Jersey Devil V3

Cold Open: The Jersey Devil. Is it a kangaroo-like creature with the head of a goat, horse, or dog? Most agree that it has wings, hooves, horns, and a tail. Where does it come from? Many describe a dragon-like creature. Or does it walk on two legs like others have reported? Some say it can fly. Legends say it has killed. It supposedly once survived a cannonball blast. It emits a blood curdling scream. It might be a pterodactyl. It can die and come back. It is almost certainly demonic. It murdered it’s own human mother and some midwives moments after its brith before flying up the chimney. It has a NHL hockey team named after it. There’s a good chance it worked as a roadie on Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness tour in the summer of 1978, handling sound check duties and replacing guitarist Steven Van Zandt’s signature bandana whenever he either sweated through it or when he felt a new bandana was needed to get him in the correct artistic zone to play certain songs, like Born to Run. Okay, I may have made up the Springsteen shit. But the rest of this info does come from historical accounts. So when did the legend of this creature originate? What do people think this creature is? What does it want? Is there any cryptozoological basis for this legend or do the origins of the Jersey Devil have nothing to do with a beast at all? Let’s get weird Timesuckers. Let’s head to Jersey, back to the it’s beginning, and crawl into the darkest corners of the Garden State to solve the enduring mystery of the Jersey Devil, today, on Timesuck. PAUSE TIMESUCK INTRO I. Welcome Happy Monday Suckers! Hail Nimrod. Praise Bojangles. And Be gone Lucifina! I’m Dan Cummins and this is Timesuck. Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. day! I’d do a Timesuck on Dr. King but it’s already been done. One of my faves actually. Timesuck 42 if you want to check it out. Recording from the Suck Dungeon again today with Josh Krell watching the levels. Tweaking the sound a bit since last week. Trying to get it perfect! Couple quick tour dates I hope you’re buying tickets to and then it’s Jersey Devil time! Super cool Timesucker Update this week regarding getting out of a traffic ticket due to being in the Cult of the Curious. Providence, RI January 19-20th. The Comedy Connection! Get over there damn it! And again - NO show in Chicopee, MA on Jan 21st because the venue went out of business and didn’t care about warning anyone. Damn it! Hopefully that doesn’t happen again. Ever. Philadelphia! January 25-27th. Get to the Punchline! And get to Baltimore January 28th at Magooby’s - tickets are for sale now. Chicago! January 31st through Feb. 3rd Tell me you’re coming to Zanies. It’s an amazing comedy club. New York City - Gotham Comedy Club, one night only, Feb. 11th. Detroit! Feb. 16th at the Magic Bag in Ferndale with the boys from Small Town Murder. One show is a swap cast and the other is standup. Minneapolis tickets are on sale! Stand up shows March 2nd and 3rd. Very limited tickets. The live Timesuck in Minneapolis is already sold out! I told you tickets would go fast for that one. Sorry to any of you who can’t make it. BUT - that standup show is very Timesuck-esque and there are still standup tickets available. Cleveland just added to the calendar in March - March 22-24. Another live podcast just added in Spokane, Washington. One show only, Sunday night May 6th! More announcements at the end of the show including more tour dates. It’s Jersey Devil time! PAUSE INTERLUDE II. Pine Barrens, NJ: To learn about the Jersey Devil you gotta head to the Pine Barrens of Jersey, Central and Southeast Jersey. Gotta talk about some “Piney” culture! The Pine Barrens take up part of the 1.1 million acres - the Pinelands National Reserve - America’s first National Reserve, established in 1978, 22% of New Jersey’s total land area and the largest body of open space on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard between Richmond, Virginia and Boston. Massachussets. While there are no towns in the Reserve today, there used to be several; ruins of ghost towns are found throughout the dense forest. And these old towns, places with names like “Rattlesnake Ace’s Town”, “Calico”, and “New Egypt” were populated by people referred to as “Pineys”. Living conditions in the sandy, acidic soil of the Pine Barrens was hard - the land was considered un-farmable by early settlers, and those who decided to live there were considered to be the dregs of society by East Coast city folk and even small town Northern Jersey small-town folk; the “Pineys” were fugitives from the law, poachers, moonshiners, runway slaves, and deserting soldiers. Early “Pineys,” as Barrens residents call themselves, included Quakers who’d been expelled from their congregations for fighting in the Revolution; outlaws and smugglers; and Tory loyalists known as the Refugees who, despite their politics, rode in packs and killed and robbed indiscriminately. “Pineys” also mined Bog Iron during colonial times which appears as horrible as it sounds. Lot of Revolutionary War steel was carried out of the Pine Barrens. Bog iron is literally just chunks of “bog ore”, big chunks of oxidized iron - giant rocks, that you dig out of bog mud. From what I saw online, the rocks, size-wise, tend to be somewhere between the size of a cantaloupe and the size of a small watermelon. And you dig them out of the mud or collect them from the bottom of a pond and carry them to have the iron smelted out of them. A very low- tech type of mining; light on equipment/heavy on back breaking labor. Dudes with shovels literally digging rocks out of bog mud. Or, even worse, dudes without shovels digging rocks out of mud. And many of the “pineys” mining this bog ore were part of a culture of living off of the grid in various cabins sprinkled throughout the forest. The “pineys” were a poor people, the Jersey equivalent to the poor Appalachian people of West Virginia and the backwoods rural folks of Kentucky. I can picture the Idaho County equivalent where I grew up. There was a family I will just refer to as the Johnsons so I don’t embarrass any of them if they somehow listen to podcasts now. I worked at the grocery store in Riggins in high school, and sometimes I would work early in the morning before school started and before the store opened stocking freight. Well the Johnsons would come down from their family mountain ranch about once a month for supplies, and they’d come in early before the store opened. They’d stock up on flour, sugar, butter, and other perishables and canned food and take several shopping carts of shit back up to the ranch, far away from town. And other than that, other than occasionally grabbing a bunch of fuel as well, no one ever saw them. They avoided town as best they could. And they looked like they had been cast in some hillbilly movie. Straight out of Deliverance. Dental care was not a strong family priority. They didn’t even have a casual interest in toothbrushes and toothpaste. Or deodorant. Or shampoo let alone conditioner. Didn’t seem to be big fans of soap. And they just looked off. Even if they were cleaned up, they had the facial characteristics that seem to correlate from generations of inbreeding and poor nutrition. If this family popped up in a movie, you’d be like, “Oh, shit! What the fuck??” And it seems like the back woods of the Pine Barrens of NJ had some similar families. And this rural, backwoods area of Jersey has served as a cultural petri dish for growing the strange legend of the Jersey Devil. A. Nucky Thompson: There were old dirt roads cutting through the trees to clay factories and cranberry bogs and wood mills back in the 18th and 19th centuries. Along the roads where roadhouse inns and taverns where outsiders were rumored to have been robbed and killed. Some of the characters you can watch in HBO’s Boardwalk empire came from this rough and rugged place - like Enoch Johnson, the inspiration for the Buscemi’s main character, Atlantic City kingpin Nucky Thompson. B. Atlantic Monthly Article: In May of 1859, an article appeared in the Atlantic Monthly which described the culture of the inhabitants of the Pine Barrens as “aboriginal in [its] savagery.” The residents were referred to as “Pine Rats” and described as “people as barely human in their squalid living conditions” and “besotted and brutish in their ignorance.” Sounds like the Johnson family I remember! Wow. C. Goddard’s Eugenic’s study: In the early 1900s, the living conditions and inhabitants of the Barrens were so concerning that a eugenics study was carried out by American psychologist Henry H Goddard, and it labeled the Pineys as a genetically inferior, almost sub-human group or intellectual inferiors. Jesus! Goddard was looking into a genetic cause for what he labeled “feeble- mindedness”, a general category of conditions that included mental retardation, learning disabilities, and mental illness. He studied the ancestry of a Pine Barrens woman by the name of Emma Wolverton, born in 1889. And, according to Goddard, Emma’s Piney family tree was full of virtually nothing but criminals, inbreds, folks with various levels of mental retardation, and, basically, lazy, good-for-nothing, delinquents with no moral compasses.

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