Tag Archives: New Jersey

The Jersey Devil

Nationality: Italian-American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles/New Jersey
Performance Date: April 25, 2014
Primary Language: English

This piece was collected from my friend who grew up in New Jersey. To her, it wasn’t a very important part of her life, but it was well-known where she was from because it’s one of the most popular pieces of folklore from New Jersey.

This is how she explained it to me:

“I’m from New Jersey, and there’s a southern part of the state called the Pine Barrens, it’s filled with trees, it’s a very forest-y area. And for years and years it’s been said that there’s the Jersey Devil that lives in the pine barrens, hence the name the New Jersey Devils, the hockey team… there’s ben songs written about it…stories written about it. There are lot of versions of what it actually is. Some say it’s an actual devil or it’s more like a beast, like an animal. It’s kind of like a yeti or something, to this day people still say they see when they go to the pine barrens. I think I learned about it honestly in school when we learned about New Jersey myths, I’m pretty sure it was mentioned, and the only way is just through word of mouth”

Even though the Jersey Devil is very popular, there’s still not a consensus on what it looks like (or even what it is exactly) So, the legend can be interpreted differently by each person. However, it has been incorporated into things like sports teams, where it might become less folkloric because it would be portrayed in a certain way and would probably be trademarked. Also, the informant described it as a New Jersey myth, however, it would more accurately be categorized as a local legend or folk belief.

The Formaldehyde Bucket

Nationality: American (ethnicity: half Swedish, half Chinese)
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California (Originally from Montclair, New Jersey)
Performance Date: 4/29/2013
Primary Language: English

Item:

“So in my town, Montclair, New Jersey, we have a street called Mission street, and it is broadly known as the ‘crime street’ in town. So, I’ve never actually been down this street. I know that there’s crime there (I read police reports about it), someone got shot there last year, he died. So anyways the story is, this person is at the corner of Mission and Bloomfield, the cross street. And there’s this man standing there with a bucket. So the person, whoever was the originator of this story, goes over to the man with the bucket and said ‘what’s in the bucket?’ And the man with the bucket explains that it’s formaldehyde and that for five dollars the guy can dip his cigarette into the formaldehyde and smoke it.”

Context:

This anecdote is a rumor that the informant overheard at his high school.

Analysis:

This story a great example of a wacky, neighborhood urban legend. Regardless of where you are from, everyone knows little anecdotes like this that may or may not be true, but are remembered and passed down because of their originality and tie to the specific area that they circulate within.

 

Grovers Mill Haunted House

Nationality: Indian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 26, 2013
Primary Language: English

Interview Extract: 

Informant: So there’s this legend in my community, and I don’t know if people outside of it would really know about it, but definitely all the kids in my class know about this because we all went to a field trip and we learned about the history of our little town in class and like, ok do you know H. G. Wells’ book, War of the Worlds?”

Me: “Yeah, I know it.”

Informant: “Well in 1938 Orson Welles did a reading of it on the radio, and he read in the style of a news report. And this was in Grover’s Mill, this small town inNew Jersey, but people didn’t realize that like, it was fiction, so they all actually thought that like aliens were coming in and invading earth, and people legit thought it was real, since it like, sounded like a news report. They all were running out of their houses, shooting with guns, and basically, it was just like, a huge disaster.

So in my elementary school, they taught us all about this, and I guess it was like, the history of our town. Also, so in the 80s, they created a time capsule and buried it in the area where the hysteria culminated, and it’s by this park that I always used to pass like everyday after my mom dropped off my dad, and there was this um, water tower behind this creepy-looking house painted gray. And it’s pretty big too. And like, I passed it all the time without ever really thinking about it, but I guess back then people thought it was a spaceship and started shooting at it.

And with my friends, we made up all these stories about it, because we didn’t actually know what the house was for or who it really belonged to. Like we’d see a car in front of it always, but never anyone actually going in and out, you know. It was just a staple in our community and everyone thought it was really old and weird. We made up stories, like ‘Oh, aliens live there, Oh, it’s haunted,’ that kind of thing.

It’s just the kind of creepy house and I have friends that definitely still believe in some of the stories, or the ones from before when people actually thought it was a spaceship. And like, honestly, if it turned out that aliens really did live there, we wouldn’t be surprised.

In the end, we learned when we were older that a chiropractor lived in the house, which took away from some of the creepiness, and he repainted the house a different gray so it’s less run-down looking. But there still is that vibe of creepiness, I mean, at night also, you see the lights come on inside but still you’d never see anyone inside!”

Analysis:

This is a good example of a memorate, or how someone will create a memory of an incident, such as a haunting or alien invasion, after hearing previous legends regarding the area or situation. My informant has been told about the mass panic in her town since she was a child, so it’s natural for her and her friends to fabricate stories about real aliens or sinister people in the strange house they often pass.

