Speaker 1: I want you to just for a second, close your eyes,
picture yourself standing on a ridge. It's the middle of
summer in the levant, so the heat is already just
it's oppressive, shimmering off all the limestone. But when you
look down into the valley below you, the heat gets
more intense.
Speaker 2: It's not just the sun you're feeling.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. There are fires burning down there, yeah,
a lot of them, and the air is thick with smoke.
But it doesn't smell like a campfire, you know, it
doesn't smell like a hearth. It smells acrid, greasy. And
through all that haze you can hear the rhythmic beating
of drums, loud drums, so loud, frantic almost, and you
realize they're designed to drown something else out, something screaming.
Speaker 2: That is a scene that feels like it should be
from I don't know, Dante's Inferno or something. But you're
talking about a very real place, a real coordinate on
a map.
Speaker 1: I am, This isn't some fantasy novel. This is a
real place located just outside the walls of what was
supposed to be the holiest city on the entire planet,
and in the ancient world. This wasn't a tourist it
wasn't a park. It was the absolute epicenter of what
the prophets called unholy worship.
Speaker 2: And it's such a jarring juxtaposition, isn't it. You have
a holy city on the hill and then right there
this pit of fire in the valley exactly.
Speaker 1: This is the valley of Hinmham, right on the border
of Jerusalem. And for centuries, the things that were done
in this physical valley were so horrible, so scarred into
the collective memory of the people, that the name of
this location became the actual Hebrew word for hell.
Speaker 2: It's really the ultimate example of how geography can become theology.
A real place becomes an idea.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. I'm your host, and today we
are not just recounting history. We are pulling on the darkest,
most tangled loose threads of folklore, religion, and the supernatural
to see what unravels when you give them a really
hard yank.
Speaker 2: And I'm here to help sort through that tangle. It's
great to be here. This is a big one.
Speaker 1: Today's mission is frank, it's a little terrifying. We're looking
at the concept of the devil. But before anyone listening
rolls their eyes and thinks we're about to do a
Sunday school lesson, let me just clarify what we're doing here.
We're looking at the manifestations of this idea. We're tracking
the devil through you know, physical geography, through mass sociological panics,
and through the very specific rituals of exorcism that are
still happening today.
Speaker 2: Right wow. And we're using some really extensive investigations from
the History Channel regarding the unexplained as our sort of
roadmap for today. We're going to be bouncing from, like
you said, the Iron Age levant all the way to
the Vatican and then to the pine barrens of New Jersey,
of all places.
Speaker 1: It's a global tour of high strangeness. I'm so excited
for this one. But we really have to start back
in that valley, the Valley of Hinhem, because I think
most people, myself included, kind of assume that Hell was
always this abstract spiritual concept, you know, like a cloud
of fire in another dimension. But you're saying it started
as a literal piece of real estate.
Speaker 2: And to really get the concept of hell, you have
to understand the topography of ancient Jerusalem. You have the
Temple mount that's the dwelling place of Yahweh, the god
of order, the god of life. That's inside the city walls.
Speaker 1: Okay, inside is safe, right.
Speaker 2: But just outside, to the south and west, this deep
ravine cuts through the landscape the valley of Hinham. In
that ancient mindset, walls were everything. They were the demarcation
between cosmos and chaos. Inside is order, safety, outside is
the wild.
Speaker 1: And the Book of Sharemaia, which we looked at in
the source material, it just paints this horrific picture of
what was actually happening in that wild space.
Speaker 2: It does, it's incredibly graphic. We're looking specifically at the
reign of kings like Manassa and Amah, and this is
before the big reforms of King Josiah. And the text
describes the Israelites, and this is the key part, not
foreign invaders, but the people of Jerusalem themselves building these
high places they call them tofit in the valley.
Speaker 1: And what did they do there?
Speaker 2: They burn their sons and daughters in the fire.
Speaker 1: The cult of Moloch, that's what we're talking about.
