The Pineys

Hey, true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. It was a wicked storm, rain pounding like fists against the windows. Trees bent nearly double by the wind. And that wind, it was like a living thing exploding in a furious howling scream that shook the rafters and banged against the door. On any other night, mother would have paced the small front room worried, but the roof hold could a tree come down, smashing the cabin into splinters. But this was no ordinary night. Mother was in labor, the pain coming in tight waves, sharp and relentless. She was no stranger to childbirth, having already born a dozen children. It's lightning split the sky open.

Mother knew with a stricken heart, this storm was, it was a punishment, punishment on her. Mother didn't want this baby. She already loathed it. What else could a 13th baby be but the devil himself, gleeful at finding a doorway into this world, a doorway torn from her very flesh. Mother had cursed this child. She knew the way mothers always know that something was terribly wrong, that whatever grew inside her swollen belly was evil, foul, unclean. The infant wasn't born in the regular way of things. Instead, it wrenched itself from mother's body, its first cry, an unearthly shrieking growl.

That's when she lifted her head and saw just what she had brought into this world. Weird stuff. Standing on two legs with cloven hooves, small arms ending in oversized clawed hands, large leathery wings, and a forked tail. Mother's 13th child tipped back its goat like head and shrieked in rage. The other children cowering against the walls scrambling to hide themselves beneath the table were battered by those wings whipped by that forked tail. Mother exhausted and bleeding so much blood, feverish with pain and shock was defenseless against the cruel lashing of the creature's barbed tail. Then, as quickly as it began, it was over. With a final blood curdling scream, the thing flung itself at the hearth and scrambled up the brick chimney and into the storm scoured darkness.

That night in 1735, Mother Leeds gave birth to a terrifying monster and to a legend, the legend of the Jersey Devil. You might be hearing about the Jersey Devil for the first time. The kids who grew up in the Garden State or near Philadelphia or New York, they knew the Jersey Devil and not as a story from the olden days. The Jersey Devil, whatever, whoever it was, is still very much around. In October 2015, it was not only spotted, it was photographed. A guy named David Black was driving on route nine in Galloway Township at around 6pm. He was on a stretch of that road that ran alongside a golf course when he saw it. At first he was like, is that a llama? It was weaving in and out of the tree line bordering the road. It was weird as hell. Why would a llama be loose at all, much less on a golf course on route nine in New Jersey? It was crazy.

David reached for his cell phone and snapped a photo. And then suddenly, the animal he thought was a llama spread an enormous pair of wings. David, like any normal person was completely freaked out because A, llamas don't fly. And B, he had never seen anything in his life that looked like whatever this was. The story made national news. David Black told the press that his heart was racing during the encounter. Because in that moment, he realized he had just witnessed the creature from his childhood nightmares, the Jersey Devil. Listen, you got to have thick skin to live in New Jersey, because the Jersey vibe ain't for the weak or the soft or the painfully sensitive.

These are people that once they love you, will literally give you their last bite of food and beat the crap out of someone if you happen to need that particular favor. These are the same people whose 84 year old grandmother will stick her head out of the car window and call you a damn moron with brains if you accidentally cut her off in traffic. Okay, you got to be tough if you want to roll Jersey style, which is why it did online trolls zero good to make fun of David Black. Plus, only a few days later, another eyewitness named Emily Martin managed to roll video on her own sighting of the Jersey Devil. A sighting that took place just a few miles away from that golf course on Route 9. Now, here's the thing about the Jersey He's a seasoned professional at the cryptic game. He's been around for a very long time, making his home in New Jersey's most mysterious and mythic place, the Pine Barrens. The Pine Barrens may be a forbidding wilderness, but it's never been a lonesome one. People have called the place home for hundreds and thousands of years. Those people made their own way shunning the wider world, preferring the peace and plenty of the Pine Barrens to the noisy crowdedness of civilization.

Over time, they became more and more separate, more and more isolated. They lived by their own laws and avoided outsiders. And those outsiders called these people pineys. Harassment and judgment of the pineys goes all the way back to like 1859 when the Atlantic Monthly Magazine published a piece describing the people of the Pine Barrens, calling them pine rats.

Completely besotted and brutish in their ignorance, they are incapable of obtaining an honest living and have supported themselves from a time which may be called immoral. By practicing petty larceny on an organized plan, the pine rat steals wood, steals game, steals cranberries, steals anything. In fact, that his hand can be laid upon and woe to the property of the man who dares to attempt to restrain him. Now, let's jump ahead 54 years.

Promiscuity and all its worst features is an everyday factor. These people were descended from colonial and revolutionary stock. Naturally, the percentage of mental defects is very high. The low mentality prevalent among the pineys is apparently responsible for their low standard of morality and their lack of education due to the poverty and the necessity for earning a living at an early age.

That's the 35th governor of New Jersey, James Fairman Fielder. He's been dead for 70 years now. I was gonna say that you can tell he's from another time by the way he calls people defective. But then I remember that our own political climate right now is just as bad, if not worse. So we'll just leave it at that. He was the 35th governor of the Garden State.

Fielder fixated on the pineys, thanks in large part to a woman named Elizabeth Kite. Kite was a special investigator for the New Jersey State Department of Charities and Corrections. Along with Dr. Henry Goddard, a fervent believer in eugenics, Kite released a report in 1913 on the residents of the Pine of the people and the place. It was also packed with half truths, full out lies, and more sanctimonious moralizing than an old fashioned church revival in the woods of Mississippi. The pair presented the report to then Governor Woodrow Wilson.

But he was getting ready to be sworn in as the 28th President of the United States. So he shoved it aside. When acting Governor James Fielder found it, he found the kind of cause a politician lives for. Something that would capture the attention of the public, make him look like an effective leader, all at the expense of a vulnerable population outside the mainstream. Kite's report was titled, The Pineys. It was chock full of lurid descriptions, drunkenness, incest, farm animals quartered in the same bedrooms as But the real Piney has no inclination to labor, submitting to every privation in order to avoid it. Lazy, lustful, and cunning. He is a degenerate creature who has learned to provide for himself the bare necessities of life without entering into life's stimulating struggle. Like the degenerate relative of the crab that ages ago gave up a free roving life and gluing its head to a rock built a wall of self defense around itself, spending the rest of its life kicking food into its mouth and enjoying the functionings of reproduction.

The Piney and all the rest of his type have become barnacles upon our civilization. All the higher functions of whose manhood have been atrophied through disuse. Fielder ate up every word and so did the press. The public was shocked but couldn't get enough. Women living with multiple children, all bearing old and distinguished New Jersey names.

