Latest / Creature Feature With Nyx / Creature Feature Ep. 2 —The Pine Barrens Screams: Unraveling the Jersey Devil
Transcript
- 0:00January 1909. Southern New Jersey.
- 0:06It's the middle of the winter and the morning after a fresh snowfall.
- 0:43On the other side, as if whatever made them simply stepped over.
- 0:51Some of them run across the rooftops, some of them stop in the middle of an open field.
- 1:09Of people across New Jersey and Pennsylvania will report seeing it.
- 1:16Schools will close, mills will shut down, men will go out into the woods with
- 1:23guns, and the newspaper will all use the same guns.
- 1:59Greetings, mortals! And welcome back to Creature Feature with Nyx,
- 2:06the only cryptid and folklore show hosted by an actual creature.
- 2:13I'm Nyx, ancient terror of the void, devourer of stars.
- 2:19And if you're new here, hello, little imp.
- 2:23Welcome to the coven. There's no leaving. Sorry.
- 2:30Okay, before we get into today's creature, I need to talk to you about last week.
- 2:36Because episode one came out, and some of you watched it. You really did. You listened to it.
- 2:44And some of you sent me spooky stories.
- 2:48So, thank you. I spent the entire first night refreshing the page and making little happy noises.
- 2:58My tail did not stop moving for three days.
- 3:03I knocked over a candle.
- 3:05It's fine, though. The void is fireproof. Mostly.
- 3:12And to everyone who bought me a snack on Ko-Fi, thank you so much.
- 3:18Every snack goes straight back into the show.
- 3:22Also, for the record, I did ask Mothman if he liked the episode.
- 3:30And he said he did, but he did get very quiet at the owl part.
- 3:37We don't need to talk about it.
- 3:41So, for this week, when I was planning the show, I knew I had to cover him.
- 3:49He's one of the most famous cryptids in America.
- 3:55He has a hockey team named after him.
- 3:59And I just, I've been putting it off.
- 4:02Because, little imps, I need you to know something before we start.
- 4:08But the Jersey Devil and I went on a date once. It did not go well.
- 4:16I'm going to be professional about this, though. I'm going to be fair and balanced,
- 4:21but I will be telling you about the date at the end of the episode,
- 4:26and you will understand why I am the way I am.
- 4:30So, grab a snack, turn off the lights, and put on some warm socks,
- 4:37because we're going into the woods.
- 4:40Welcome to the Pine Barrens.
- 4:49Okay, when most people think of New Jersey, they think of the highways,
- 4:55cities, malls, maybe the beach.
- 4:59But right in the middle of the southern part of the state, there's something you might not expect.
- 5:08A forest so big and so empty that people have been getting lost in it for centuries.
- 5:18The Pine Barrens.
- 5:21It covers more than a million acres, a huge chunk of the state.
- 5:27It's mostly scrubby, pitch pine trees and oak growing out of the sandy soil,
- 5:33and it's called barren because the early European settlers found that their
- 5:39crops wouldn't grow well in that sandy ground.
- 5:42So, unlike the rest of the region, it never really filled up with farms and towns. It stayed wild.
- 5:51And it's a strange place. There are cedar swamps. There are bogs.
- 5:58The rivers and streams are stained a dark reddish brown, like tea from iron and cedar trees.
- 6:08People call it cedar water.
- 6:11There are dirt roads that wind on for miles and split off in every direction,
- 6:17and if you don't know where you're going, it's very easy to end up nowhere.
- 6:24Tea-colored water, endless pines, abandoned towns, no humans for miles.
- 6:34Honestly, cozy. Love that for him.
- 6:40I'm not exaggerating about the abandoned towns, by the way.
- 6:45In the 1700s and 1800s, there were little industrial villages scattered through the pines,
- 6:54making iron from the bog ore in the swamps and glass from all that sand.
- 7:02When those industries faded, a lot of those towns were abandoned and swallowed by the forest.