Speaker 2: Here, Molach or Bahal, the names kind of shift depending
on the text in the era, but the ritual unfortunately
remains pretty much the same. The source material describes it
as a big pit of fire, and the ritual involve
passing the child, specifically the firstborn male through that fire
as a sacrifice.
Speaker 1: I just I have to stop here because we see
this in movies, right, and it's always portrayed as these
villains in dark robes, cackling and being evil just for
the sake of being evil. But human beings, I mean,
generally speaking, we love our children. We're hardwired by evolution
to protect our offspring, of course, So how does this
society get to a place where where throwing your baby
into a fire is considered a good or even a
necessary idea? What is the logic there? I can't wrap
my head around it.
Speaker 2: You really hit the nail on the head with that
word necessary. To understand this, we have to strip away
all of our modern comforts. We live in a world
with supermarkets, irrigation, global supply chains, antibiotics. If it doesn't
rain here, we get wheat from somewhere else.
Speaker 1: We're insulated from that kind of raw survival totally.
Speaker 2: In the ancient Near East, you were living on a
knife sedge every single day. If the rains didn't come,
or if a swarm of locusts did, your entire village,
your entire society died, not just you, everyone, your legacy,
your family, your history gone.
Speaker 1: So the mindset wasn't let's be evil today.
Speaker 2: Not at all. The mindset was transactional. It was agricultural
anxiety ramped up to the absolute maximum level of terror.
They weren't being cruel, they thought they were being practical.
Speaker 1: So it's like a grim economic calculation.
Speaker 2: In the grimmest sense imaginable. Yes, they believed these deities,
these spirits and gods, controlled the rain and the harvest,
and the greater you're ask the greater the payment that
was required. You could offer a goat or a dove
for a small favor, you know, for a safe journey
or something right, but for the survival of the entire community,
for the rain that will save everyone from starvation. The
gods demanded the most precious thing you possess.
Speaker 1: The future of your bloodline, the.
Speaker 2: Future of your bloodline, your firstborn son.
Speaker 1: That is just it's chilling. It's fear masquerading as piety.
Speaker 2: And that's exactly why the biblical reaction, specifically from the
monotheistic prophets like Jeremiah, is so visceral, It's so full
of rage. In Jeremiah, God says something really fascinating. He says,
and I'm paraphrasing, I never asked you to do this,
and never even entered my mind. It's this total horrified
rejection of that transactional relationship with the divine.
Speaker 1: But the memory of those fires it stuck.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's stuck hard. Even after King Josiah came in
and destroyed the tofit and defiled all the shrines to
try and stop the sacrifices, the valley remained a place
of death. It became essentially the city's garbage.
Speaker 1: Dump, so still a place you'd want to avoid.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Tradition says, the bodies of executed criminals, dead animals,
all the city's refuse was just dumped there, and to
deal with the smell and the disease, fires were kept
burning constantly to consume all the filth.
Speaker 1: Okay, I see where this is going. So if you're
a parent in Jerusalem in say the year thirty a d.
And you want to warn your kid about what happens
if they live a bad life. You just point to the.
Speaker 2: Valley precisely, you point to the smoke constantly rising from
the trash heap, and you say, that is where you
will end up in Gahinam.
Speaker 1: And over time Gahinam.
Speaker 2: It gets hellenized, it gets Greekified into Gehenna. The physical
location becomes the metaphor for spiritual destruction. The lake of
Fire from the New Testament isn't some new radical invention.
It's a direct memory of the smoldering garbage dump in
the valley of Hinnam.
Speaker 1: Wow. That just grounds the theology in such a gritty,
tangible way. It's not just a ghost story. It's history
repurposing collective trauma. But okay, this brings us to the
entity itself. We have the place hell. Now we need
the Landlord, the devil.
Speaker 2: The figure with a thousand faces.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no kidding. The source material lists so many names, Beelzebub, Lucifer,
the Prince, Darkness, the evil One, and then you get
the folksy ones like old Nick. Why is the branding
sewing con? I mean, why do we need twenty names
for one bad guy?