They have no idea who their fathers are. Many cannot even say when or where they had been born. Even the names of their communities struck Elizabeth Kite as further proof that these were morally bankrupt degenerates. Hog wallow, sows crotch, no decent person would consent to live in such a place. Acting Governor Fielder promptly took himself off for a visit to the Pine Barrens to see these wretched people with his own eyes. They have inbred and led lawless and scandalous lives till they become a race of imbeciles, criminals and defectives. Kite's report was spun from lies and judgment filtered through the lens of eugenics. In reality, the so called pineys were nothing like the wretched creatures Kite described. They were something else entirely. Something remarkable, something different. And you know how being different works out for people, then and now. Kite's report slapped a pile of ugly labels on the people of the Pine Barrens.

They were othered and marginalized. They're condemned. It's tragic how those labels and judgments stuck right up to the present day. The pineys were hunters and fishers, people who lived off the land and out of time. They didn't participate in the Industrial Revolution. They had no use for the 40 hour work week, the rat race, the endless and unwinnable competition to have more, do more, be more. Good cog in the capitalist machine that he was, Fielder saw this not as a perfectly functional alternative lifestyle based on subsistence and independence, but as proof of inborn laziness and stupidity.

Back he went to the state capitol, Trenton, to demand that the legislature isolate the Pine Barrens from the rest of New Jersey. Now the only thing Fielder and Kite needed to make their case to the public was a religious leader willing to cast the pineys as an affront to God. Enter the Reverend A.W. Bostwick. From the pulpit at Grace Church in Madison, New Jersey, Reverend Bostwick thundered on about the moral failings of the savage pineys and congratulated himself on all he had done to uplift these pitiful people. And of course, he asked for money to continue doing the Lord's work in the Pine Barrens. He read the congregation a letter sent to him by Governor Fielder, a letter praising Bostwick for his Christian heart and good deeds on behalf of the pineys.

His eyes moist with emotion, Reverend Bostwick pled with the congregation to help fund a hospital for feeble minded children. Thousands of them, he declared, right here, right where you live. The Piney region of New Jersey presents a wonderful opportunity for Christian service, beginning only 27 and a half miles outside Philadelphia, running through three counties Burlington, Ocean and Atlantic until you reach the shore. In the course of a day's journey, you come suddenly there in the woods upon a little hut with one room or two or three, and a little boy attracted to you because he sees you are a stranger. He lifts his little face up towards you. And he just says, huh? Reverend Bostwick was just getting warmed up. There's something queer about the boy, his strange gait as he came towards you his sloping shoulders, his pasty complexion, the dead look in his eyes. You want to say, boy, what in the world's the matter with you? What have you done to yourself?

Yes, my man. There's that judge not less you be judged vibe we were looking for. He's only a little piney boy. We have about 4000 of them in this region and they present to us three problems. One of the mental deficits, one of the moral deficits, and the third the problem of the life itself. It seems strange in these days in a Christian state like New Jersey, when you consider what New Jersey is supposed to be that you will stumble so often in that region upon grown up men or women with the mind of a little child of eight or 10 or 12. I don't think I've ever seen them above 12 years old mentally.

Reverend Bostwick was on a roll. He recounted taking Governor Fielder to see the pineys with his own eyes and hear their stories with his own ears. He described introducing Governor Fielder to a fully grown man they called Joe boy. Now Joe boy, the governor's come down here today to see you. I want you to tell the governor what education you have and something about your opportunities in life. I ain't had much education in life. I've just been kicked around from one place to another and never had a chance. What day of the week is it Joe boy? Well, he didn't know the day of the week. What month of the year is it? Well, he didn't know that. I tell you what, Joe boy, you name the months of the year for the governor. You mean name of all? Well, now I can't do that. But I can give you one of I remember the fourth of July. The Reverend Bostwick shook his head. That was the best poor Joe boy could do. The truth is Joe boy is one of the fellows whom it's impossible to keep straight. He is always tumbling into trouble. I no sooner get him out of one straight than he's in another either marrying another girl or stealing something that does not belong to him. He doesn't seem to have the mental balance that's essential to keep him in the right way. Bostwick eventually got to the point. It wasn't so much the mental deficiencies of the pioneers that represented a threat to the good people of New Jersey. It was their moral deficiencies. It seems strange again that in a Christian state like New Jersey, in these days, you'll stumble here so often in the woods upon men or women with anywhere from two to five wives or husbands living by themselves generation after generation for a century secluded and left to go in accordance with their own traditions and customs. You'll great many tales and the pioneers so I've confined myself strictly to facts. The Reverend Bostwick was absolutely correct when he said the pioneers had kept to themselves for generations. The Pine Barrens have been occupied since the first century BCE. The first indigenous people to call the wilderness home were the Lenni Lenape. They were also the first to cultivate the native cranberries for food and medicine and even dye for clothing. Next came European and African settlers who also learned very quickly how to work the cranberry box, how to survive off the plentiful game and fish in the region. The colonial era was a wild time in the Pine Barrens.

Stories are told of mercenary German soldiers, they were called Hessians, who hid in the forest. Soldiers of the American Revolution, both patriots and British loyalists, built homes that were concealed deep in the pines. Native Americans have long found refuge from genocide in the Pine Barrens. And in time, black people who escaped slavery disappeared into a new life of freedom in the New Jersey wilderness. And then a new resource was discovered. It turned out that the boggy and sandy soil in the Pine Barrens was rich in iron ore. The pioneers didn't just extract the ore, they built forges and furnaces to smelt the ore. Iron taken from the Pine Barrens contributed mightily to the Industrial Revolution in America. The very thing the pioneers themselves rejected.

And that wasn't all. Pioneers ran thriving lumber businesses too. And the area became known for its glass artisans, an industry of its own, creating and selling beautiful and The pioneers of the 18th and 19th centuries were hardworking and self-sufficient. But they were also isolated, both by geography and by choice. They existed in their own hidden world inside, but not a part of the rapidly growing and modernizing state of New Jersey.

This presents a grave problem which the local authorities apparently cannot handle. The state must consider segregation and sterilization. And there it is eugenics showing up to the party right on schedule. This race based science and I'm putting that in air quotes was all about notions of fitness. Who was fit to reproduce? What sort of fit people might best improve society? Here in America, we had our own spin on eugenics. We believed strongly in applying Darwin's laws of natural selection to human beings by controlling who was fit to reproduce, we could make the whole society more glorious, which is why this idea of forced sterilization shows up time and time again, in our brief history as a nation. Mental illness and homosexuality were considered fine reasons to sterilize a citizen. In some cases, right up through the 1970s in these United States. Now, Fielder and Elizabeth Kite and the Reverend Boswick were focused on improving New Jersey by applying eugenics to the people of the Pine Barrens. And Fielder would have succeeded in forcibly sterilizing the pineys. Had the New Jersey State Supreme Court not stepped in to the justices were like, bro, the that is totally unconstitutional. Meanwhile, Mrs. Mabel Fielder, First Lady of New Jersey, shared her husband's concerns about the moral character of the pineys. It became her cause as well.

