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    Monsters of New Jersey: Mysterious Creatures in the Garden State
    Monsters of New Jersey: Mysterious Creatures in the Garden State
    Monsters of New Jersey: Mysterious Creatures in the Garden State
    Ebook155 pages2 hours

    Monsters of New Jersey: Mysterious Creatures in the Garden State

    By Loren Coleman and Bruce G. Hallenbeck

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    About this ebook

    • Stories of the best known of the Garden State's cryptid population
    • From the bustling cities and Down the Shore to the creepy Pine Barrens
    • Research from the world's leading cryptozoologist
    • Extensive section on the state's most infamous creature, the Jersey Devil
    • Also includes Big Red Eye of the Great Swamp in Somerset County, Hoboken Monkey-Man, Lake Hopatcong Monster, Cape May Sea Serpent, the Wooo-wooo, and the Lizardman of Great Meadows
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStackpole Books
    Release dateAug 17, 2010
    ISBN9780811741941
    Monsters of New Jersey: Mysterious Creatures in the Garden State
    Author

    Loren Coleman

    Loren Coleman, M.S.W., has researched the Copycat Effect for more than two decades. Coleman has been an adjunct professor at various universities in New England since 1980 and a senior researcher with the Muskie School for Public Policy. He is currently the primary consultant for the State of Maine's Youth Suicide Prevention Initiative. The author, coauthor, or editor of more than twenty books, including the critically acclaimed work Suicide Clusters, lives in Portland, Maine.

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      Book preview

      Monsters of New Jersey - Loren Coleman

      Copyright ©2010 by Loren Coleman and Bruce G. Hallenbeck

      Published by

      STACKPOLE BOOKS

      5067 Ritter Road

      Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

      www.stackpolebooks.com

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books.

      Portions of this book are based in small part on the following previously published material by Loren Coleman: Winged Weirdies, FATE, March 1972, with Jerome Clark; Chapters 6 and 7 from Creatures of the Outer Edge with Jerome Clark (New York: Warner, 1978; New York: Anomalist Books, 2006); Chapter 8 of Curious Encounters (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985); On the Trail, Fortean Times, January and May 1997 and March 1998; Mysterious World, FATE, July 1999; Chapter 18 and marginal material from Mysterious America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006); and Cryptomundo.com postings, 2006-2010. Kind permission has been granted by Mark A. Hall to reproduce material on the Wooo-wooo from his Thunderbirds! (Bloomington, MN: Privately published, 1988) and by Laura K. Leuter, president of The Devil Hunters, for material to be found in the appendix.

      Printed in the United States of America

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      FIRST EDITION

      Cover art by Marc Radle

      Cover design by Tessa J. Sweigert

      Sites described in this book, including the descriptive appendix, are presented as the alleged locations of local testimony and folklore. Many of these legends, sightings, and stories cannot be independently confirmed or corroborated, and the authors and the publisher make no representation as to their factual accuracy, other than as collected and reported information. Readers should be advised that many of the sites described in this book may be located on private property and should not be visited, or they may face prosecution for trespassing or worse. The authors and the publisher disclaim any and all responsibility for physical or mental harm that may come to those who engage in monster hunting.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Coleman, Loren.

      Monsters of New Jersey : mysterious creatures in the Garden State / Loren Coleman and Bruce G. Hallenbeck. — 1st ed.

      p. cm.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-3596-4 (pbk.)

      ISBN-10: 0-8117-3596-6 (pbk.)

      1. Cryptozoology—New Jersey. 2. Monsters—New Jersey. 3. Animals, Mythical—New Jersey. I. Hallenbeck, Bruce G., 1952- II. Title.

      QL89.C647 2010

      001.94409749—dc22

      2010019431

      To Jerry Dale Coleman, William Coleman, Susan Hoey, and Martha Hallenbeck

      If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?

      — Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

      Contents

      Introduction: No Neat Little Pigeonholes

      The Jersey Devil

      More Winged Wonders and the Wooo-Wooo

      Big Red Eye and Other Garden State Giants

      Hoboken Monkey-Man and Urban Unknowns

      Cape May Sea Serpent and Marine Monsters

      Lake Hopatcong Horror and Other Freshwater Weirdies

      Lizardmen and Various Vicious Reptilians

      The Ultimate New Jersey Monster

      Appendix: A Comprehensive List of Jersey Devil Sightings

      Acknowledgments

      About the Authors

      Introduction

      No Neat Little Pigeonholes

      Charles Fort, that clever New York City researcher into matters inexplicable and author of such classic works as The Book of the Damned, once noted that excluded and damned data arrange themselves in mass-formations that pass and pass and keep on passing.

      Fort should know, as he was one of the earliest writers to try to tackle the slippery strangeness of the Jersey Devil. We shall see that New Jersey’s special and lively cryptozoological Forteana, as the overall study of strange phenomena is now called in Charles Fort’s honor, is not easy to place into neat little boxes. It is similar to trying to put water in a bucket full of holes; once you get it in, before you know it, it is someplace else.

      New Jersey’s monsters are very much like the water flowing from that hole-filled bucket. Of all the states in America, it appears this one has no neat little pigeonholes in which to conceptualize and organize the terrible creatures seen in the air above, the bizarre beasts encountered on the land below, and the mysterious monsters sighted in the waters off the Jersey shores.

