Gallows Beach

The town was founded in 1897, and named after founder John Gallow. A barrier island in South Jersey, it has all the makings of a quiet, nice little beach town. The truble is, bad things just seem to happen here. Things no one can explain. The tourists that come here are either morbidly curious or just very, very out of the loop. The year-rounders gave up trying to understand so many generations ago that nowadays no one really cares. Do they believe in the supernatural? Not at all, everyone sees weird stuff happen here all the time, just don't go poking around into any of it and hopefully nothing will happen to you. The real thing to be afraid of are the $35 dollar a season beach badge prices, I mean that's just extortionate.

The Pier

People go fishing here. To catch normal fish probably, not sea monsters or blobs

The Beach

The shoreline is 7.8 miles long, and is actually pretty nice. The boardwalk is split in two by the half-mile gap. Since the boardwalk was built, that same section had dealth with destruction from a termite infestation, unprescedented storm damage, and three separate fires before the town decided to stop attempting to rebuild it. Instead, there are now two sections, Boardwalk A and Boardwalk B. Gallows Beach is a "dry beach," meaning that no alcohol may be sold or consumed on the boardwalk or beach. However, this rule is unenforcable in the gap because it isn't part of the boardwalk, and many people take full advantage of this loophole. It also occasionally serves as a venue for bands to perform at.

Gallows Plaza Hotel and Resort

there's a good few places to stay in Gallows Beach during the summer season, from cheap hotels to airbnbs, but none as classy or obnoxious as Gallows Plaza. Decades ago, the whole boardwalk was zoned for resort hotels, but every other building had a long chain of unfortunate and unexplainable mishaps which led to their developments being cancelled. The Plaza survived mostly unscathed.

The Wetlands

While most of the coastline is beach, there's also some marsh around. This area is frequented by birders, who enjoy the variety of birds who nest here, and anyone looking for some quiet and solitude.

Gallows Beach High School

Gallows Beach High School was built on top of Sinker Island, which is mostly marshland. Above the entrance there's a quote from town founder John Gallow: "No mystery can stand againt the might of discovery." The academics are...pretty bad. But the sports? Also bad. Year after year, the Gallows Beach Hangmen are in fierce competiton with the neighboring Salvage High Seadogs for second-to-last place in the Atlantic County sports division. What GBHS does do well in? ...Does a high rate of injuries and disappearances count?

(Until 1984, the mascot was a classic executioner with a noose and everything. There were parent complaints that the mascot was too dark and not school appropriate, so the mascot was changed to a grim reaper as a compromise, keeping the morbid identity but with a more vague portrayal. The cheers remained mostly undoctored, and you can still hear chants of "SWING, SWING SWING!" when the visiting team is losing. The marching band's rendition of Drowning Pool's Bodies must be heard to be believed.)

Sinker Island

Sinker Island was entirely marshland before half of it was cleared to make room for the high school. According to rumors, the pit in the direct center of the marsh is bottomless. Students often talk about "The Pit" and some throw things into it to see how far they will go, while others worry about the ecological effect the decades of tossed report cards and contraband must be having on the marsh.

Boardwalk A

Boardwalk A is the more expensive option that stays closed until the summer season. Highlights include:

• a string of hotels
• many t-shirt shops selling deeply overpriced souvineer shirts and shirts that say things like "no shirt no shoes no problem" and "beach vibes"
• sweet shops, selling saltwater taffy, fudge, carmel corn, and so on
• a soft serve ice cream shop and a hard scoop ice cream shop
• pirate themed mini-golf
• a food court
• surf shops
• an escape room that opened when that started being trendy and has remained completely unchanged since

tourists like it. locals enjoy the influx of income during the summer, but don't enjoy it so much really

Boardwalk B

Boardwalk B is the cheaper section which is open year round. Highlights include:

• just the worst t shirt shops imagineable. they all sell shirts that say "i piss in the ocean and the fish love me for it" or "if my wife asks, you didn't see me wearing this shirt." they somehow stock merchandise for every sports team in new york and pennsylvania. it is impossible to oversell the tackiness of these shirts. every time you see the worst one, a new, even worse one spawns into existence. somehow they're all sunbleached to hell despite being inside
• a curiosities shop
• a strange, dingy arcade. a few pinball machines, a handful of old cabinets, some shooting games, some racing games i would really not reccoment sitting in, a shocking machine, a shark themed whack-a-mole that seems to move either way too slow or way too fast, a ddr machine
• a pizzaria
• indescribably creepy minigolf

it may not be much, but it sure is. here

Wizard's Trove (and Beach Supply)

This is a curiosities and oddities shop run by a Mr. Wizard, a man of indeterminate age who's legal last name is definetly Wizard, obviously. One part antique store, one part low-budget Ripley's Believe it or Not, one part an excuse to sell the old Halloween costumes he keeps in boxes in the back of the store (have people worn those vampire teeth before? Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to). Though Mr. Wizard's first love is getting tourists to spend sizable sums of money on plastic Jersey Devil skeletons in jars or pirate gold that definitely isn't plastic, during the off season he focuses on his second love: providing a spot for adventure-loving kids and werid goth young adults to loiter in. He can answer any question about the town history, though he may point you to his very real occult tomes and treasure maps he stocks along the way.

Bridge to Salvage Township

Salvage Township is the neighboring mainland town. It's a bit bigger than Gallows Beach, stretching from the coast up to the edge of the Pine Barrens. They have a mall and lots of offices, so there's regular commuting from Gallows Beach to Salvage. Fair's fair though, the Salvage Township coastline is all marsh, so people from Salvage drive down to enjoy the shore. The township tries for its own tourist selling point, claiming to be the location of Captain Kidd's buried treasure (no, not the one he actually buried on Gardiner's Island that they found, a second different treasure that totally exists). Never one to be outdone by Salvage Township, Gallows Beach began to claim that they were the real location of the totally real treasure. Now both towns have metal detectors and pirate merchandise sold in many stores, and tourists sort of care sometimes.