These people have lived with no social consciousness with no regard for either the laws of God or man. As for wedding rings, they're mainly unknown. The people have lived and still do in tumble down shacks. The conditions in which these people have lived have had the inevitable effect. A large proportion are defectives. Some people try to discourage us by asserting that work among such people is hopeless. But they are there. Their existence is a fact. And the actuality of such living conditions. It's a blot on the state. Mrs. Fielder did acknowledge that these people were hardworking people. But you know, there's a but common and industry highly specialized is finding its way into the Pine Belt of New Jersey, as into every other corner of the world. Within a year of Governor Fielder declaring the pineys defective, the new Lisbon Development Center was opened in the heart of the Barons. Two years later in 1916, the state of New Jersey took over the Burlington County colony for feeble minded boys. The state was shoveling money into expanding these facilities.

Business was booming. By the end of the year, there were more than 12,300 wards at the state, a number that just kept growing. While the pineys represented only a fraction of that, their isolation made them more vulnerable. The state knew where they were, even if locating them in that endless maze of pines wasn't the easiest task. Burlington County is the largest in New Jersey by area. But thanks to the Pine Barons, it had the highest proportion of state wards. Calling the piney mental waifs. Local officials credited Elizabeth Kite's report with having awakened public interest in caring for defective children. They boasted that Burlington County would soon show the world a practical and economical solution for that age old problem, criminality. Professor E.R. Johnstone, head of New Jersey's Vineland home of the feeble minded, was over the possibilities. It is the aim of this new colony not only to save them from lives of crime and shame, but to develop the physical ability of these children along lines that can make them productive members of society. They have not the minds to become farmers. They can aid in clearing the Pine Barons and converting these wastelands into fertile farming areas. Their lives can be made to prove a blessing instead of a curse to organized society. Okay, first, they most certainly did have the mind to become farmers. They were the descendants of generations of subsistence farmers. Second, the Pine Barons were not a wasteland, as the US Congress proved in 1978, when the land was designated a National Reserve. Third, isn't it wild how everyone except for the pineys themselves got to decide what was a blessing for them and what was a curse? As the years passed, the pineys shrank more and more into their own hidden communities. They were mocked and reviled and even feared. Their children were targeted to be institutionalized. Then came the rise of Hitler and the inevitability of war. In 1940, that war in Europe came to the Barons. Burlington County was home to Fort Dix, a training and staging ground during both World Wars for the United States Army. Officials at Fort Dix made the decision to build an artillery range and ordered the immediate removal of any pines people living in the designated zone. The pineys were given until Monday, December 2, 1940 to leave. Many flatly refused, which was a problem since the army intended to set a forest fire to clear the land. It was a real laugh riot for the local press, who declared that quote, even tough skin pineys can't stand that much heat. It was believed that the pineys were simply unable to comprehend the war at all. Which is interesting, when you consider that even that nasty article in the Atlantic Monthly acknowledged that the ancestors of many of the pineys had themselves been soldiers.

This extraordinary race of beings are lineal descendants of the New Jersey Tories who, during the revolution, made the pines their refuge whence they sallied in perpetual forays against the farms and dwellings of the partisans of the opposite cause. Several hundred of these fanatical desperadoes made the forest their home and laid waste to the surrounding townships by their sudden raids. Meanwhile, the pineys were resistant to leaving their home, despite the government's offer of compensation and help with relocation. And they had their defenders, which comes as a relief, considering how many people despised and pitied them and thought they were barely human. From the Central New Jersey Home News in December 1940. It is not true that crime is prevalent among these people.

They are poor, but they are happy. They are also independent. How could one expect then these people to leave willingly their land, even for what others would consider a better one? Now apparently some may because of the nation's defense program, but they would not be at all happy away from the sand and the pines, even though in new homes, they would have bathtubs and silver in their pockets. By January 7th, 1941, pineys or not, the army was christening its brand new artillery range. By January 28th, 155 millimeter howitzers were booming, firing away at fixed targets in the barrens. Two days later, 18 soldiers from Fort Dix dressed themselves in white mattress covers and staged a demonstration to prove the effectiveness of camouflage and snow-covered battle terrain. What the pineys made of this?

18 grown men covered in white sheets with slits cut out for their eyes, holes at the bottom for their feet, crude sleeves sewn on and a slit on one side for a rifle. Well, maybe they were laughing too hard to comment. Because here's the thing. No one asked the pineys or seemed to care. They've been told to leave. And if they were too simple minded to do so, that was on them. It took until 1967, and the writer John McPhee, to cast the inhabitants of New Jersey's pine barrens as something other than depraved and ignorant. In his book, The Pine Barrens, McPhee painted a much more nuanced picture of just who the pineys were, and how they had come to make this vast, wild forest their home for hundreds of years. He wrote that there were stories who fled into the pines during the American Revolution.

People with names like Britton and Brower, loyal to the king, and sometimes covered with feather and tar, left their homes in colonial cities and took refuge in the pine barrens. After the British defeats at Trenton and Princeton, Hessian soldiers deserted the British Army in considerable numbers, and some of them went into the pine barrens. And then there were the 18th century Quakers. The Pine Barrens served as a catch basin for Quakers who could not live up to the standards of the Quaker code. McPhee wrote about the black people who fled slavery. And then there were the smugglers and pirates and privateers who found the pine barrens to be an ideal sanctuary. It's all very dramatic and exciting. Even if a lot of it's been found now to be untrue. You can toss out the Hessians and the pirates, and you can keep the Quakers and the loyalists and even a few of the privateers. So much of the history of the people of the pine barrens was passed down in the oral tradition, and then written down by historians who are still trying to untangle the truth about the pineys, who still suffer today from prejudice and hateful ignorance. Here's a very, very recent example. In May 2024, Natalie Stone resigned from her position as deputy mayor of Tabernacle, New Jersey, just six months into her three year term. What got stoned into trouble was a 2020 post she made on Facebook, a post that read in There is actual truth to pineys being incestuous, illiterate, mentally deficient, inbred imbeciles, supposedly responsible for generations of morons and prostitutes.

Remember at the beginning of this episode when we talked about how New Jersey ain't for the weak? Yeah, the people came for Natalie Stone, and not just the pineys. The whole South Jersey hit squad turned out. Natalie Stone complained about bullying and virtual mobs, but her constituents responded to that with a hearty New Jersey Get the f*** out of here, girl.

And in classic New Jersey style, Natalie Stone was brazenly unrepentant. She thought the pineys were garbage, end of story. And she clearly thought everyone in South Jersey shared her hateful views. And it's almost like she had no idea how Facebook or the internet works. Die mad, Natalie. The institutions that Governor Fielder created to transform the pineys into productive citizens. What happened to them? Remember, those programs were all rolled into the new Lisbon Development Center. And that's still very much in business today. But under a cloud. A 2002 investigation by the Department of Justice found numerous conditions and practices that violate the constitutional and statutory rights of new Lisbon residents. Even more suspicious and concerning. The 1975 disappearance of two boys who were last seen near a baseball field. 1,896 acre complex off Route 72 in the Pinelands.