Speaker 2: That's a great question, And it's because the devil isn't
just a character, He's a function, and that function is
seen as being ubiquitous. It's everywhere. If you believe there
is an active, malevolent force working against you, tripping you up,
tempting you, causing disease, you're going to encounter that force
in many different contexts.
Speaker 1: So he gets different names based on the different jobs
he's doing at that moment.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect way to put it. The Elzebub, for example,
is often translated as lord of the flies. It's a
name associated with decay, filth, disease. It's the devil with
the trash heap.
Speaker 1: We were just talking here, whereas Lucifer is totally different.
Speaker 2: Completely. Lucifer means light bearer or morning star. That name
refers to the fallen angel aspect, the story of the
most beautiful and powerful angel whose pride caused him to rebel.
That's the devil of tragedy and arrogance and satan itself.
And Hebrew just means the adversary or the accuser, like
a prosecutor in a heavenly court.
Speaker 1: It's interesting you mention the utility of fear. The source
makes a really strong point that this figure, this Satan
serves a very real social purpose.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely it does. If you are a medieval cleric
or even a modern pastor. The devil is an incredibly
useful concept. The fear of eternal damnation, of going to
that Gehenno we talked about, is a powerful, powerful motivator
for compliance, keeps people online, It keeps people in line
with the established social and moral order. It's the ultimate
stick to go along with the carat of heaven. If
you take away the consequence, the eternal consequence, you remove
a lot of the urgency from the morality for some people.
Speaker 1: Right, But it's not just a Christian narrative, is it.
I was really glad the source widened the lens here
because this isn't just a Western obsession, not at all.
Speaker 2: They brought up Buddhism and Islam, which I think is crucial.
In Buddhism, you have the figure of Mara, and Mara
is a fascinating parallel to the devil. He's often called
the Lord of the senses.
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 2: Well, when the Buddha is sitting under the body tree
trying to achieve enlightenment, Mara doesn't just attack him with
monsters and demons, though he does that too. His primary
attack is to assault the Buddha with desire, with doubt,
with lust, with sensory overload.
Speaker 1: So he's trying to keep you tethered to the physical
world to prevent spiritual transcendence.
Speaker 2: Exactly. He represents the attachments that keep you trapped in
the cycle of suffering. And then in Islam you have
the figure of Iblis. The story there is that when
God created Adam, he commanded all the angels to bow
down to this new.
Speaker 1: Creation, and the abolie refused.
Speaker 2: He refused, He said, I am made of smokeless fire,
and he is made of clay. Why should I bow
to him? It's that exact same sin of pride that
we see in the Miltonic Lucifer story. It's a refusal
to accept one's place in the cosmic order.
Speaker 1: It really seems like humanity just across the board has
this deep psychological need to identify a boss for all
the bad things. We can't just accept that chaos is random,
that things happen. We need a manager to blame.
Speaker 2: Or to look at it in another way, an antagonist
to define ourselves against. You can't be a hero without
a villain. The devil in all these forms provides the
resistance that is seen as necessary for spiritual growth. You
have to overcome temptation to prove your virtue.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the visuals, though, because if I asked
anyone listening right now to draw the devil, I bet
ninety nine percent of them would draw out the red tights,
the horns, the little goateee, the pitchfork. But that's a
pretty recent invention, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's very recent, relatively speeding. In the early biblical texts,
Satan doesn't have a physical description at all. He's a
spirit and adversary. The imagery we have now is a
complete hodgepodge of later folklore and really art history.
Speaker 1: Okay, so where did the horns and the goat legs
come from that seem so specific?
Speaker 2: Mostly from the Greek god Pan. When Christianity was spreading
through Europe. It had to contend with all the old
pagan guides. Pan was a nature god, He had goat legs, horns,
he was very earthy, very sexuld. To the early Church,
this kind of nature worship was the absolute opposite of
the spirit of heaven. So they demonized the imagery.
Speaker 1: So they just took the face of the old god
and pasted it onto their new devil.
Speaker 2: It's basically a hostile takeover of branding, and it's a
very effective marketing. If you want people to stop worshiping
the old gods, you tell them those gods are actually
demons in disguise.
