Pine Barrens

My uncle used to live in New Jersey.

This one year, when he was maybe 12 or 13, he and his church group went to a retreat in the Pine Barrens.

Now, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but I'm sure if this gets on the show, others won't be.

The Pine Barrens is home to a very notorious something called...

It's amazing how the TV made it seem like that's not how you were.

Because we did a tour of the Pine Barrens, Steph and I, and those rooms and everything had these old beds and what have you.

And when I went upstairs and saw these beds, the original, quote unquote, beds that are there...

They were disgusting.

Witnesses who got a good look at the creature described it as being enormous, with thick black matted fur and hooves, a horse-like head with sharp horns, bat wings, and a serpentine tail.

This creature was widely believed to make its home inside the Pine Barrens, a massive forest that spreads across southern New Jersey.

Residents who live near these woods even have a name for this creature.

They call it the Jersey Devil.

But there's a reason that New Jersey is nicknamed the Garden State.

New Jersey has a long history of agriculture, and even today there is a huge swath of swampy forest spreading across the southern part of the state that seems both out of place and time.

This is the Pine Barrens, the largest patch of undeveloped land across the mid-Atlantic seaboard.

The Pine Barrens is made up of over a million acres of trees, and beneath all that fertile soil are a number of enormous underground aquifers that are estimated to contain more than 17 trillion gallons of fresh water.

This is America's most infamous crime, so it's only fitting I bring you one of America's most infamous monsters, the Jersey Devil.

Deep in New Jersey's Pine Barrens, people have reported a winged, hooved, horse-headed creature since 1735.

In one terrifying week in 1909, hundreds saw it.

Schools closed and police fired their revolvers.

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Today's episode is about the Jersey Devil.

It's America's oldest monster legend, a creature with bat wings, a horse's head, and cloven hooves said to have been born to a cursed mother in the New Jersey Pine Barrens in 1735.

So what's out there? Let's talk about it.

A lot of the pine that goes into paper comes out of the southeast, so Georgia, Florida.

How about the Pine Barrens in New Jersey?

No, that's all protected land.

It is? Yeah, and I don't think any good luck logging in New Jersey.