Neither boy was ever seen again. And if you're wondering why you've never heard of these boys, it's because they were inmates in a state institution. And if history teaches us anything, if the kids in that position are lucky to survive it unscathed, the fate of those missing boys in the pines has been an aching mystery for 49 years. And speaking of mystery, let's go back to Mother Leeds and the monstrous thing she birthed into this world. The Jersey Devil. Were you thinking that that was just a scary bedtime story? Think again. The first inhabitants of the Pine Barrens, the Lene Lenape, called the region Papuasing, which translates to place of the Hmm. The large leathery wings, the forked tail, the horrifying scream. Witnesses have described the Jersey Devil this way. It's not a huge leap to see that as a kind of dragon, is it? And what about Mother Leeds? Is there evidence that she was a real person? Well, there was a Leeds family, a very prominent family in the Pine Barrens. Daniel Leeds was the publisher of an almanac and the sworn rival of Benjamin Franklin. His wife had given birth to nine children, not the 12 of legend. But even back then nine was considered a whole lot of babies to be having. The trouble began with Daniel's work. The Leeds family was ostracized by their fellow Quakers for the wicked sin of Daniel having published astrological writings and in his almanac. It's not hard to see how the leap from the black magic of astrology to birthing the devil wasn't much of a leap at all back then. Daniel Leeds responded to his neighbor's pearl-clutching piety by doubling down. Don't like the astrology? Here's even more of it. Along with a heaping side of demonology, occultism, mysticism, and even some natural magic. Then he went big and left the Quakers altogether and converted to Anglicism. The Quakers were loud and furious, but the British royal governor of New Jersey liked Daniel Leeds and took his side. So, fun fact, as much as the Quakers are capable of hating anything, they hated the British. They ranted that Leeds was a traitor. He responded by publishing a slew of anti-Quaker materials. Oh my God, the ye olde pettiness. But remember, this is New Jersey. And in New Jersey, even Quakers can't turn away from a fight. They rolled up their long black sleeves and published Satan's Harbinger Encountered, being something by way of answer to Daniel Leeds. And in it, they accused Daniel Leeds of working with the devil. By this point, Leeds' son Titan was running the family almanac and beefing even harder with Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, in his poor riches almanac, printed a satire of astrology in which the stars predicted the death of Titan Leeds, who was pissed off to the point of incoherence. He fired off a response, but Benjamin Franklin would not let it go. And in time, the notion of Leeds ghost slowly morphed into a story of Leeds devil stalking the Pine Barrens. And as the years passed, the Leeds devil became the Jersey devil. Maybe. That's one version of events.

Bet you'd like to believe that, wouldn't you? You who needs this world to be orderly, all buttoned up and battened down to make sense. What nonsense to believe in monsters in this day and age. Even if all around you, people claim to have seen and heard these creatures. Even if those sightings go back and back and back and back to a time before movies and television and the internet filled our heads with ideas. Back to this news story from 1887. It would give a most unearthly yell that frightened the dogs. It whipped at every dog on the place. That thing, said the colonel, is not a bird nor an animal. But it is the Leeds devil, according to the description. And it was born over in Evesham, Burlington County 100 years ago. There is no mistake about it. I never saw the horrible critter myself. But I can remember well when it was roaming around in Evesham woods 50 years ago. And when it was hunted by men and dogs and shot it by the best marksmen there were in all South Jersey but could not be killed. There isn't a family in Burlington or any of the adjoining counties that does not know of the Leeds devil. And of course forward to 2015. And that very strange and puzzling encounter on route nine in Galloway Township. When I was little about eight or nine years old and near paralyzed with terror over the Jersey devil. I asked my grandmother if it was real or just make believe. And she thought for a long moment, dragging on her cigarette and then finally answered. She said that it would be best to just ask the Blessed Mother for protection. That way I'd be covered. No matter what happened. As long as I asked with a pure heart and didn't wait until the Jersey devil had me in its clutches.

Now you can see why I turned out the way I did. Next time on true weird stuff. One in 10 Americans don't really believe that we ever landed on the moon. That July 1969 one small step for man one giant leap for mankind. They call it a fairy tale. When it comes to the moon, the human imagination has always run wild. And there was nothing wilder than the very first moon hoax more than 100 years before Apollo 11 was even a twinkle in Neil Armstrong's eye. Unicorns and giant moon beavers on the next true weird stuff. Special thanks to all of our voice talents in this episode. And there are many Stacey and David Robertson, our own Caramia, Don Morgan, Sam Moore, Lamar Richardson, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Robert Palmer and Brittany Lynch. If I missed anybody, I apologize.

Can I just say making making their great debut in the true weird stuff podcast is my baby care Mia playing Elizabeth Knight. Yes, that's his friends have all been on the on the podcast and care me is like, Well, I guess I'll just wait. In fact, she was the first she was the first voice we recorded for this for this one. So, you know, Sherry, I really knew nothing about the New Jersey devil. I knew nothing about any of this. I just and and I had no idea that that's where the hockey team got their name. I had no idea about that. Or the connection to the football team that my father played for the the Atco imps, which after we recorded the last episode, Sherry, and I went down a wormhole with because Atco is is in the Pine Barrens. Although my father was grew up in Haddon Field and Camden. Anyhow, we went we fell down such a hole we found. So it turns out that the Max's dad played high school football and his high school football coach became the coach of the Atco amps a semi pro football team. And so Max's dad played semi for pro football before going off to fight the Nazis in World War Two. And we were able to find some stuff about the Atco. But not as much as we would have liked to. And the only thing we can come up with is, after coming back from defeating the Nazis, those former football players just probably thought football was a silly game, and they just got on with their lives, and never talked about it again. That was our best guess. Right, right.

Well, and when we were doing a little research, we were trying to figure out what year that he played. And you know, I mean, we figured out that probably they would have stopped playing after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. So that was in, I want to say 41, December of 41. So, you know, after that, yeah, we weren't playing any, any football, because all those men were off fighting the war.

It was so trippy to kind of crash into this part of Max's personal family history. And I was I have to say I was blown away that you didn't know about the Jersey Devil. I don't know there's very many cryptids that are so specific to geography that they're not known outside of it. Like, everybody's heard of Mothman, right? Bigfoot, Bigfoot is everywhere. The North American primate, I mean, Bigfoot is everywhere.

And the Mothman kind of resembles this creature. There's a there's a similarity in description, I would say. But the Mothman has had a lot of action up around Chicago. In the last few years, there's been a lot of sightings of the Mothman. We've got to we've had people email us and go do the Mothman do the Mothman and we will well, I promise we'll get to the Mothman. I just have always been fascinated by the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Because so I was born in Philadelphia, my parents moved to New Jersey when I was a toddler, and then we moved to Wyoming when I started school. So I did live in New Jersey for a of years as a little, little kid. And the Jersey Devil was how we were kept in line. Like we would go outside to play. And you know, the rules are this, this and this, you don't want the Jersey Devil to get you. And we believed like everybody acted like the Jersey Devil was as real as anything, right as real as you or me. And then I you know, I moved west and then came back when my parents split up and went to high school and college back east. And I had a friend in college, whose dad would go to fishing and hunting in the Pine Barrens like every chance he could, and his relatives, his family came from there. And the the ugliness and the discrimination and the hateful rhetoric around the pineys even today. I mean, look at that politician who was forced out of office just a few months ago.