Speaker 1: And the wings they're always bat wings, not angel wings.
Speaker 2: Ray they're leathery and dark, and that's not an accident.
Birds belong to the day, to the sky, bats belong
to the night, to caves. It's all symbolic language designed
to trigger a sense of revulsion and otherness. Everything about
the classic depiction is meant to be an inversion of
the Holy.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've established the history, the names, the art.
Now I want to get into the trenches because for
a lot of people around the world, this is not
abstract art history. It's a literal, physical battle that's being waged.
We need to talk about exorcism.
Speaker 2: And this is where a lot of modern skepticism hits
a hard wall against personal experience.
Speaker 1: The source material opened this thread with that viral video
of Pope Francis in Saint Peter Square. He lays his
hands on a man in a wheelchair, then convulses and
slumps down, and the Internet just exploded screaming the Pope
dead and exorcism live on camera.
Speaker 2: And the Vatican, of course gave a very diplomatic no comment. Essentially,
they said it was just a prayer for the sick.
But the experts in our source material, including theologians and priests,
they point out that Pope Francis is actually very traditional
when it comes to this idea of spiritual warfare.
Speaker 1: More so than other recent.
Speaker 2: Popes, much more so, he mentions the devil by name
far more often than his immediate predecessors Benedict and John Pauli.
He views Satan as a real, active personal entity, not
just a metaphor for bad behavior or societal ills.
Speaker 1: It feels so weirdly anachronistic, doesn't it. I mean, we
have iPhones and mars rovers and gene editing, but the
Catholic Church still have a dedicated core of priests whose
official job is to yell demons.
Speaker 2: It does feel medieval, but the practice isn't just surviving,
it's actually growing. The demand for exorcists is reportedly higher
now than it has been in decades. And what I
found really compelling in our research was the procedure.
Speaker 1: It is not like the movies, not just a priest
kicking down the door and splashing holy water everywhere. Not
at all.
Speaker 2: It's a highly bureaucratic, almost medical process. And this is
the part that usually surprises people. Before an official exorcist
will even agree to see you, you generally have to
be cleared by a medical doctor and a psychiatrist.
Speaker 1: Wait, really a psychiatrist. Yes.
Speaker 2: They call it the dual track approach. The church is
frankly terrified of the pr disaster of performing an exorcism
on someone who is actually suffering from schizophrenia or epilepsy
or dissociative identity disorder. They want to rule out every
possible natural explanation before they even consider the supernatural.
Speaker 1: So the psychiatrists and the priest are basically coworkers on
a case.
Speaker 2: In a sense. Yes, they are looking for the gap.
They're looking for the symptoms that medicine and psycholog you
can't explain.
Speaker 1: And what are those symptoms? What separates a tragic mental
health crisis from something else? In their view?
Speaker 2: The ritual Romanum that's the official Roman ritual for exorcism,
lists very specific signs. One is what they call hidden
knowledge or clairvoyance, meaning one meaning the person knows things
they couldn't possibly know, details about the priest's life, secret
sins of people in the room speaking in languages the
person has never studied or been.
Speaker 1: Exposed to, like ancient languages Aramaic or Latin exactly.
Speaker 2: Another sign is a profound, often violent, aversion to the sacred.
A person who is otherwise non religious might suddenly recoil
in agony at the sight of a crucifix or the
touch of holy water. But the one that is most
often cited and is frankly the most disturbing, is the
anomalous physical strength.
Speaker 1: The source mentioned that anecdote about a one hundred and
ten pound woman.
Speaker 2: Right, And this is a story you hear over and
over from exorcists, a small, frail woman who during an
episode was able to physically throw so three large strong
men across the room. Now we know about hysterical strength.
You hear stories of mothers lifting cars off their children.
Speaker 1: Adrenaline.
Speaker 2: It's a massive burst of adrenaline, but that's usually a
single brief action. This is described as sustained, directed force
that seems to defy the actual muscle mass of the individual.