      Nevertheless, with our hands firmly on the steering wheel as we rush around the parkways and waterways of the state, we shall explore the woods, backyards, Pine Barrens, lakes, and sea where New Jersey’s creepy critters and unclassified cryptids are reported in this unique bit of land. New Jersey, we have come to discover, is much more than a place to call home for all those people who commute to work in New York City or live and work in the Garden State. Lest we forget, New Jersey is the fabled home to many monsters.

      A Note on Style

      Why are animal names sometimes capitalized, sometimes in lowercase, and sometimes in italics? The style used in this book follows the manual of style adopted by the International Society of Cryptozoology and its peer-reviewed scientific journal, Cryptozoology. The journal’s editor, Richard Greenwell, detailed the proper capitalization of cryptozoological names, before and after discovery, in a footnote on page 101 of the 1986 issue of Cryptozoology. Greenwell followed the same manual of style used in systematic zoology.

      Greenwell is very clear in his example:

      Native name: okapi;

      Western name for presumed, undiscovered animal: Okapi;

      Common name after discovery and acceptance: okapi.

      For our extended use, this translates into the following form:

      Native name: nahuelito;

      Western name for presumed, undiscovered animal: Nahuelito;

      Common name after discovery and acceptance: nahuelito.

      Native name: naitaka;

      Western name for presumed, undiscovered animal: Ogopogo;

      Common name after discovery and acceptance: ogopogo.

      Therefore, as Lake Monster, Sea Serpent, and Nessie have not been technically accepted by systematic zoology as of this date, the capitalized form is employed in this book.

      The Jersey Devil

      The joke circulating in 2010 about the Jersey Devil goes something like this: If you live in New Jersey, get up in the morning, and pour milk on your cereal to only find the milk is sour, the Jersey Devil did it. If you then go out to your car, and find you have a flat tire, well, the Jersey Devil did it. If your hockey team loses in the playoffs, guess what … You get the idea.

      So what is the Jersey Devil after all?

      Today, in New Jersey, the umbrella term Jersey Devil seems to apply to anything that has a curse or bad luck associated with it. The Jersey Devil is one of those localized names that residents have applied to any supposed strange beast, entity, or phantom seen in the state. The legendary creature, in fact, is New Jersey’s official demon, a regional mascot, and the name of the state’s National Hockey League team.

      The Jersey Devil, as a feral human initially identified as a Bigfoot, was featured in the third episode of the TV series The X-Files, as the first ever monster of the week. A 1990s Sony PlayStation game turned the savage beast into a likeable videogame character, and in this new century, the Jersey Devil has been a frequent topic of reality television programs. But the history of the beast is much older.

      The first people to note the presence of a peculiar animal in the general area were the Native Americans, who said it originally appeared across state lines in what is now Bucks County, Pennsylvania (where alleged sightings of the Devil have been made in recent years), just north of Philadelphia. In fact, the local Indians named the creek Popuessing, meaning place of the dragon.

      In 1677, Swedish explorers examined some weird footprints in the rocks near the same creek and renamed it Drake Kill, which also refers to a dragon.

      But the main locus has always been New Jersey, of course. The Jersey Devil, sometimes called the Leeds Devil, has been seen since the 1930s, but long before that a great body of folklore had grown up around the elusive beast. Some versions of the legend—folklorists claim there are more than thirty variants of the tale in circulation—list the creature’s alleged birth as having taken place in 1887. The Gloucester Historical Society, however, has traced the tale back as far as 1790, and there is every reason to believe it was around even earlier.

      The most frequently related account of the Devil’s origins goes like this: In 1735, a Mrs. Leeds of Estellville, New Jersey, upon finding she was pregnant for the thirteenth time and less than exhilarated about it, snorted that if she was going to have another child it might just as well be a devil—and it was. It was born with an animal’s head, a bird’s body, and cloven hooves instead of feet. Cursing its mother (it could speak at birth, of course), it promptly flew up the chimney and took up residence in the swamps and Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, where it has lived ever since. American folklore is filled with similar stories about a pregnant mother’s careless words backfiring on her. As late as 1908, a tale circulating through rural Alabama had it that a Birmingham baby was born with horns like a devil. During the pregnancy, the mother had remarked, I’d as soon have a devil in the house as a baby!

      Over the years the story, like all good stories, grew in the telling. Eventually the Devil was held responsible for every major calamity that befell the state, and some people even maintained that its appearance presaged the coming of war. On a less cosmic scale it was said that its breath could sour milk, kill fish, and dry up cornfields.

      The late Rev. Henry Carlton Beck recounted another part of the myth in his Jersey Genesis:

      Accompanied, as it usually is, by the howling of dogs and the hooting of owls, there can be no surer forerunner of disaster. Where the barrens line the shore it flits from one desolate grass-grown dune to another and is especially watchful upon those wild heights when coasting schooners, driving their prows into the sand, pound to splinters upon the bars and distribute upon the waves their freight of good and human lives.

      Upon such occasions Leeds’ Devil is seen in the companionship of a beautiful golden-haired woman in white, or yet of some fierce-eyed, cutlass-bearing disembodied spirit of a buccaneer whose galleon, centuries ago, was wrecked upon the shore of Cape May County.

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