Really? I mean, that that was shocking to me. Now, if you say it's somebody that's, you know, from Woodrow Wilson's time, you say, Okay, fine, they were just ignorant. But for people to still be saying things like that, it's astonishing. It is, you know, okay, so without, like, nobody needs to get their feelings hurt, unless you're a racist asshole, in which case, you probably should get your feelings hurt. And I hope that you do get your feelings hurt, because that might drive you to do some changing. You know, we're seeing, we have a lot, we're a very ableist society, we are, we live in a very ableist society. Is that fair to say? I would say I don't want to be too I don't want to be too woke for anyone. We live in an ableist society, where we're very, very quick to discriminate and mock and judge people who are differently abled. One of the most distressing things of my adult life is seeing the word retarded reemerge as a slur. When people on social media use that word as a slur, like my whole body seizes up, because it is so completely offensive, right. But if you look at what was just everyday matter of fact, language back then, then the Vineland Institute for the feeble minded, the New Jersey home for feeble minded boys, these people are defective. But the language, the ableist language and the language of eugenics, that is used to describe a population of people who have honestly God done nothing to you or anybody, except mind their business. But the problem is, is that they lived and you really saw this with Governor Fielder, who took over from Woodrow Wilson, in case anyone also didn't know that like New Jersey sent somebody to the White House, they did. Governor Fielder was not elected to the office of the governor. So he needed to find a cause to rally voters around. And as we are seeing today ripped from the headlines, one of the easiest ways to get people riled up is by casting a group as outside the mainstream, right, the sort of discriminatory bigotry and racism. And so Fielder was like, boom, this is my this is my thing. I'll go after the defective imbeciles of the Pinelands. And I'll rally the good people of New Jersey to my cause. And if you listen to what Governor Fielder and his wife Mabel had to say, part of what they were saying is, is that New Jersey is moving forward in terms of progress. And these people are not part of that. Because many of the people who lived in the Pine Barrens at that time, and today, weren't interested in moving into a house in the suburbs, and working from sunup till sundown, just to have money to buy things so that they could keep up with the neighbors. They didn't, they didn't want that life, they rejected it. That's what I mean when I say they lived out of time, they just, they didn't see the appeal when they could live in the forest that was teeming with game. And so like, you could survive in the Pine Barrens. And you could live by the rhythms of the land as their families had done for generations. These are the people that Fielder targeted for for sterilization and institutionalization. And I triple dog dare you to defend that.

Yeah, you really you can't, I think it's interesting. They're just they're acting like they're defectives. And rather than trying to institute something that would give them some genuine help towards certain things. You know, it's like, let's, they're an embarrassment. They're an embarrassment on the state of New Jersey.

Yeah, that is, that is exactly the energy that was brought to it. And, and, you know, it's so gross. And again, we see this, this is a recurring theme in human history. When we need to galvanize the crowd, we need a target that everyone can agree is unworthy. And so the pioneers became that for Fielder. And when you think about how cynical and how calculated that is, it makes your stomach turn. And to think that 111 years after that first speech in 1913, those people are still being described that way, and judged that way. Wow.

Is there no sense of, I know, it's politics, but is there no sense of morality towards towards people? There's no sense of, you know, we don't evolve. It's frustrating, because I keep on thinking that we are going to and then I keep on hearing things. And it just makes you realize that it doesn't seem like some people want to evolve. It's a very, it's a very short path to all right, let's just judge other people in order to feel better about ourselves. Or to move our agenda along or whatever, whatever it is, it's, it's upsetting. It really is.

Well, let's look at what happened and is happening in Springfield, Ohio. So a neo Nazi group, ginned up a rumor that Haitian people living in Springfield, Ohio, these are immigrants who were here legally, who were invited to the state of Ohio and the town of Springfield, because there were so many jobs that needed to be filled and no one to fill them.

These people were invited, they came this new they have filled the churches, they have taken the manufacturing jobs that were sitting empty, their kids go to school, they pay taxes, they are by all accounts, hardworking, upstanding, decent citizens with a devout faith in God. So a neo Nazi group gins up the rumor that these people are stealing cats and dogs, and ducks and and killing them and eating them. And a woman sees that rumor, and post it to her Facebook where it goes viral.

Now she has since apologized. And oh, I regret my actions. Oh, I didn't mean for any of this to happen. Well, girl, we seldom mean for the things to happen that happen when we put ourselves in the crosshairs of history like this. But I digress. Long story short, the one of the senators of Ohio, who's also in the running to be the future Vice President of the United States amplifies this neo Nazi rumor that has gone viral on Facebook. Now the schools are closed because of bomb threats.

They had to evacuate patients out of a hospital and close the hospital because of threats of violence. This is the 20, the September 2024, even more horrifically terrible version of what James Fielder did to the people of the Pine Barrens 110 years ago. It's the same. It's the same script. It's the same dynamic. We just play it out differently for every generation, based on the kind of technology we have based on all sorts of factors like population numbers and economy. We just keep playing the same script out. And that's what happened to the people of the Pine Barrens. What happened to them isn't a relic of the past. And it didn't happen a long time ago. It's still happening right now. And how, how any of us can live with that. Like these are people whose whose ancestors fought for American independence in the Revolutionary War. That's who these people are. These are people whose ancestors were enslaved, and who made it to the Pine Barrens via the Underground Railroad. That's who these people are. These are people who came to this country with nothing but a work ethic and a That's who these people are. That's who James Fielder tried to round up and forcibly sterilize. Their children are who James Fielder placed in institutions. And it's still happening today. Not the institution part, not the sterilization part. But the ugly, discriminatory, bigotry and ableism targeted at a group of people that honest to God, if it hit the fan right now, they're going to survive. And Max, you and I are going to be in the fetal position, because we can't bring ourselves to eat dog food. Well, right.

You know, the thing about this governor is, so this this was about 20 years before the Nazi atrocities. And this is this is akin to that the idea that we're going to sterilize these people. I mean, and all of this is happening in this country. And thank God it, you know, he, he was stopped by the New Jersey Supreme Court that said, Hey, you can't do that. Because once you start to do that, then then how do you how do you put parameters on things? How do you decide who should and who shouldn't, you know, how do you how do you unwind the right?