Speaker 1: Okay, we have to address the floating elephant in the
room levitation.
Speaker 2: Test chuckles, the levitation. Yes, this is where the host
in the documentary was understandably very skeptical, and I don't
blame him. Gravity is a law and not a friendly suggestion.
Speaker 1: But the exorcist they interviewed, Father Vincent Thomas, I believe
he was pretty candid about it. He said he personally
hadn't seen a full on head spinning, floating to the
ceiling levitation, right, but that his colleagues have and he
mentioned them seeing it with what he called salt of
the earth witnesses, normal credible people.
Speaker 2: That's the exact phrase he used. And he said something like,
I believe in gravity, but I also believe dark forces
can violate the laws of nature. At right, there is
the fundamental clash of worldviews. If you believe in a
spiritual realm that is superior to and can influence the
physical realm, then the suspension of physical laws is at
least theoretically possible.
Speaker 1: But if you're a materialist, it's impossible. By definition. There's
no room for me.
Speaker 2: There's no real middle ground on that one. But you
know what struck me the most. It wasn't the supernatural
special effects. It was the psychology of who supposedly gets
possessed me too.
Speaker 1: I was assumed there must be people who are dabbling
in dark stuff, using Ouiji boards, joining cults, whatever. But
the expert in the source that it's often psychologically balanced people.
They mentioned lawyers, military personnel, teachers.
Speaker 2: That is the truly frightening part, isn't it. It suggests
that anyone is potentially vulnerable. But there is a crucial caveat.
They mentioned the entry point, the wound. Yes, the theory
that exorcists work with is that demons don't just jump
into random people who are walking down the street. They
attach themselves to trauma, to deep, unresolved spiritual wounds, unforgiveness,
profound anger, childhood abuse, a major betrayal.
Speaker 1: So these things create like a crack in your spiritual defenses.
Speaker 2: That's the idea. They create these spiritual wounds that fester,
and the demon or the negative entity feeds on that negativity.
It draws strength from the anger, the bitterness, the despair.
Speaker 1: So the exorcism is into a priest yelling the power
of Christ compels you. It's actually a form of therapy.
Speaker 2: It's deep spiritual therapy. The most effective exorcists say, you
can't just cast out the darkness. You have to heal
the wound that let the darkness in. You have to
lead the person to a place of forgiveness, of healing. Otherwise,
even if you get the demon out, the door is
still wide open for it or another one to come
right back in.
Speaker 1: That is That's a really profound point. Yeah, because whether
you believe in actual demons or not, the metaphor holds
up perfectly. You can't cure a self destructive behavior without
addressing the underlying trauma that causes it.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the ritual works in a psychological sense because it
forces the person to confront and heal the darkest spots
of their own history and their own soul.
Speaker 1: Wow, Okay, let's pivot. Now. This is a big shift.
We've looked at the devil in the valley, in our
theology and in the human body. Now I want to
look at the devil in the landscape of America itself.
We're moving a thread four geological mysteries, specifically a place
that actually bears his name, Devil's.
Speaker 2: Tower, Wyoming, a truly truly alien landscape If you've.
Speaker 1: Ever seen the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
you know this silhouette instantly. It's that massive, flat topped,
stump like mountain with the deep vertical grooves running down
its sides.
Speaker 2: It rises almost nine hundred feet straight up out of
the rolling sedimentary planes. It is a complete geological non sequitor.
It makes no sense being there. It looks like it
was either dropped from.
Speaker 1: The sky or pushed up from Hell.
Speaker 2: That's the implication of the name, isn't it Geologically It's
made of something called phonolite porphyry, which is a type
of volcanic rock. But there isn't a volcano anywhere nearby.
There's no other volcanic activity in the region. Geologists are
still debating exactly how it formed.
Speaker 1: It's a genuine mystery.
Speaker 2: It's a genuine mystery. Was it a magma plug from
an ancient, long eroded volcano. Was it a different kind
of geological intrusion. There's no final consensus. It's a miracle
of nature.