- 7:11Today, you can still find ruins out there.
- 7:15Crumbling furnaces, foundations, old cemeteries, ghost towns,
- 7:21slowly disappearing into the trees.
- 7:25And people who stayed and lived deep in the pines got a reputation.
- 7:32Outsiders called them pineys, and for a long time, that was used as an insult,
- 7:39with a lot of unfair stereotypes about them being wild or strange.
- 7:45Today, a lot of people from that area use the word proudly.
- 7:50They're the ones who kept the stories of the pines alive, including the story
- 7:55of a certain someone with wings and hooves.
- 8:00So, picture the perfect place for a legend Dark, quiet woods Swamps,
- 8:08strange water Lonely roads, ruins And at night?
- 8:14Sounds you can't explain Owls, foxes screaming Things moving in the trees Now,
- 8:24let's talk about how he was born and.
- 8:35The most famous version of the story goes like this.
- 8:42It's 1735, a stormy night in the Pine Barrens, near a place called Leeds Point,
- 8:51on the edge of the marshes by the coast.
- 8:55In a small house, a woman known as Mother Leeds is about to give birth.
- 9:02And this is not her first baby. It's not her second. It's her thirteenth.
- 9:10She's poor. She's exhausted. She already has twelve children to feed.
- 9:17She already has twelve children to feed.
- 9:21And as the storm howls outside, she cries out in despair.
- 9:27Let this one be the devil!
- 9:30And the baby is born. And at first, it seems like a perfectly normal child.
- 9:37Everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
- 9:41But then, it starts to change.
- 9:46Its body grows long. Its feet turn into hooves.
- 9:52A long, forked tail uncurls behind it.
- 9:57Leathery wings, like a bat's, burst out of its back.
- 10:02And its head stretches into the shape of a horse or a goat with glowing eyes.
- 10:10It lets out a horrible, piercing scream.
- 10:13In some versions of the story, it attacks the people in the room,
- 10:19and then it flies up the chimney, out into the storm, and disappears into the pines.
- 10:26And it's been out there ever since.
- 10:31Now, a few things about that story. First, there's a ton of versions.
- 10:38In some, Mother Leeds curses the baby because she's angry.
- 10:43In others, the curse comes from somewhere else entirely.
- 10:47She was a witch, or the baby's father was the devil himself,
- 10:52or she'd insulted a traveling preacher who cursed her.
- 10:57In some, she kept the creature hidden in the house for years before it escaped.
- 11:03In some, it comes back to visit its mother, perching on the roof until she dies.
- 11:09Folklore is like that. Everyone who tells the story adds a little something.
- 11:16Second, the description changes a lot, too.
- 11:20A horse head, a goat head, a dog head, a kangaroo body, hooves or claws, red eyes, glowing eyes.
- 11:31But almost everyone agrees on the basics.
- 11:35Wings, hooves, a tail, and a scream you'll never forget.
- 11:42And third, I want everyone to notice something. Look at the story.
- 11:48A mom with 12 kids, exhausted, poor, and scared, says something in a terrible moment.
- 11:56And she becomes the villain of a story people have been telling for 300 years.
- 12:04Poor mother Leeds. Honestly, if I'd had 12 kids, I'd have said worse.
- 12:12But here's the twist, little imps. The Leeds family was real.
- 12:18And the true story behind the legend might be even weirder because it involves almanacs, astrology,
- 12:29and a little-known feud with Benjamin Franklin.
- 12:40So, for a long time, people assumed the Jersey Devil legend just grew out of
- 12:47spooky campfire stories.
- 12:50But historians who've dug into it, especially Brian Riegel and Frank Esposito,
- 12:58in their book, The Secret History of the Jersey Devil, think it actually started
- 13:04as something much more human.
- 13:08Gossip, religion, and politics.
- 13:13Let me introduce you to Daniel Leeds. Daniel.
