2025‘ in the mail. Great zine and I highly recommend. @rawilson23.bsky.social published a review on their site, so go check that out. Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT received a very kind and generous review in this issue.
The 2025 Mycellium Parish News may be ordered from Etsy.
A new series and some assorted news
It’s been on my mind to do this for a while. So, I’m just going to do it.
This is the beginning of a free podcast/post series of Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT
You may subscribe to this series via RSS here. https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/232444.rss
On Spotify
Apple podcasts
iHeart
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-joseph-mathenys-art-is-war-107824877/
Pocast Addict
https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/joseph-matheny-s-art-is-war-talks/4223678
and most other podcast outlets.
Or you can just receive them through this Substack.
You get the picture.
Twice a month, I will publish, in order, a chapter of the book and the corresponding discussion audio. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is a multidisciplinary work: the text is one part, the audio is another, and the links within the text add a different dimension. Sequoyah and I discuss it in depth, including how I intended people to experience this design. Here’s a video of that discussion:
Here is the first chapter, with a bonus intro by David Metcalfe, which was previously included only in the print version.
I hope you enjoy this free experiment and know that it was made possible by those who bought the print/audio or combo. If you’d like to donate some change to thank us for the tremendous effort it took to produce 14 hours of audio and all the linked print for this project, feel free to buy the audio files on Bandcamp or the print or digital versions of the books. If you can’t afford it, that’s ok. The people who bought the work this year and last year covered for you. Kinda like a “pay it forward” model.
Be well and enjoy.
Ong’s Hat © Patrick Tappe/Shutterstock.com Tucked into the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Ong’s Hat may be found on actual maps from the early days of the region. The small town finds naming on maps but most likely, it was merely the site where Ong (presumed a farmer) parked in a hut (Ong’s hut) on regular long journeys to and from market. As late as the 1930s, Ong’s Hat appeared on maps but nothing could be done to prove the place ever existed, save finding the ruins of one single hut in the middle of the forest.
It wasn’t until the 1980s when strange tales emerged on various bullet board services and magazines of conspiracy theorists that people thought about the place again. The publications detailed elaborate conspiracies involving mystics and scientists breaking through to another realm via Ong’s Hat. The tales arose from the novel “Incunabula Papers: Ong’s Hat and Other Gateways to New Dimensions.” Author Joseph Matheny probably didn’t anticipate his fictional tales would lead to theorists believing every word until the 2000s, seeking answers of the “truth.”
If you find one of the outdated maps from the 1930s or earlier, you may well be able to pop over to the ruins with your drone. Or visit Google and find the Ong’s Hat Parking area at the Batona Trail and hike out.
LINK: https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/article/7-famous-places-that-don-t-actually-exist/ss-AA1XgCi9
Among New Jersey’s most enigmatic vanished settlements, Ong’s Hat blurs the line between documented history and enduring folklore. You’ll find this Burlington County location first documented on a 1778 Hessian map, where Quaker settler Jacob Ong purchased 100 acres around 1700.
Folklore storytelling explains the name through legends of a trampled silk hat, possibly painted on tavern keeper Isaac Haines’s sign circa 1800 for illiterate travelers.
During the 1860s, you’d encounter a lively social center known for prizefighting and moonshining.
By 1936, only ruins remained.
Modern lantern preservation efforts combat fictional narratives from the 1980s claiming interdimensional experiments occurred here.
Today, you’ll discover descendants denied the town’s existence in 1968, maintaining only a rest hut stood along the cedar swamp route.
It all started with the emergence of a pamphlet, “Ongu’s Hut: Gateway to Multiple Dimensions, Full-Color Pamphlet for the Chaos Institute and the Moorish Scientific Monastery,” which suddenly began circulating in the late 1980s. According to the pamphlet, Ongu’s Hut was once the site of secret experiments by quantum mechanics researchers the Dobbs Brothers. Nearby, the mystic Wali Fard had founded the Moorish Scientific Monastery. Eventually, scientists and mystics met, merging metaphysical disciplines—including meditation, physics, alchemy, and remote viewing—in unprecedented ways, opening up new frontiers for further experimentation. The pamphlet describes how, after repeated complex and bizarre experiments, they finally pierced the veil between parallel worlds and developed the “Egg,” a pod that allows travel to other dimensions. However, after a mysterious nuclear accident at a nearby military base exposed them to the risk of radioactive contamination, they used the Egg’s technology to transport the entire monastery and its inhabitants to a parallel Earth, leaving only the building for the gateway behind. The end of the pamphlet invites readers to Ongu’s Hut and discover the transdimensional community there, but cautions that it will not be easy.Another Real World: Collective Delusions in the Post-Truth Era (Part 1) This was later compiled into an online book titled Ong’s Hat: The Beginning by Joseph Masini, the founder of Ong’s Hat.
Matheny first launched the project around 1988, collaborating with anarchist author Peter Lamborn Wilson, physicist Nick Herbert, and artist James Cohenlein to create a legend of paranormal activity in New Jersey. Initially, Matheny and his friends spread the legends through catalogs of magazine articles and ghost books that they compiled and mailed out, but in 1993 they continued the story using the then-new medium of the internet.Ong’s Hat (ARG) This led to widespread speculation among users online, and eventually, due to harassment from users who mistook it for a real event, Joseph Matheny, the creator of the story, himself confessed that it was fiction, and the story came to an end in 2001. ☟Some of the email text used in the ARG has also been archived. Incunabula: Ong’s Hat- Scans of the original mail art documents form the 80s and early 90s : Joseph Matheny : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet ArchiveScans of the original mail art documents of the Incunabula Caarchive.org LINK TO ARTICLE: https://note.com/angrybreakfast/n/n668d9bd4f7a2#c3f1e498-c580-43b9-8f14-f65466d3dd08
However, preceding Publius Enigma was what expert Szulborski (2005) suggests was truly the first ARG experience, Ong’s Hat / Incunabula. The Ong’s Hat experience differed in that it intertwined two different narrative from both Ong’s Hat Ashram in the 1970’s as well as that of “Incunabla Papers” (Szulborski, 2005a). Moreover, this experience is only said to have precluded the modern ARG because it began so many years prior to the introduction of technologies that now characterize the genre. The experience was so large and spanned over so many years, that experts are unable to agree on when it actually began. Furthermore, this experience was so ahead of its time that it has been dubbed as a “literary/digital crossover” (Szulborski, 2005a) that incorporated mediums such as the CD-Rom, traditional print, bulletin boards and eventually, the internet(Szulborski, 2005a). In fact, a co-creator of the experience’s CD-Rom has suggested that Ong’s Hat included 23 complex puzzles, some of which have yet to be solved or even identified (Szulborski, 2005a). Consequently, many lessons were learned in this generation of ARGs that aided insofar as identifying feasible experiential scope, depth of cross-media convergence and appropriate timelines for the current generation. Additionally, because this generation of ARGs would effectively draw to a close in the early to mid 1990’s, a majority of the technologies that characterize the current generation of ARGs were beginning to emerge and shape the next generation.
By the mid-1930s, Ong’s Hat had been completely reclaimed by the Pine Barrens, leaving behind only crumbling foundations and forgotten artifacts.What makes it cinematically compelling is the layered narrative—from documented disappearances to internet-born urban legends about interdimensional portals and government secrecy. For location scouts, Ong’s Hat offers:
