Mind your Neighborhood Enigma

To embrace the weirdness of your town or neighborhood is to appreciate the immediate environment in which you engage and exist.

Even though I’ve been a proud New Yorker for 10 years, I still hold a flame to my home state of New Jersey. Here are three reasons why:

1) It is the diner capital of the world.

2) The cultural North-South divide on the “official” name of a delicious processed meat.

3) The Jersey Devil. Not the hockey team.

While the first two facts make me feel like a New Jersian, the third is what makes me feel particularly proud of being someone from South Jersey. The Jersey Devil is a Cryptid from the Pine Barrens. It’s not as popular as the A-listers like The Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. But do keep in mind that the Jersey Devil was featured in the 5^th episode of the X-files, an episode of Supernatural, and a handful of cheaply funded documentaries aired on (gasp) The SyFy Channel. So, we have at least achieved local celebrity status.

The story goes that Joseph and Mary Leeds were living in incredible poverty in the Pine Barrens. When Mary became pregnant with their 13^th child, she screeched “Let the child be the devil”. Quickly after the child was born, it grew large bat wings and a goat head, adopted the body of a horse (complete with horseshoes, somehow) and flew away, but not before incinerating the house in the process. This is the Galloway interpretation, which is a county about 23 miles away from Atlantic City. But the lore actually exists in state of limbo. Esteville, near Mays Landing, claims instead of Ms. Leads being poor, she was a witch (apparently being a wealthy witch is an oxymoron). The point is that there is no objective truth to the origins of the Jersey Devil, but everyone can agree that it haunts our spooky Pine Barrens.

The existence of the shoes implies for the Jersey Devil the existence of self-aware shame.

If you think all this is a little weird, it probably is. New Jersey is canonically weird. There is a whole magazine dedicated to it. Weird NJ started in 1989 and ran content exclusively focused on New Jersey for about fifteen years before jumping to other states. This publication covers everything from UFO sightings, strange architecture, abandoned silos, etc.. Outside of our famous Cryptid we have local haunts like Clinton Road, of which I’ve personally experienced the penny loving Ghost Boy and the outright aggressive Ghost Truck. There is the Goosebumps-vibe Gingerbread Castle in Hamburg and the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital. I was nearly arrested exploring the latter sometime around 2012, but that’s another story.

So back to Cryptids. Outside of New Jersey, you’ve probably heard of a few: Sasquatch, Jackalope, Chupacabra. West Virginia has the creepy Moth Man and the even creepier Flatwoods Monster. Lake Champlain has Champ, who is sorta like a B-list Nessie. The list goes on. According to J.W. Ocker in his 2022 book The United States of Cryptids (probably available at your local library), there are approximately 66 Cryptids in the mainland United States alone. The point is that there are more Cryptids than you’d think, and with that comes regional folk lore, mythologies, and insider knowledge.

Engaging with Cryptids and spooky folklore encourages non-mainstream thinking. Cryptids, by definition, are inherently unproven. They exist primarily in the realm of dreamers, sleuths, and most importantly, mystery. With mystery comes whimsy. Imagine Salem without the Witch Trials. Entire towns have based their identity on their Cryptid, if only for commercial reasons. These are aptly referred to as “Cryptid Towns”, in which places like Point Pleasant, West Virginia, puts on the annual Moth Man Festival.

The fascination with Cryptids and folklore are important for small towns. These traditions provide necessary street-cred against all the other chaos and oddities of the world. Folklore formalizes a collective identity and shared historical knowledge on a community level. A great neighbor-to-neighbor inside joke passed down through generations. I’d like to point out that my “Galloway” telling of the Jersey Devil’s origins several paragraphs up was not something I learned on Youtube; it was told to me by my father on a long car ride when I was six or seven. What I did learn was that the lore actually changes on a county by county level.

When we ignore the strangeness around us, we make it easier for us to ignore what makes our communities so, well, weird. There is an untapped sphere of cultural identity that is lost in pursuit of truth, logic, and evidence. Why can’t the Jersey Devil exist? Whether or not our local monstrosity is real or not is irrelevant (it’s real), it’s the fact that those who engage with the folktale are those who typically find enjoyment in the mystery and unknown.

This is supposedly what the Flatwoods Monster looks like (sans chair, obviously). This strange seat welcomes visitors to Flatwoods, a town with a population of 319 according to the recent census.

To acknowledge and embrace our homegrown folktales and oral traditions is to celebrate them. People need to be apart of a greater whole, and traditions are one of the first binding agents in our communities. Yet to discourage the weird is to create an identity vacuum often filled with sports teams, brand names, and politics. Sometimes they intersect, but not often. I recognize that championing Cryptids is itself to become one with a brand, but at least it’s your brand and one that has historical and community roots that you can share with your neighbors. To embrace the weirdness of your town or neighborhood is to appreciate the immediate environment in which you engage and exist. Go to your local ghost walking tour, read Atlas Obscura and filter for your town or state. The world is an Advent Calendar of impossible woodland creatures and blink-and-you-miss-it deformed 13th children.

To quote Fox Mulder: I want to believe.