Speaker 1: And as we've seen, wherever science leaves a gap, folklore
rushes into poor the cement. But the name Devil's Tower,
that's actually a mistake, right wasn't it original name?
Speaker 2: It's a tragic mistranslation. This site is incredibly sacred to
numerous indigenous peoples, particularly the Lakota, the Kioa, and the Cheyenne.
The Lakota call it Matho Fhippola, which means bear lodge.
There are several beautiful legends associated with it, most involving
a giant bear whose claws scraped the sides of the
rock as it tried to reach children who had magically
been lifted to the summit for safety. It's a place
of refuge and spiritual power.
Speaker 1: So where in the world did devil come from?
Speaker 2: The name was likely given by a Colonel Richard Dodge
during an expedition in eighteen seventy five. The most common
theory is that his interpreter simply mistranslated a native word.
Perhaps they used a word for a bad god or
an evil spirit in a different context and he just
ran with it. Or maybe they just saw the natives
treating the site with such awe and reverence, and through
a colonial lens, assumed it must be some form of
devil worship that's infuriating it is. It's the classic colonial error.
If it's strange and powerful, and I don't understand it.
Speaker 1: It must be demonic, because the indigenous view is the
complete opposite of that. The source of material says they
view it as a place of positive energy, a place
you go to recharge, to pray.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It's an altar, not a fortress of evil. But
once you slap the name devil onto an official map,
it primes every visitor. You go there expecting something ominous,
something dark. Language shapes perception.
Speaker 1: But then in the nineteen seventies the folklore around it
shifted again dramatically. We traded demons for aliens.
Speaker 2: The Spielberg effect. It's impossible to overstate the impact of
close encounters of the third kind. After Steven Spielberg used
the tower as the climactic landing site for the Mothership,
Tourism there literally doubled overnight and has never dropped.
Speaker 1: Back down, and the whole narrative changed completely.
Speaker 2: People don't look at it now and think geology or
native alter or even to devil. They look at it
and they think UFO parking lot. It's become the focal
point for a whole new mythology.
Speaker 1: It just shows how malleable our myths are, doesn't it,
we update them based on whatever our current cultural obsessions are.
In eighteen seventy five, we were obsessed with the Devil
and conquering the Savage Wilderness. In nineteen seventy seven, we
were obsessed with space and the possibility of extraterrestrial contact.
Speaker 2: And in both cases, the tower serves as a perfect
vessel for the other, the unexplained. There's a great quote
in the source material from one of the experts. He
says something like, we like to walk around with the
confidence that we know this planet, but there seems to
be nothing but mystery.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 2: And the tower just stands there. It's this nine hundred
foot tall stone, cold reminder that we are very small
and the world is very, very weird.
Speaker 1: Speaking of the world being weird and genuinely scary, we
are now leaving the wide open plains of Wyoming and
heading to the east coast to a place that honestly
scares me more than the tower. The Pine barrens of
southern New Jersey.
Speaker 2: A million acres of dense, near impenetrable forest sandwiched right
in the middle of the most densely populated part of America.
Speaker 1: It's so true people think of New Jersey, and they
think of turnpikes and industrial zones, you know, the sopranos,
But the pine barrens are they're different. The soil is
acidic and sandy. The water in the streams is this
strange tea color from all the cedar trees and the
iron in the ground. And it's quiet, too quiet. Yes,
it's the perfect incubator for a monster.
Speaker 2: And they have one of the most famous ones in
American history, the Jersey Devil.
Speaker 1: This is my absolute favorite cryptid because the description is
just so wonderfully chaotic. It makes no biological sense.
Speaker 2: It's a total chimera. The witnesses over the centuries describe
a creature with a horse's head, large bat like wings,
a long body that sometimes described as being like a kangaroo's,
thin bird like legs, with hoofs, a forked tail, and horns.
Speaker 1: This sounds like a child's drawing of a monster that
just came to life.
Speaker 2: Or, as one of the experts in the source called it,
a product of doctor Frankenstein's lab. But more than the look,
it's the sound. The blood curdling screech or roar is
what people really focus on. That's the thing that terrifies
them in the dark.