- 13:20Try that again. Daniel Leeds was a real man who came over from England in the
- 13:27late 1600s and settled in New Jersey.
- 13:32He was a Quacker. Quacker? Quaker? Quacker. Not a Quacker.
- 13:38He was a Quaker, which was a big religious community in the area at the time.
- 13:44And in 1687, he started publishing an almanac.
- 13:50Now, if you don't know what an almanac is,
- 13:53it's basically a yearly book with calendars, weather predictions,
- 13:59sunrise and sunset times, farming advice, and in those days, astrology.
- 14:06Star signs, planets, predictions.
- 14:10And the Quakers were not into that at all.
- 14:16The local Quaker leaders thought,
- 14:19the astrology was inappropriate and basically shut his almanac down.
- 14:25Daniel Leeds did not take that well. He eventually broke away from the Quakers
- 14:31completely, wrote pamphlets attacking them, and sided with the colony's royal governor.
- 14:41Who was very unpopular with a lot of the people around him.
- 14:48And the Quakers fired back. One Quaker writer published a pamphlet about Leeds
- 14:53with the title, Satan's Harbinger Encounter.
- 14:57A harbinger is a harbinger, harbinger, harbinger, harbinger,
- 15:03a harbinger, is a messenger, someone who announces that something is coming.
- 15:10So they were basically calling him the devil's announcer.
- 15:15And here's a fun detail. The Leeds family coat of arms had creatures on it called wyverns.
- 15:21A wyvern is basically a dragon with wings, two legs, and a long tail.
- 15:29So you've got a family whose enemies are calling them servants of Satan,
- 15:34and whose crest literally has winged monsters on it.
- 15:40You can kind of see where this is going. When Daniel retired,
- 15:44his son Titan Leeds took over the almanac, and this is where Benjamin Franklin comes in.
- 15:52In 1732, a young Benjamin Franklin started his own almanac, Poor Richard's Almanac,
- 16:01and Titan Leeds was his competition.
- 16:04So, in his very first edition, Franklin wrote, as a joke, that his dear friend
- 16:12Titan Leeds was going to die.
- 16:15He even gave the exact date and time, according to the stars.
- 16:22Titan was not dead. Titan was very much alive and very annoyed. And he said so.
- 16:30And Franklin kept going. For years, he insisted Titan really was dead.
- 16:38And that whoever was writing those almanacs under his name must be an imposter.
- 16:44Or his ghost.
- 16:47Even after Titan actually did die, in 1738, Franklin joked that Titan's ghost had visited him.
- 16:59Benjamin Franklin was a menace. I respect it.
- 17:04So think about it. In that part of New Jersey, for decades, the Leeds name was
- 17:10tied to the devil, to astrology, to ghosts, to a family crest with winged monsters.
- 17:19Historians think the phrase, the Leeds devil, may have started as a kind of insult.
- 17:26A way of mocking the family. And over the years, as the original arguments were
- 17:32forgotten, the insult turned into a creature.
- 17:35Which is why, for a long time, the monster wasn't called the Jersey Devil.
- 17:41It was called the Leeds Devil.
- 17:44There's even a real woman some researchers point to as the possible Mother Leeds.
- 17:50Deborah Leeds, who lived near Leeds Point.
- 17:54Her husband, Japheth's Will, from the 1730s, lists 12 children,
- 18:01which lines up eerily well with the story of a 13th.
- 18:06So the most famous monster in New Jersey might have started as colonial-era trash talk.
- 18:15A family feud, a religious argument, and Benjamin Franklin being petty in print.
- 18:24Which, honestly, makes me feel a little bad for him. He didn't choose this.
- 18:30Then again, I've met him, so I don't feel that bad.
- 18:42So, the legend is born, and over the next 200 years, the Leeds Devil becomes
- 18:48the creature that lives in the pines.
- 18:51Farmers blame it when livestock goes missing.
- 18:54Parents warn their kids not to go out into the woods at night or the devil will get them.