How do you do that? And so, you know, and, and by the way, atrocities don't, atrocities are not something that, you know, you add water to and there they are atrocities evolve and develop, like the Rwandan genocide, which happened in the 90s. It's current history, right? This is the orders and the tootsies and the hooties and the tootsies. So in the Rwandan genocide, Rwanda and Africa, the orders to kill your neighbors were broadcast on commercial radio. It will be like tuning into our radio show to hear which hit squads were going out today. Did you know that by the way, Max, I didn't know that they were doing it on radio. I do remember listening on radio and reading about the the conflict there that it started with the description of people as cockroaches and vermin and subhuman and, you know, all of the language that we see that gets used to other people when it when it's time to commit these atrocities, because you're not neighbor is not going to kill neighbor, unless they've been radicalized to believe that the neighbor that they're targeting isn't human the way they're human. That's how the Holocaust happened.

That's how all genocides happened. And that's what James Fielder was trying to accomplish with the people of the Pine Barrens. And if you want to read about the Rwandan genocide, if you want to read a book about the Rwandan genocide, that reads like a thriller, but it's nonfiction and every word is true. The author is Philip Gorovitch. And the title is very memorable. The title is, we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. It's an incredible book about something horrific that happened while we were all listening to the Spice Girls. Okay, like that's how not that long ago that was. And so this is what Fielder had teed up for the people of the Pine Barrens. And we have to be forever thankful. I know the people of New Jersey are forever thankful that the state Supreme Court was like, get out of here. No, absolutely not. Because I will tell you this about New Jersey.

If they love you, they love you. And if they don't love you, you don't have a chance. People, the people of New Jersey, zero tolerance for bullshit at all times, they will not have it. So the very same people who were like, like the great, great grandparents of the people who went up against the mayor of Tabernacle, their great great grandparents were like, what they're inbred, dangerous, defective imbeciles living in incestuous ways with cows and the Pine Barrens. Oh my goodness. Oh my gracious, right? Because there's very little mass media and no internet back then. But their great, great grandchildren were like, not on our watch, asshole. It's not happening again. And they drove that woman out of office and good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if you go, so the Pine Barrens are huge in New Jersey is small. And you don't have to drive very far once you're in New Jersey to get to the Pine Barrens. Because like my husband didn't know about them either. And he's asked me all these millions questions. You like they're less than 30 miles from Philadelphia. They're not far from Atlantic City. Because the state is small. If you go to college at like Rutgers or Seton Hall or Princeton or Montclair, there's the Pine Barrens. It's an enormous chunk. It's a fifth of the state. Yeah. And inside that wilderness are still people descended from those first modern settlers, you know, of the Revolutionary War era and about 100 years before. And when you look at people that can survive off the land, you know, like, how do you feel anything but awe and respect for that?

Well, it's just, first of all, I had no idea. I don't have to love the woman that was making fun of the names of the towns. Hogs Crotch, Sows Crotch and Hog Wallow. Yeah. You know, I can't remember there was a story that was done. I want to say it was on 60 Minutes. And this was like in the 60s or 70s. I didn't see it, but I've seen clips of it. But they went up in the Appalachian Mountains. And they were going through there and people were all of a sudden getting real excited. And there were people that lived up there who were just simple folk and were living up there. And in fact, I saw a comedian who was making fun, you know, there's a university, a well respected university called Appalachian State. And he said, an Appalachian College. And he was like making fun of it in front of a crowd of people that probably had a pretty good number of graduates from that university sitting in the I can just tell you. But this is the thing what happens is people are always like trying to position themselves to feel better about themselves by putting other people down and not really truly understanding what the situation is.

The people of the Pine Barrens and the people of Appalachia and the people that were profiled, and it's fictional, but the temptation for people who have who live in the city, you know, and who are part of the industrial capitalist machine. There's such a, an impulse to feel superior to country people or hill people, mountain people, or the people who live down in the holler. That's that same dynamic played out with the people of the Pine Barrens. What makes the Pine Barrens so fascinating is that it is such a crucible of American history in terms of how we became a nation. And if you have not listened to the episode we did before this one called Legends of the Pines, there's a lot of that, those stories woven into there. I mean, how many places in the United States can you go where you're walking on soil that is actually like where this birthed? It's fascinating. I've walked on some of that in New Jersey. It is very sandy. I will say that. Sugar sand, yeah, a lot of sandy soil. Hey, for all of you Gen Xers that have grown up expecting that you may encounter quicksand and you need to be prepared, there's quicksand in the Pine Barrens if you want to go test that out. Well, I meant to ask you about that because you mentioned quicksand in the last episode that we did, and I thought the quicksand was something that you only saw in movies in some sort of comical way. I thought that it just didn't exist, but as it turns out, it does exist.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And there are ways, like, if you're going to go hiking or camping in a place like the Pine Barrens and you don't have the first clue, you should maybe rethink that because you really need to have some woodcraft about you to do that, to navigate. You've got to understand the terrain a little bit. It's not like there's quicksand every 10 feet in the Pine Barrens, but the soil conditions are such that the necessary conditions for quicksand to happen, I think is the right way to say it, exist in the Pine Barrens. Plus, a confusing labyrinth of trees that you're going to really get lost in. And then, of course, the cranberry bogs, blueberries are a huge crop that come out of the Pine Barrens. It's just an incredible place. And the reason that it hasn't been developed, there aren't condos in there, is because in 1978, the federal government protected it. The feds recognized that it was this unique environment, this jewel of an environment that deserved to be set aside so that it couldn't become, you know, a Best Buy and a Chipotle and a bunch of generic apartments and townhouses. So it was recognized as such a special place with so much history. And if you love ghost towns and ruins and the inexplicable, you're going to love the Pine Barrens. You're going to love them. And for all the stories that I was told growing up, and it continued right through college, because even people that have grown up on the outskirts of the Pine Barrens will still tell you that, oh, you don't want to drive into there. The Pineys will get you. The Pineys, they don't have any morals. The Pineys, they don't observe any laws. The Pineys, they don't have any morals. You'll still hear those stories right now. And so there are people who perpetuate those stereotypes, not realizing, but not realizing where it came from, that it came from a guy who wanted to be elected to the governor's office. And he was willing to do whatever he had to in order to make that happen. I want you to just sit with that for a second and think about that. That an entire category of people have been terrorized, because this clown knew that if he didn't win re-election, he'd only keep Woodrow Wilson's chair warm for a little while, and he wanted to be the governor. It's so gross. It's so cynical.

The New Jersey Supreme Court is all I can say. Can you imagine? And you know what? It could have. That's the thing. Like, this is why we have to be, we have to be engaged as citizens, and we have to pay attention, and we have to hold our institutions to the fire when it comes to ethics and integrity. Because had the New Jersey State Supreme Court ruled differently in 1914, the stain and the shame of the atrocities that would have happened in New Jersey to the people of the Pines, it would be something we would never, ever crawl out from under. Can you imagine?