Speaker 1: So the origin story here is incredibly specific. It's not
just some vague legend. We have a time and a place.
Seventeen thirty five. Mother leads right a.
Speaker 2: Woman named Jane Leeds who lived at a place called
Leeds Point, right on the edge of the barns. The
story goes she was pregnant with her thirteenth child, thirteenth Wow,
and she was impoverished. She was exhausted, probably dealing with
a husband who wasn't much help, and in a moment
of pure despair, she cursed the unborn child. She cried out,
I'm tired of having children. The devil can take this one.
Speaker 1: Which you know, as far as parenting strategies go.
Speaker 2: Is poor, not generally recommended. No, But according to the legend,
the curse took. The baby was born on a stormy night,
and at first it seemed like a normal, healthy boy.
But then within minutes it began.
Speaker 1: To change transform.
Speaker 2: It elongated, the wings sprouted from its back, the head
became horse like. It thrashed around the room, attacked the
family and the midwife, and then shot at the chimney
and flew off into the darkness of the pines screeching.
Speaker 1: What I love about this story is that it didn't
just stay a local folk tale told around a campfire.
It almost immediately entered the historical record. Yeah, you have
very prominent, credible people claiming to see it.
Speaker 2: Commodore Stephen Decatur. I mean, we're talking about a genuine
American naval hero, the guy who fought the Barbary Pirates,
famous for the line our country right or wrong.
Speaker 1: A serious guy, yeah, not a fantasist at all.
Speaker 2: And he's at the Hanover Ironworks in the pine barrens,
testing out cannonballs. He sees this strange flying creature, and
being a military man, his first reaction isn't too hide
or run away.
Speaker 1: He shoots at it.
Speaker 2: He shoots with a cannon.
Speaker 1: He fired a cannon at a cryptid.
Speaker 2: That's amazing, allegedly, and the story that's passed down claims
he actually hit it, blew a hole right through one
of its wings. But the creature didn't drop. It didn't
even seem to notice. It just kept on flying.
Speaker 1: Now, look, if a drunk guy at a tavern tells
you he saw a dragon, you can probably ignore him.
But if a decorated naval commodore tells you he shot
a cannon at a dragon and it just shrugged off
and kept flying. You kind of have to listen.
Speaker 2: It lends an air of credibility that most folklore doesn't have.
Or it tells you that maybe Dicatur missed his target
and needed a really, really spectacular excuse for his superiors.
Speaker 1: Sorry about the ways that ammunitions here, there was a
dragon classic. But the real meat of this story, for me,
the part that elevates it, is the year nineteen oh nine,
because this is where the monster moves from just being
a legend to being a full blown sociological event.
Speaker 2: The Great Panic of January nineteen oh nine. This is
one of the most fascinating case studies in mass hysteria
in America history.
Speaker 1: Walk us through it. What happened?
Speaker 2: It started in the Hiddle of January, a few scattered
sightings here and there. Then the local newspapers picked up
the stories, and suddenly the flood grates just opened. Over
the course of one week, there were literally thousands of
reports from across the entire Delaware Valley, not just in
the pine barrens, but in Philadelphia, in Trenton, all over.
Speaker 1: Thousands. Yeah, in one week.
Speaker 2: Thousands people were seeing it in their backyards. They were
finding strange, cloven hoof prints on the rooftops, which, by
the way, is physically impossible for any known animal. A
trolley car full of people and Hadden Heights was reportedly
dive bombed by the creature, causing mass panic.
Speaker 1: A trolley car that is pure cinema. I can just
picture it.
Speaker 2: And the panic was genuine and widespread. It wasn't a joke.
Schools closed down, mills and factories shut down because workers
were too afraid to walk to work in the dark.
People were barricading themselves in their homes.
Speaker 1: And didn't the Philadelphia Zoo get involved.
