Hello, dear listeners, and welcome to this installment of Context Clues, where we provide you with excerpts from previous episodes to help make our new topic at hand a little bit richer.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

Those of you who know me well, who have been longtime listeners, know that cryptids are just not my bag, baby.

This may seem incongruous with the rest of my interests, folklore urban legends conspiracy theories,

but I don't know. Those little monsters just don't spark joy within me. But we received a message

on our urban legends hotline asking me to investigate the Jersey devil, a winged creature said to live deep in the

pine barrens of New Jersey, causing all kinds of calamities for the local population, stretching

back 300 years. So I started looking into the story and, to my glee, found that the roots of this tale did spark

joy in the way that weird Puritan and Quaker history and elaborate circus hoaxes always do for me.

The Jersey Devil folklore I discovered had old school sociopolitical roots, much more than just a goofball creature

that goofballs are hunting for out in the dense pine barons of the northeast. So then I got

excited to tell you all about the fascinating, meandering, folkloric components that came together

to form one of the weirdest cryptids out there,

and to explain why I think it's all still relevant today.

We are going to get into this collection of context clues right after this.

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

Bucking hero.

We've all got that silly booker of a mate who comes back from holiday with a phone bill

bigger than, well, something really big.

Don't be like them. Be a smart booker. On the Beach to get up to three gigabytes of free data.

Stop booking around and visit Onthebeach.com.ukuk.

Conditions and exclusion supply. At all protected.

...