The Secret History Of The Jersey Devil

A product of innuendo and rumor, as well as scandal and media hype, the Jersey Devil enjoys a rich history involving land grabs, astrological predictions, mermaids and dinosaur bones, sideshows, Napoleon Bonaparte's brother, a cross-dressing royal governor, and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.

In the course of its extraordinary history, the Jersey Devil has been exorcised, shot, electrocuted, declared officially dead, and scoffed as foolishness--none of which has had any effect on it or the people who persist in seeing it!This mysterious creature is said to prowl the lonely sand trails and mist-shrouded marshes of the Pine Barrens, and emerge perioducally to rampage through the towns and cities of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, leaving many communities in near-hysteria.The authors show that while a few appearances have been out-right fraud and others have likely been the result of mass hysteria, this creature has been seen by enough sane, sober, and responsible citizens to keep the possiblity of its existence alive and tantalizing.Over 50,000 in print

The Pine Barrens region in New Jersey has long been a place of mystery, with its dark pine groves, black swamps, and dank bogs, oftentimes shrouded in mist and fog. Reputed to be haunted by spirits, it’s an unsettling place to be sure. But of all the mysterious happenings and sights to be found in the Pine Barrens, there is none so intriguing as the Jersey Devil. Since its first reported sighting in 1735, local lore has it that a “devil-like” creature with the head of a horse, the wings of a bat, and the hooves of a goat has menaced townspeople, frightened livestock, and caused all manner of trouble over the years. Is the Jersey Devil real? Award-winning author Trinka Hakes Noble weaves a spellbinding tale about the origins of the legend of the Jersey Devil. Atmospheric illustrations by artist Gerald Kelley bring the tale to spooky life.

Emitting shrill cries and leaving its footprints in mud and snow, it has roamed the Pine Barrons of South Jersey for almost three hundred years. It is usually said to resemble a composite of several different animals, but it walks upright and us believed to be the child of a human mother.What is this mysterious creature? The Jersey Devil, of course! More than twenty years after their first book about the Jersey Devil was published, James McCloy and Ray Miller, Jr.'s, new research into this phenomenon continues to intrigue readers. Does the Jersey Devil actually exist? Or is it simply a hoax? Open Phantom of the Pines--if you dare--and decide for yourself.

"For the better part of two centuries, at least, the story of the Jersey Devil has been part of the culture of Southern New Jersey. A fire-breathing monster with the head of a horse, bat wings and the body of a kangaroo, the creature is said to be the thirteenth child of Mother Leeds, born in 1735, when the unfortunate woman put a curse on her future offspring. Informed at a tender age by his BeBop (his grandmother) that he is distantly related to the beast, Bill Sprouse goes looking for the story behind the story of his family's connection to the famous monster. The result is part memoir, part travelogue and part a raucous tour of three-hundred years of New Jersey history. The domestic life of the Jersey Devil traces the origins of the Jersey Devil legend to an obscure pamphlet war that sent the Leeds family to Leeds Point at the end of the seventeenth century, with the family patriarch, Daniel Leeds, branded Satan's Harbinger in the process. If follows the story through its connection with the residents of the Pine Barrens (the famous Pineys), who were said to live in fear of the beast, and, finally, it examines the legend in its modern iterations: X-files episodes are made about the monster, a pro hockey team is named after it, and residents of Galloway Township attempt to adopt the creature as the official town mascot. The domestic life of the Jersey Devil is a book about suburban identity, and about one suburbanite's attempt to come to terms with his family history in the most unlikely of places."--

"Absolutely perfect for the current moment." --Buzzfeed America's favorite cultural historian and author of Ghostland takes a tour of the country's most persistent "unexplained" phenomena In a world where rational, scientific explanations are more available than ever, belief in the unprovable and irrational--in fringe--is on the rise: from Atlantis to aliens, from Flat Earth to the Loch Ness monster, the list goes on. It seems the more our maps of the known world get filled in, the more we crave mysterious locations full of strange creatures. Enter Colin Dickey, Cultural Historian and Tour Guide of the Weird. With the same curiosity and insight that made Ghostland a hit with readers and critics, Colin looks at what all fringe beliefs have in common, explaining that today's Illuminati is yesterday's Flat Earth: the attempt to find meaning in a world stripped of wonder. Dickey visits the wacky sites of America's wildest fringe beliefs--from the famed Mount Shasta where the ancient race (or extra-terrestrials, or possibly both, depending on who you ask) called Lemurians are said to roam, to the museum containing the last remaining "evidence" of the great Kentucky Meat Shower--investigating how these theories come about, why they take hold, and why as Americans we keep inventing and re-inventing them decade after decade. The Unidentified is Colin Dickey at his best: curious, wry, brilliant in his analysis, yet eminently readable.

A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov’s life and works—notably Pale Fire and Lolita—bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic authors Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics? Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art’s sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction—history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending the most productive decades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searing bigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert’s secret identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of Pale Fire recalls Russian tragedies that once haunted the world. From Tsarist courts to Nazi film sets, from CIA front organizations to wartime Casablanca, the story of Nabokov’s family is the story of his century—and both are woven inextricably into his fiction.

Documents the story of the luxury liner that burned off the coast of New Jersey in 1934, revealing how the Morro Castle's captain died under mysterious circumstances seven hours before the ship caught fire and how many of the crew abandoned ship.