How 12 days on the Jersey Shore in 1916 turned the shark into a monster - and why the most famous shark attacks in history were never actually solved.
It is the evening of July 1, 1916, and a young man named Charles Vansant is swimming out past the breakers at Beach Haven, on the New Jersey shore. He is 25, on vacation from Philadelphia, showing off a little - calling to a dog to follow him into the surf while a whole resort full of people watches from the sand. Some of them will later say they saw it: a dark shape in the water behind him, moving fast, cutting a line straight toward the young man who is laughing and has no idea. They start to shout. He thinks they are cheering.
What happens in the next minute will kill Charles Vansant - and it will do something stranger than that. It will reach across the next hundred years and put a fear into all of us, a fear of the water we still carry today. This is the story of the 12 days that invented the shark, and of a mystery that, more than a century later, has never actually been solved.
The animal nobody feared
To understand why 1916 was such a shock, you have to understand the one thing almost no one believes today: in 1916, Americans were not afraid of sharks. The fear did not exist. Scientists - actual experts - largely believed a shark would not attack a healthy, living person in the cool waters of the northern Atlantic. The shark was a big, ugly fish, a scavenger of the dead. Years earlier a wealthy man had reportedly offered a standing cash reward to anyone who could prove a shark had ever killed a person in these waters. For 25 years, nobody collected it. And that summer, a brutal heat wave and a terrifying polio epidemic were driving families out of the cities and onto the beaches, which everyone knew were the safest, healthiest place of all.
The first death
When the shark hit Charles Vansant, it took his leg. A lifeguard and a bystander dragged him back through reddening water and up onto the sand in front of everyone, and they could not stop the bleeding. He died that night on the manager’s desk of a beachfront hotel, his family beside him. And the world shrugged. A terrible accident, surely a freak one - maybe a big fish, maybe a turtle. The experts reassured everyone it could not happen again. The beaches stayed open.
Spring Lake
Five days later, 45 miles up the coast at the resort town of Spring Lake, a 27-year-old Swiss bell captain named Charles Bruder went for a late-morning swim past the lifelines. The people onshore saw him throw up his arms and vanish, and the water around him bloom red; a woman thought a red canoe had capsized. According to the accounts, Bruder managed to tell his rescuers what had happened - that a shark had taken his legs - before he died in the boat. Two men now, dead in the open sea, and the country could not look away. But even with two dead, the horror was where it was supposed to be: out in the deep salt water, where the monsters live. Stay out of the deep, people told themselves, and you will be safe.
A shark in the creek
The third act does not happen in the ocean at all. Matawan is a small town more than 10 miles inland; its only water is Matawan Creek, a narrow, muddy, winding tidal creek that threads through the marshes, in places barely wider than a road - about as far from a great white’s world as you can imagine. On July 12, a retired sea captain named Thomas Cottrell looked down from a bridge and saw a gray shape, eight feet long, sliding upstream toward the swimming holes. He ran through town raising the alarm. And the town laughed at him. A shark? In the creek, miles from the sea? The old man was seeing things.
Matawan Creek
That afternoon a group of boys were swimming at the Wyckoff dock. One of them, 11-year-old Lester Stillwell, was seized and pulled straight under. The other boys ran into town screaming. And a strong, well-liked young man named Watson Stanley Fisher went into the creek to bring back the boy’s body - and in front of the whole town on the bank, the shark took him too, tearing the muscle from his thigh. Fisher bled to death that evening. Half a mile away, about 30 minutes later, a 14-year-old named Joseph Dunn was climbing out of the same creek when the shark closed on his leg. His brother and a friend grabbed his arms and won a horrible tug of war, dragging him out of the water and out of the shark’s mouth. His leg was badly torn, but he lived. In 12 days: Vansant, Bruder, Stillwell, Fisher - four dead, in the one place everyone swore was safe.
The war on sharks
That is when the fear became a war. The story ran on front pages across the country and reached the President; there was talk in Washington of federal action. Up and down the coast, men went out to kill sharks - any sharks, all sharks - with rifles, dynamite, nets and hooks and bounties. They dropped dynamite into Matawan Creek itself to try to flush the thing out. A nation that two weeks earlier had not feared this animal at all was now trying to exterminate it.
The monster on the dock
And then, on July 14, it seemed to end. A man named Michael Schleisser - by trade a lion tamer for a traveling circus - was fishing in Raritan Bay, a few miles from the mouth of Matawan Creek, when something huge hit his line and nearly swamped his boat. He killed it with the only weapon he had, a broken oar. What he dragged home was a great white shark, about seven and a half feet long, and when they cut it open they found human remains inside - later confirmed by a scientist at the American Museum of Natural History. The monster had been caught, and after Schleisser killed that shark, the attacks stopped. Case closed.
The case that was never closed
Except for the creek. A great white is a creature of the cold, open, salt ocean; it does not, as a rule, swim a mile up a shallow, half-fresh tidal creek and hunt there. But there is another shark that does exactly that. The bull shark can move out of salt water and into fresh, its body chemistry adjusting on the way; bull sharks have been found hundreds of miles up the Mississippi and deep in the Amazon. A shark hunting a mile up a New Jersey creek is not a great white’s story - it is a bull shark’s, told perfectly. So which was it? The great white in Schleisser’s boat, a lost animal somewhere it never should have gone? A bull shark no one ever caught, that slipped back out to the bay? Two different sharks the whole time? More than a century later, the experts still cannot say for certain. The most famous shark attacks in the history of the world - the ones that taught the entire human race to fear the water - were never actually solved. The case just went quiet.
The ocean did not change in 1916. The sharks were always out there. What changed was us - what we saw when we looked at the water.
What we really did in 1916
Before that summer, the shark was nothing - a scavenger, a big fish no one thought about. After it, the shark was a monster, and that image never left. Decades later a writer named Peter Benchley, turning over the idea of a shark terrorizing a shore town, wrote a novel called Jaws; a young director named Steven Spielberg put it on screen; and an entire generation became afraid to put their feet in the ocean - all of it flowing downstream, across 60 years, from 12 days on the Jersey Shore. And here is the quiet truth underneath it: sharks kill only a handful of people in an average year worldwide, while in that same year people kill tens of millions of sharks. It is one of the most lopsided rivalries on the planet, and we are not the ones losing it. The monster of 1916 was never really the monster. It was just, for 12 terrible days, finally seen.
Sourcing note: the timeline follows the July 1-12, 1916 attacks - Charles Vansant (Beach Haven, July 1), Charles Bruder (Spring Lake, July 6), and Lester Stillwell, Watson Fisher, and the surviving Joseph Dunn (Matawan Creek, July 12). Michael Schleisser caught a great white in Raritan Bay on July 14 with human remains later identified at the American Museum of Natural History. The great-white-versus-bull-shark question remains genuinely unresolved among researchers. The attacks are widely cited as an inspiration for Peter Benchley’s Jaws. This article accompanies Episode 4 of the Huck Podcast - listen above for the full story.