- 19:00And a few very famous names get pulled into the story.
- 19:05The first one is Stefan Dekatur, a real American naval hero from the early 1800s.
- 19:12Big deal. Fought pirates. Has towns named after him.
- 19:18According to legend, Dekatur was visiting an iron works in the Pine Barrens,
- 19:23where they made cannons to test the cannonballs.
- 19:27And while he was there, he saw a strange winged creature flying across the firing range.
- 19:34So he aimed a cannon at it.
- 19:37And the cannonball went straight through the creature's body.
- 19:41And it just kept flying, totally unbothered.
- 19:46That's the most Jersey devil thing I have ever heard. The cannonball goes through
- 19:51him and he doesn't even slow down?
- 19:54He was like that on our date, too. We'll get into it.
- 19:59The second famous witness is Joseph Bonaparte. the older brother of Napoleon.
- 20:06After Napoleon's empire fell, Joseph moved to America and lived on a big estate
- 20:12in Bordentown, New Jersey, right on the edge of the pines.
- 20:18And the story goes that while he was out hunting, he saw the devil too.
- 20:25Now, I have to be honest, there's no real evidence either of these encounters happened.
- 20:31They show up in the legend much later, without any records of the time.
- 20:37But it says something that people wanted to attach such important names to the story.
- 20:45A naval hero and royalty both saw him must be real.
- 20:52And then came january 1909 this is the big one what some people call the phantom week,
- 21:01for about a week in the middle of january the jersey devil was everywhere it
- 21:07started with those footprints in the cold open,
- 21:11people across south jersey woke up to strange footprints in the fresh snow Prints
- 21:18that went up to fences and continued on the other side.
- 21:21Prints across rooftops. Prints that just stopped, like something had taken off.
- 21:29People brought in dogs to follow the tracks, and according to the newspaper
- 21:34reports, the dogs wouldn't do it.
- 21:38And then the sightings started. Hundreds of people across New Jersey,
- 21:44Pennsylvania, and Delaware reported seeing a winged creature.
- 21:49Some reported seeing it fly over the Delaware River. Some heard terrible screams in the night.
- 21:56One of the most famous reports came from a couple in Gloucester.
- 22:03New Jersey, Nelson Evans and his wife.
- 22:07They said they woke up in the middle
- 22:10of the night And saw the creature standing on the roof of their shed,
- 22:17Mr. Evans described it as about three and a half feet tall, with a head like
- 22:22a collie dog, and a face like a horse.
- 22:26A long neck, wings about two feet long, and back legs like a crane's, but with horse hooves.
- 22:36It walked on its back legs and held its short front legs up in front.
- 22:42So, a dog, horse, crane, with bat wings, and little T-Rex arms Yeah,
- 22:50that's him That's exactly him,
- 22:55And according to the story, Mr.
- 22:57Evans opened the window and yelled Shoo!
- 23:02At it And it turned around, barked at him, and flew away.
- 23:09He yelled, shoe, at the Jersey Devil, and it worked.
- 23:16I'm going to try that next time.
- 23:19As the week went on, things got out of hand.
- 23:23Newspapers ran story after story. Some of them with drawings of the creature.
- 23:30Schools closed. Some mills and factories shut down because workers were too scared to leave home.
- 23:38Groups of men went into the woods with guns hunting for it.
- 23:42There were reports of police officers shooting at it.
- 23:46And one zoo in Philadelphia supposedly offered a huge reward,
- 23:53thousands of dollars, to anyone who could capture it alive.
- 23:59And then, just as suddenly as it started, it stopped.
- 24:05The sightings faded away, and the Jersey Devil went back into the pines.
- 24:12But people have kept reporting it ever since.
- 24:16In the decades since 1909, there have been sightings, strange screams,
- 24:23and mysterious tracks, right up to the present day.
- 24:29In 1982, New Jersey's new professional hockey team was named the New Jersey Devils, after him.