Speaker 2: They did. They offered a ten thousand dollars reward for
the creature, dead or alive, which in nineteen oh nine
was an absolute fortune. Pauses were formed, Groups of men
were roaming the woods with shotguns hunting for it. It
was chaos.
Speaker 1: This is what I find so fascinating. We could sid
he and laugh at the description of the horseback kangaroo monster,
but the fear was real. The economic impact of the
shutdowns was real. The social panic was real.
Speaker 2: It's a perfect example of a social contagion. One person
sees a shadow in the dark and calls it the
Jersey Devil. The next person reads that story in the paper,
and now their brain is primed. Now every rustle in
the leaves, every screech of a fox and red foxes
makes some truly terrifying sounds at night. By the way,
it all gets filtered through that lens and becomes the monster.
Speaker 1: But even the skeptics in the source material admit something
must have triggered it. You don't get thousands of reports
from zero something was out there.
Speaker 2: No, you don't. And interestingly, this is where the indigenous
history comes back into play yet again. The local Lenape
people had a name for that area long before the
colonists arrived. If they called it the place of the Dragon, seriously, seriously,
it was a place they largely avoided. They felt the
land itself was wrong, unsettling.
Speaker 1: So maybe the mother Leads story was just the colonist's
way of putting a narrative to a vibe and energy
that was already there in the land itself.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The land is a personality, and sometimes that personality
feels ancient and hostile, and we give it a name
Jersey Devil, spirit, dragon, satan, so that we can process.
Speaker 1: That fear, and that really brings us full circle, doesn't it.
From the sacrificial fires of the Valley of Hindhem and
Jerusalem to the dark, cedar choked woods of New Jersey.
Speaker 2: It's all part of the same thread. Humanity is small.
The world is large and dangerous and often completely random.
And we don't like random. We don't like unexplained. It
makes us feel powerless.
Speaker 1: So we create a box to put the chaos in.
Speaker 2: Create a box and we write a label on it,
evil or devil or monster. If we can name the darkness,
we feel like we have some small measure of power
over it. If the crop fails, it's not just bad
luck with the weather. It's a demon that I can
try to appease with a sacrifice.
Speaker 1: If I have a profound mental breakdown, it's not just
my neurons misfiring. It's a spirit that a priest can
try to exercise.
Speaker 2: If there's a terrifying noise in the woods at night,
it's not just the wind or a fox, it's the
Jersey Devil, a known entity with a backstory. The monster
serves a purpose. It localizes the fear. It gives us
a target for our anxiety.
Speaker 1: And in a very weird, roundabout way, it keeps us safe.
The fear of hell keeps you moral and in line
with your community. The fear of the Jersey Devil keeps
you from wandering into a dangerous, disorienting swamp in the
middle of the night.
Speaker 2: The devil, in all his forms, is the ultimate cautionary tale.
Speaker 1: So I guess we have to turn this over to you,
the listener. We've thrown a lot of really heavy stuff
at you today, child sacrifice, theology, exorcism, aliens and cryptids,
but the core question running through all of it remains
the same.
Speaker 2: Are we seeing real monsters out there in the world
or are we just seeing our own shit reflected back
at us in the dark.
Speaker 1: What is your stand on these thrilling threads. Do you
believe these things are manifestations of a genuine spiritual war,
real entities, real demons that exist independently of us, or
is this all just the powerful human imagination filling in
the planks that science hasn't gotten to yet because we're
too afraid to sit in the dark alone.
Speaker 2: I am genuinely curious to see where our audience lands
on this one. Is the Devil real or is he
simply the most successful and enduring literary character of all time?
Speaker 1: Leave us a comment. We really want to know your theory.
And hey, if you have a local legend or a
spooky spot in your own hometown that just feels off,
tell us about that too.
Speaker 2: We would love to investigate those threads.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on this particularly dark journey.
Speaker 2: I'm your host and I'm the expert.
Speaker 1: And this has been thrilling threads. Keep pulling on those strings.
You never ever know what might be waiting at the
other end.
Speaker 2: Just maybe don't look up the chimney.
Speaker 1: You definitely don't do that. See you next time.