Now, I mean, I mean, horrifying. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's not like we don't have a history of genocide in this country anyhow. Anyway, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, we're living in such an interesting time. And I get there's a standard email that goes around to people who work in the entertainment business. And I get it about four or five times a year. Dance monkey. If I wanted to hear your opinions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Your job is to dance and entertain me. Well, Karen, I ain't your monkey. And it's not my job to dance for you. And this ain't the Bob and Sherry show. And I'm not going to pull my punches. We are watching history repeat in such frightening and soul crushing ways right now. And if we only understood how close we've come, how many times we've come so close to tipping over the line into being monsters so close. Yeah. And the motivation for it is almost always political or financial, political or financial. And I'll tell you who's a real piece of is the Reverend Bostwick, who I was like, Oh, my God, I cannot wait for Don Morgan to do this part. Poor Don. Listen, look at him. This is a man of God, hollering at his congregation about what defective garbage their neighbors are. Tell me that isn't a scenario that's not playing out right now. In churches all over the country, because it is. And we know it is pretty sure that I don't know. I know a little bit about Jesus having studied some of that. He wasn't a hateful guy.

In fact, he told stories about people who overcome hate that the Good Samaritan stories like that. That's the thing, Max, like sometimes I'll get a crazy rant from somebody and I'm like, you know what, Max went to seminary school to be a priest. And I went to religious school and was taught by Jesuit most, believe it or not, was Jesus, who Jesus was, and who Jesus wasn't. What Jesus said, what Jesus did, what Jesus believed. And when you look at all of what Jesus said, didn't believe you add it all up, what does it equate to Max?

Love? Yeah. Love. Love your neighbor. Love your neighbor. I mean, there's stuff in the Bible about like, if someone from another land, you must treat them as though they were from your land. Like, it's literally in Scripture. It just, it just slays me. And to see someone like the Reverend Bostwick at the pulpit, using his sermon, using his office as a clergyman to drive home this political agenda for Governor James Fielder. Like, excuse me while I try to wipe the gross off.

It's so gross, isn't it? It is. Now, let's talk about the Jersey Devil. Do you believe or not? Well, it isn't that I don't. It's just, I mean, here's the thing. If the Jersey Devil is kind of like the Mothman, I'd say, yeah, because there's been sightings of that for sure. And the Jersey Devil, you know, it's kind of like with Bigfoot. It's where does this come from? And where does it live? And all of those questions that people have. I think that if people have spotted it, I think if people have sighted things, you have to think that they're not making it up. I mean, the one thing that you and I have really been able to drive home is when people talk about seeing crazy stuff, they generally, they're not trying to make money off of it. I don't know anybody that I've made a million dollars off seeing Bigfoot.

No, no, I mean, there's no fame or fortune to be had. And when you look at the video, or you listen to the audio that these people have captured, which by the way, flies in the face of well, we have cell phones. These people did whip out their cell phones, right? They tried as best they can. And it's, you know, you can like if you are inclined to believe you're going to be like, yeah. And if you're inclined to debunk, you're going to be like, whatever. But it's interesting. It's interesting to look at. And how about the legends from the first Native Americans who lived in the Pine Barrens, who described something very similar? What did you think about that?

Got to be something to it if it's coming from lots of different places. Now lots of different places. Is it going from dimension to dimension? Or is it actually living here? Don't know. So I was having this conversation with someone and they were like, yeah, but I mean, how is it having? How is it reproducing? How is it having babies? How could it be around all this time? Well, now you're ascribing a human lifespan to another creature. Look how long a tortoise can live. Look how a great white shark can live. Maybe it isn't reproducing and having babies. Maybe it's just a creature with an incredible long lifespan. What do you think?

You know, that's a possibility as well. I mean, I just think if I've learned nothing else from doing true weird stuff for almost two years, and isn't that hard to believe? That is, there is a lot of stuff on this planet that is unknown and unexplored. And I think that we have to be open minded to certain things that we just simply can't explain yet.

One of the cool things about doing this show is because we spend so much time in the past, but in the pretty recent past, pretty recent past, you realize our lives feel so technologically futuristic and advanced. But we just got here a minute ago. Literally a minute ago. It wasn't all that long ago that people were drinking turpentine thinking it was medicine. Of course, I guess with COVID, we're back to that. But everything old is new again. But all the advances that we right now are pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty recent.

Go ahead. And these stories, these reports of the Jersey Devil are very recent, in some cases, like within the last six months or so. And then of course, you can look in the record and find reports of sightings of the Jersey Devil that go back 200 years. Reported in the newspapers like it was a legitimate story, not here's someone's kooky Uncle Nathan. No, they reported it like it was legitimate news, because to them it was.

I'm still fascinated that the football team my father played for was called the Imps. And of course, an imp is a small devil. And that it has some connection to this. I think that's fascinating. I mean, really, an unexpected thing. Now, I'm sorry that I can't ask my father a bunch of questions. After we did a little deep dive into that.

Well, we're trying to find out more about Max's dad. So there are a lot of relatives, probably kind of distant relatives of Max's family that were in New Jersey at that same time in the Haddonfield, Atco, Greater Philadelphia area. Right. And we looked at each and every one of them. And I was so excited for Max, because his family, they're like ministers and, and society people. He has a, is it your great, great uncle, that was the captain of a civil defense unit in Camden, New Jersey during World War Two.

My great uncle. Keep in mind, yeah, it was on the eastern seaboard. And because of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, it was considered a target for enemy attack. And so there's Max's uncle, we found him in the newspaper as the head of civil defense for that part of his community. Yeah, he's my grandfather, my grandfather's brother.

If you can find a lynch in the public record, it's usually a crime. So I was so proud of you. I was so proud. Well, one of them, I think it was him, one of them worked as a night watchman, anyhow, down in Philadelphia during that time. So it's just fascinating, like Max's great, great uncle. Part of his responsibility to his community was making sure that people had their blackout curtains down. He would, if there was going to be an enemy attack, you know, and it would have come, you know, maybe by air, maybe from a German U-boat a submarine, it was his responsibility to get people to safety. That's, that's a pretty cool thing to have just talking about the Jersey devil, isn't it?

It is just with the internet. I mean, we're not even going into archives of any kind, you know, we're just, we're just kind of noodling around on the internet, which has limited information. Yeah, especially so for something like the Echo Imps, because there's another semi pro football team that your dad played against the Boonton. What were they? It was Boonton.

But anyway, somebody who played on that team was very sentimental about it, and collected all kinds of memorabilia and tracked down former players, and like put together a whole thing. And so you can find that you can find the all sorts of information about that team. But nobody that played on your dad's team that we've been able to find so far did that. If it exists, it's in somebody's like rec room or it hasn't been digitized and put online yet. So Max has made some inquiries to see, is there somebody out there in New Jersey, who maybe had a relative or dad or a granddad or whatever that played for this team? Because how amazing would it be to find your dad? Oh, that would just be the coolest thing. It would. And of course, as you had said, the the guy who coached him in high school football is the one who coached this team as And I found his great great nephew has a Facebook page somewhere. So I did find, you know, you can you start to look in obituaries, and you can say who is survived by and then you can look those names up and kind of, you know, find some things.