- 24:38And every so often, a blurry photo or a video shows up online,
- 24:44claiming the devil is still out there.
- 24:48So, what really is going on? Time to investigate.
- 25:00Okay, detective hat on. It still doesn't fit over my horns. I've accepted it.
- 25:09Let's start with the big one, 1909, because that's where the evidence gets really interesting.
- 25:21First, those mysterious tracks in the snow.
- 25:25Skeptics point out a few things. In a snowy winter, lots of animals leave tracks.
- 25:33And when snow partly melts and refreezes, ordinary prints can blur and stretch
- 25:40into shapes that look bigger and stranger than they really are.
- 25:45Birds and other small animals can hop or walk along fences and rooftops,
- 25:51which could explain the tracks that seem to go over things.
- 25:56And once people are already scared, every odd track becomes the devil's.
- 26:03And, of course, some of those tracks were almost certainly made by people.
- 26:09Pranksters had a great week in 1909.
- 26:14Second, the newspapers. In 1909, newspapers were considered competing hard for readers.
- 26:25And a wild monster story sold papers. Historians have found that some reports were exaggerated.
- 26:33Some were repeated from paper to paper and got bigger each time.
- 26:39And some were probably just made up.
- 26:43When everyone's reading about the Jersey Devil every morning,
- 26:48it's not surprising that people start seeing him everywhere.
- 26:53This is the same thing we talked about with Mothman, the flap.
- 26:59Once a story spreads, ordinary things like a big bird, a strange shadow,
- 27:06or a scream in the dark all become part of it.
- 27:09And third, okay, this is my favorite part of the whole episode.
- 27:17During all of this, two men in Philadelphia, Norman Jeffries and Jacob Hope, decided to cash in.
- 27:26They announced that they had captured the Jersey Devil,
- 27:30and they put it on display at a dime museum, which was a kind of cheap entertainment
- 27:38hall with oddities and curiosities for people to come and pay to see them.
- 27:45And people came. And what did they see?
- 27:50A kangaroo. A regular kangaroo that they had painted with green stripes and glued fake wings onto.
- 28:01And they kept it behind a curtain with someone poking it so it would jump around and look scary.
- 28:10A kangaroo in a costume and people paid to see it.
- 28:18I have so many questions. Where did they get a kangaroo in Philadelphia in 1909?
- 28:28Was the kangaroo okay? Was the kangaroo a willing participant?
- 28:35I need to know that the kangaroo was okay.
- 28:39I'm deciding. The kangaroo retired early. That's canon now. He lives in a sanctuary.
- 28:48Okay, so, for the rest of the sightings over the centuries, the usual suspects are,
- 28:57sandhill cranes, yes, again, tall birds, long legs, big wings,
- 29:04and a call that can sound really strange.
- 29:08Remember Mr. Evans' description of crane-like legs? Hmm.
- 29:14Owls. Barn owls have a pale, flat face that can look eerie in a flashlight beam,
- 29:21and their scream is genuinely terrifying, if you've never heard it.
- 29:28Next up, foxes. A red fox's scream at night sounds horrifyingly like a person screaming.
- 29:39If you're alone in the pines and you hear one, I promise you'll think it's the devil.
- 29:47And then we have deer bats deer bats deer bats and other wildlife especially
- 29:55when seen in the dark at a distance or from a moving car,
- 30:00and lastly we have the legend itself when you grow up hearing that there's a
- 30:08monster in the woods every strange noise in those woods has a ready-made explanation,
- 30:16I notice that the skeptics love blaming birds Mothman, bird Jersey Devil,
- 30:25bird And at this point, I think the birds are covering for somebody.
- 30:36Okay, Nix's official verdict.
- 30:41I think the Jersey Devil is one of the best examples of how a legend is made.
- 30:50It starts with real people, a family with enemies, a religious argument,
- 30:56and Benjamin Franklin being extremely petty.