It also shows how important it is for a small town such as hers to distinguish itself in whatever way it can. Orson Welles may have done a reading there, but that was nearly a century ago, so new stories and legends have to be made up to keep people’s interest in the town. This is why the time capsule was buried in the 80s and why the children were led on field trips to visit the supposedly haunted house, which they in turn also believed was ghostly or inhabited by extraterrestrials. It provides interesting locations to visit for tourists and gives a sense of pride to townsfolk who live there.

I find it interesting that my informant remembered seeing a car parked in front of the “haunted” house, but because she and her classmates never saw a living person, they still had probable cause to believe something out of the ordinary was going on. This brings up the question of how much “creepiness” is necessary for a person to believe a haunting is real. My informant says the house was a strange gray color, but had she not heard that it was the location for the climax of hysteria in 1938, it’s doubtful she would have noticed what color the house was painted. It’s likely that the house itself would never have attracted any attention had she and her classmates not been taught about their peculiar town history.

Jersey pizza

Nationality: American
Age: 85
Occupation: postcard collector
Residence: Howell, New Jersey
Performance Date: March 13, 2012
Primary Language: English

My grandfather called a new pizza parlor in the neighborhood to order a pizza pie (a lot of people in Jersey just refer to a pizza as “pie”) and when he asked for a large plain pie, they told him that they were sorry, but they didn’t serve pie.

My grandpa said it’s just something you know growing up in the area.

The Jersey Devil

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 50
Occupation: Professor of Creative Writing
Residence: Monterey, CA
Performance Date: 4/8/12
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio

My informant grew up in Hudson County, New Jersey, in the 1960s and 1970s, spending most of his childhood in Secaucus. He remembers having friends whose family members had ties to the mob, and in fact his own father worked as a Teamster (a cement mixer driver, specifically) for the Teamsters local 560, the chapter of the Teamsters union run by notorious Italian mob boss Tony Provenzano. He does not recall that living in such a mob run area ever caused him or his family any anxiety, it was simply a fact of life in Hudson County.

Though my informant lived for almost twenty years in Ohio during and after college, and now resides in California, his New Jersey accent slips back into his voice when he tells stories about New Jersey. This story was recorded at a family gathering in California when some of my informant’s family from the east coast were visiting.

The Jersey Devil

The Jersey Devil is a mythic creature that reportedly roams the Pine Barrens (a stretch of undeveloped wilderness) in New Jersey. My informant related to me the tale he heard as a kid of how the devil came to be.

During the Revolutionary War days, the Pine Barrens were a place that the outcasts of society, those too poor to afford better, lived. The tale goes that a poor couple with many children lived there, and they were so poor they could barely feed the family. With another child on the way, the husband decided to make a deal with the Devil (as in Satan of Christian lore, not the Jersey devil) that if he performed certain tasks the Devil would grant them enough wealth to feed the family and allow them to move out of the Pine Barrens to a better place.

My informant couldn’t remember the tasks the Devil gave the man exactly, only that instead of doing them, the husband tried to fake that he had done them somehow.  The Devil was, naturally, not fooled. So he cursed the couple’s unborn child. The wife gave birth to a hideous beast with cloven hooves and leathery wings, and as soon as it was born it flew up the chimney and out into the Pine Barrens.

The beast was given the name “the Jersey devil,” and it is rumored to prowl the Pine Barrens to this day, attacking people and eating children, as such beasties will do. It is well known in New Jersey that one should never go into the Pine Barrens alone, or at night, because the Jersey devil might get you.

What would appear to me to be a scary story that could be told to children to keep them from wandering off into dangerous woods and getting lost, actually has a more important message for the residents of Hudson County, New Jersey, where my informant was from. He explained that the Pine Barrens are nowhere near Hudson County, so to him the tale is a parable for not double-crossing the mob. Replace Satan in the story with the mob, and you see the warning: that if one doesn’t fulfill their side of a bargain with the mob, they may not take it out on you, they might take it out on your loved ones; your family.

Appearances in Authored Literature

The Jersey devil has become such a beloved part of New Jersey popular culture that it has most famously become the mascot for the New Jersey Devils Hockey Team. Reported sightings of the creature, and even people who claim it attacked them, keeps the story alive and in the public consciousness. A piece on the Jersey devil appears in the popular travel book Weird NJ, where a different version of the tale tells of a woman who, after having 13 children by a jobless drunk, in a fit of rage asked the heavens to turn her next child into a devil.

The devil even made it into an episode of the X-Files, a popular show during the 1990s that featured two FBI agents who exclusively investigated reports of paranormal phenomena. In that episode, sightings of the devil were attributed to a Neanderthal-like creature that may have been the product of an evolutionary mutation.

Cited

Carter, Chris, prod. The X-Files: The Jersey Devil. Perf. David Duchovney and Gillian Anderson. 1993. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. Web. 23 Apr. 2012. <www.netflix.com>.

Moran, Mark, and Mark Sceurman. Weird N.J.: Your Travel Guide to New Jersey’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets. New York: Sterling Publishers, 2009. Print.

New Jersey Devils Team Site. National Hockey League, 2012. Web. 25 Apr. 2012. <http://devils.nhl.com/>.