So I'm so impressed. I'm dazzled by people that are like amateur genealogists, who they go, all right, what was your grandmother's name? Got it. And then three weeks later, they have your entire family tree, including the ship that your ancestors traveled from Ireland on or whatever. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. There's a woman who listens to the radio show that we work on. And she, she found out all kinds of stuff going back to Sir Francis Drake is one of my relatives. I mean, how cool? Yeah, right. Right. chuckles the drunken clown is one of my relatives. So I just want you to know that you're an illustrious ancestor. So I didn't set out to like, you know, be a cheerleader for the state of New Jersey. I just wanted to write about the Pine Barrens. Because out of a personal fascination, but the more people that we talked to before we released these episodes, and the more I heard from people that just had no idea, the more I was like, Yeah, but this is like really cool, beautiful place. And these are great stories. And this is the birthplace of American independence. And it's called the Garden State for a reason. It really is beautiful. You know, it's fascinating. We never know what the response to episodes is going to be. I'm surprised at the response of the last episode, and probably this one as well. But the amount of response we got from that, I mean, I just was blown away. I was happy about it. Because like, that means that a handful of people more know now about this beautiful place and these amazing stories that are so connected. Like the Pine Barrens is not a microcosm for America.

But the Pine Barrens was a microcosm for the birth of America. Does that make sense? Because what we had there were regular people, farmers and blacksmiths and settlers, you know, immigrants, just regular people who believed so passionately, either in independence or in the monarchy, that they were willing to risk everything to defend and protect that. And so when you look at the history of the early days of this country, in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, you really can see who it was that gave us the American experiment.

Yeah, the founding fathers were, you know, bewigged, wealthy landowners and slave owners, many of them and men of the world, right? They had farms and plantations and, you know, they had all of that. Those are the founding fathers. But the people who rolled up their sleeves and got dirty and bloody and risked everything, they were just regular people. They were regular people who left their farms and their families behind to fight for independence. And those are the people that I think about when someone tells me, oh, I don't vote. What's the point? Well, I guess the point is, is that not that long ago, um, someone in your family line, potentially risk everything, thinking that their descendants would be free and not bound to the tyranny of a king or queen, but free and free to vote.

That's why you should vote. Maybe just a thought, because the people that made it possible for you to vote were just like you. And they and they gave everything. They risked everything. Just so you could say, I don't vote. Like, what's the point? It's depressing. I see people that are from in my area that are from all kinds of different countries, Middle Eastern countries, from South America, Mexico, a bunch of different people that are immigrants that live in this area. And I feel a kinship with because I had ancestors who did what they're doing. They only did it a couple generations before. They did exactly the same thing. They left somewhere else for the chance for something better. And I just, I'm like, I feel I don't feel different than them. I feel like them. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Well, I mean, my, my people are relatively new rivals in the United States. My grandmother was from Austria. Yeah, my, my great grandparents did not speak English. They only spoke Italian. So like, that seems very recent to me. I mean, I remember I have living memory of my great grandparents talking to me in a language I didn't understand.

Like, you know, this is like the great American experiment. And I saw something I'm not going to have the exact number right because I didn't think we were going to talk about this today. But it takes for you to be sitting here right now, listening to this, and either nodding your head or looking for a way to send me an email about how I'm woke and I should dance like a monkey and you hate me now, whatever. Okay. While you're sitting here listening to this, you should know that it took over 4000 people who had to live and die and reproduce to get you to this moment. There are 4000 plus people standing behind you in the past in time, who struggled and fought and suffered and sacrificed for you to be sitting here right now.

That's strong stuff, isn't it? It really is. I mean, that's, that's amazing. I had never heard that before or thought about that before quite that way. So, if you could try to not be a disappointment to more than 4000 human beings who busted their ass to get you here, if you could just be nice and not be a big dick and vote because it's a privilege, you know, and maybe slow down if you see somebody in a crosswalk and help an old lady lift her grocery bag, like if you could do those things, you would redeem the struggle of your ancestors, or you could be, as we say in the Garden State, a total fucking jerk off. The choice is yours, because this is America.

And even New Jersey is America. New Jersey, listen, New Jersey is America, capital A. And if you ever, oh my god, let me tell you what, you go to a Memorial Day parade in New Jersey, you even think about cutting a look and somebody's grandma will climb off her scooter and cut you. New Jersey is a patriotic and proudly American place.

Don't you ever doubt it. I love New Jersey. Let me just say, we went to the South Jersey Shore every summer when I was a kid. I love New Jersey. Beautiful place. Karamia, my baby who played Elizabeth Kite in this episode, a couple of the schools she wants to go to for my brother who lives in Woodbury where the Pine Barrens outlaw Joe Mulliner was imprisoned before being convicted and hanged.

My brother is like, I think he's lighting candles and practicing voodoo to get Karamia into Jersey so that she'll be close to them, because he is so excited to have her nearby. And I'd be so proud. I would be so proud of my child if she went to grad school in New Jersey because there's some great schools. Here's a fun thing that Max and I learned. We're going to do an episode about football, but real quick, here's something we learned when we fell into the rabbit hole about Max's dad. The very first football game, the way we understand it, was played in New Jersey.

Because American football is a relatively new invention, right? So they cobbled together a game that was kind of had some aspects of rugby about it and some aspects of other games. And the very first game of what we call American football was played in the state of New Jersey. How cool is that? So you disrespect New Jersey at your peril.

You disrespect it at your peril. Because there is not one person in New Jersey from a six-month-old baby to a 100-year-old citizen who will not come for your throat. That is their birthright. They have earned that. Their blood is in that sandy soil. They are the reason we have a country. And if somebody from New Jersey wants to kick your ass, I advise you to slow down and turn around and make it easy for them, and it'll be over for you quicker.

Well, that's a way to end an episode, I'll tell you that. Yep, yep, yep, yep. All right, so next time on True Weird Stuff, we're going to talk about the moon hoax. Not really the Apollo 11 moon hoax, although we'll touch on that because we have to. It's not a hoax. But we did go to the moon, y'all. No, listen, don't make that face. We did go to the moon. We love a conspiracy, but not that one. We did go to the moon. Now, the conspiracies, we'll talk to you about the moon. It's an alien base. There are ruins. We'll talk about those all day long.

But bitch, we went to the moon. Any hoosers, listen. Apollo 11 was not the first moon hoax. The first moon hoax happened in 1835. And it involves unicorns, zebras the size of dogs, and giant moon beavers. And I can't wait for next week. In the next episode of True Weird Stuff. Thank you for listening. You know you're why we make it even though we yell at you and tell you not to be a dick. We don't want you to be a dick because we love you. You know who doesn't care if you're a dick people that don't care about you. But people who love you like we do are like don't be a dick. That's love. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, click the play button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website TrueWeirdStuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2024 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.