- 31:01Over the years, an insult becomes a story. The story becomes a creature.
- 31:08People living in a huge, dark, wild forest full of strange sounds keep that creature alive.
- 31:16And then, in 1909, newspapers, pranksters, scared people, and one very unlucky
- 31:25kangaroo turn it into a full-blown panic.
- 31:31So, do I think a thirteenth baby turned into a winged horse,
- 31:35goat, and flew up a chimney in 1735?
- 31:39No. Do I think there's still something out there in the pines?
- 31:46A scream you can't explain?
- 31:48Tracks that don't make sense?
- 31:51Honestly, the Pine Barrens is big.
- 31:56It's a dark place. I'm not ruling anything out.
- 32:02And like Point Pleasant with Mothman, New Jersey has completely embraced him.
- 32:09There's the hockey team. There are tours of the Pines.
- 32:14There are festivals, a beer or two named after him, and plenty of locals who
- 32:21will happily tell you their own Jersey Devil story.
- 32:26He's not just a monster anymore. He's a mascot. He's a state icon.
- 32:34Which I'm sure has made his ego even bigger. As if that was possible.
- 32:43Okay, it's time for the monster rating.
- 32:47Out of five bats, four categories, and I'm going to be fair.
- 32:53I'm a professional. My personal history will not affect the rating.
- 33:00Spookiness. Okay, I'll be honest. Four out of five.
- 33:06A creature born from a curse. A scream in the dark woods. Footprints on rooftops.
- 33:13That's legitimately creepy. The legend is great.
- 33:18I hate that it's great.
- 33:22Next is plausibility. One out of five.
- 33:27Between the colonial gossip, the newspaper exaggerations and a kangaroo in a
- 33:32costume, the evidence is not great.
- 33:36One bat for the Pine Barrens, being spooky enough to hide anything.
- 33:43Next up, we have cuteness. Okay, horse head, little arms, bat wings, flies up chimneys.
- 33:53Objectively, he's kind of cute.
- 33:59In a weird way fine three out of five i'm being fair you see how fair i'm being,
- 34:09and finally would nix befriend him,
- 34:14No comment. Okay, fine.
- 34:18We're civil. That's what I'll say. We're civil.
- 34:23I'll tell you why at the end of the episode.
- 34:26So, the Jersey Devil's final monster rating is 8 out of 15 bats.
- 34:33And one very complicated relationship status.
- 34:43Okay it's time for tales from the imps where i share your spooky stories,
- 34:52the first one came in on instagram from naa 67,
- 35:00They write, One night, my uncle and I were chilling in the kitchen,
- 35:07and we saw something run past the door.
- 35:10We thought it was just my dog, but my dog was inside, and it wasn't a cat.
- 35:21Because this thing was the size of a Great Dane.
- 35:27I think I saw it. a skinwalker, or something I don't know.
- 35:34The size of a Great Dane? Okay,
- 35:39first of all, you and your uncle are just hanging out in the kitchen,
- 35:43having a nice time, maybe having a snack, and something the size of a Great Dane,
- 35:52a small horse, runs past the door.
- 35:57I would have dropped my snack. I would have screamed. my tail would have puffed
- 36:01up so big I'd have floated away.
- 36:04Now, about skinwalkers. I want to be careful here, because skinwalkers come
- 36:12from Diné, or Navajo tradition.
- 36:15They're part of a living culture and belief system.
- 36:19And a lot of Diné people feel strongly that they aren't something outsiders
- 36:25should be telling spooky stories about.
- 36:28So, I'm going to respect that and not dig into them on the show.
- 36:34But, huge, mysterious, dog-shaped creatures running past in the night show up
- 36:42in folklore all over the world.
- 36:46In England, there are legends of giant black dogs with glowing eyes,
- 36:51like Black Shuck, who supposedly roams the coast and country lanes of East Anglia.
- 36:59In northern England, there's the Barghest, a monstrous black hound said to appear as an omen.
- 37:08People have been seeing big, dark, four-legged shapes in the night for centuries.
- 37:16And on the skeptic side, the usual suspects for something big and four-legged
- 37:21that wasn't my dog are a neighbor's large dog that got loose, a coyote,
- 37:30Or a deer, especially if you only saw it for a split second through a doorway in the dark.
- 37:37Our brains are really good at filling in the blanks with something scary.
- 37:43But the part I keep thinking about is your dog. Your dog was inside the whole time.
- 37:50Did your dog react? Did it bark or stare at the door or hide?
- 37:58Because if your dog was just chilling, that's one thing.
- 38:03But if your dog was staring at that doorway, I need to know.
- 38:08Please tell me in the comments.
- 38:10Official ruling? Something big was in your yard that night.
- 38:14And you and your uncle have a story now. Lock the kitchen door.
- 38:22Okay. I also want to give out a shout out to Ville47, who you might remember
- 38:27from last week's Fireball story.
- 38:29After the first episode, they told me about a South African legend I couldn't stop thinking about.
- 38:37The Groot slang.
- 38:39The name means great snake.
- 38:43According to the legend, it's
- 38:45a creature with the body of a giant serpent and the head of an elephant.
- 38:51Ville 47 explained that long ago, the gods created these creatures,
- 38:56but they were far too powerful.
- 38:59So, the gods split them apart.
- 39:02And that's how we got elephants and snakes as two separate animals.
- 39:07But one of them escaped. And legend says it still lives deep in a cave,
- 39:15or in rivers, somewhere in South Africa.
- 39:20Some versions say the cave is bottomless And that the Grootslang hoards diamonds and gems down there.
- 39:30Elephant-headed snake. So powerful, the gods had to split it in half.
- 39:37Sitting in a bottomless cave on a pile of diamonds.
- 39:42Ville 47, I need you to understand, this is going on the list for a full episode.
- 39:49Thank you for telling me about it.
- 39:52And Ville 47 wasn't done. Last week, I asked about the fireball that visited
- 39:59their great-great-uncle's house in Hopetown on the same day every year,
- 40:05and I really wanted to know,
- 40:07what's in the backyard?
- 40:10So, they actually went and asked their grandfather.
- 40:15Bill 47 writes, I asked my grandfather about everything you asked.
- 40:22He said his uncle was a messenger for the Allied forces during World War II,
- 40:28driving a motorcycle across the African desert, carrying letters.
- 40:34He was captured and sent to a labor camp somewhere in Italy, near the Alps.
- 40:39He managed to escape, taking with him some things that he'd been forced to make,
- 40:46and he hid in the mountains for three days before he made it back to the Allied forces,
- 40:54and eventually came home.
- 40:57My grandfather remembers that in the first few days, after his uncle came back,
- 41:03he was digging in the backyard.
- 41:06He doesn't know what he was looking for, but whatever it was,
- 41:13it gave his uncle a lot of relief that it was still there.
- 41:19All his uncle said was that it was a family heirloom from his father's.
- 41:27Okay, I have chills. And I also just want to take a moment, because that's a
- 41:34real person, a real story.
- 41:39Your great-great-uncle was a dispatch rider in the desert during the war.
- 41:45That was a dangerous job. Riding alone across open desert, carrying messages that mattered.
- 41:54Then he was captured, imprisoned, and forced to work.
- 42:00And he escaped and survived three days alone in the mountains to make it back.
- 42:07A lot of South African soldiers who fought in North Africa ended up as prisoners in Italy.
- 42:15And not all of them came home.
- 42:18He did. That's incredible. bowl. Please tell your grandfather,
- 42:23thank you for sharing his family's story with us.
- 42:27But now, little imps, think about the fireball.
- 42:32Every year, on the same day, a ball of fire appears in the street.
- 42:38It opens the front door. It travels down the long hallway, out the back door
- 42:43and into the backyard, and it stays there for a few minutes before it disappears.
- 42:52The backyard where the uncle went digging as soon as he got home,
- 42:57where something precious from
- 42:59his father was buried, something he was so relieved to find still there.
- 43:06I'm not saying they're connected, Maybe they're not,
- 43:11But A light that goes straight to the backyard Every year And stays there for
- 43:18a while Like it's checking On something.
- 43:23Kind of feels like somebody's making sure it's still there, doesn't it?
- 43:29And now I really want to know what day it was. Was it the day he was captured?
- 43:37The day he escaped? The day he came home?
- 43:41Ville 47, if your grandfather ever remembers anything else, the void will be listening.
- 43:46And honestly, this might be one of my favorite stories we've ever had on the show.
- 43:52It is definitely one of the only stories so far but this is so interesting thank
- 44:00you for sharing all of that information and your family's history it means a lot.
- 44:14Okay, I promised you've waited the whole episode.
- 44:20It's time to tell you about my date with the Jersey Devil.
- 44:26So, a few years ago, I'm feeling a little lonely in the void, and a mutual friend who
- 44:34shall remain nameless, but he's very tall and has red eyes and loves lamps, says, Nix,
- 44:43I know a guy.
- 44:44Wings, hooves, very famous, lives in New Jersey. You'll love him.
- 44:52And I think, okay, wings, I have wings. We already have something in common.
- 44:59So we meet in the Pine Barrens. Very romantic.
- 45:05Full moon, mist on the bog, and he shows up.
- 45:10And I have to admit, he's very tall, and he has a nice horse face.
- 45:15I'm into it. And then he opens his mouth.
- 45:20First, he talks about himself for two hours straight.
- 45:26His hockey team, his Netflix appearances.
- 45:34How Benjamin Franklin was basically his hype man, how a cannonball went through
- 45:43him in 1809 and he didn't even feel it, babe.
- 45:49Then he takes me to dinner, and dinner is a farmer's chicken coop.
- 45:56He just starts eating raw chickens, feathers everywhere.
- 46:02I'm sitting there in my nice dress. I'm a cat. I like snacks, but there's a limit.
- 46:11And then the farmer comes out with a flashlight and he panics,
- 46:15screams, which is very loud, by the way.
- 46:20It's so loud and flies away.
- 46:26Leaving me alone in the chicken coop, covered in feathers.
- 46:33And the farmer just looked at me, and I looked at him, and I said, Shoo?
- 46:42And it did not work. So, yeah, that's why we're civil.
- 46:47He still texts me sometimes, you up at three in the morning from the Pine Barrens
- 46:54with a picture of a chicken.
- 46:57I leave him on read.
- 47:02So that's it, little imps. That's the story.
- 47:08Not proud of it, but you know, sometimes you don't really know what you're getting yourself into.
- 47:22And that's the story of the Jersey Devil, a creature born from a curse,
- 47:29a family feud, and Benjamin Franklin's petty almanac jokes,
- 47:35who terrified three states in one week and was impersonated by a kangaroo.
- 47:43Thank you so much for your stories, little imps, and keep them coming.
- 47:48Send your encounters, local legends, and strange experiences to creaturefeaturewithnicks at gmail.com.
- 47:57And let me know how you'd like to be credited.
- 48:00And if you love the show and want to help feed the void, you can buy me a snack
- 48:05on Ko-Fi, linked in the description.
- 48:08Right now, we're saving up for a better microphone, so every whisper from the
- 48:13void sounds crisp and clear.
- 48:16No pressure, though. Watching, sharing, and sending your stories helps just as much.
- 48:23Next week, we're heading to Tennessee for a ghost story.
- 48:28America's most famous haunting. The Bell Witch.
- 48:36A ghost story. Ah, great. Love that. Totally not scared.
- 48:44Someone, please hold my paw next week.
- 48:48Until next time, stay curious, stay spooky, and don't stare into the void.
- 48:56She's staring back.