The Monster of Newark Brian Regal

When I was a kid I saw a monster peering into my bedroom window. This monster even attempted to get into my room. My experience may account for a good bit of my adult behavior, though I’m hoping not. It was 1967 after all, and a lot of people were seeing monsters. I grew up in a three floor walk-up tenement in Newark, New Jersey. The neighborhood was sometimes called “Down Neck” because of the way it was bordered by the Passaic River, and sometimes called “The Ironbound” because it had been a railroad industrial hub in its heyday. I always preferred “Ironbound” as it sounded tougher. I shared a bedroom with my older sister. It was a front room off the living room with a window that faced a shopping street called Fleming Avenue. The building was an old one, with iron fire escapes, the kind that Film Noir directors were so enamored of in the 1950s because of the way moonlight shone through. There was an entire row of similar buildings attached to ours along the street with no spaces between them. A guy my dad called “The Mayor” lived a couple of doors down. In the summer time, he’d squeeze his considerable bulk into a lawn chair on the sidewalk and sit there all day, no matter the temperature. As people drove by, they would wave to him and yell, “Yo, Toe-Nay!” He smiled back knowingly while chomping on a cigar. It was not the sort of neighborhood where cryptids showed up. However, one night as I fell asleep, the fire escape outside the bedroom began to rattle and shake. I looked up to see a monstrous hairy face peering in the window. It had a deranged look in its gaunt eyes. It looked very big but emaciated as it pulled on the metal stairs of the fire escape mechanism. My sister saw it too, and we screamed in horror at this primordial beast that seemed to be trying to get in to eat us. The figure darted away just as my father rushed into the room. We pointed to the window and he looked out. He sputtered some ancient expletive under his breath he had learned as a tank driver in the Korean War. Then he turned to us. His angry face instantly turned to one of sympathy and fatherly concern. “Everything is okay,” he said with a smile. “Don’t worry.” A night or two later the beast returned. This time I heard a terrible commotion outside. Wearing my Flintstones pajamas I bravely opened the window and looked out just as the monster darted between two parked cars, yelping in pain. It was being pursued by another monster that chased him with what looked suspiciously like a baseball bat. That was the last time we saw the creature. After that, all seemed to return to normal on Fleming Avenue. There were still monsters running around, but none of them tried to get into my room. It got me thinking. How did such a creature know how to operate a fire escape? How had no one

noticed it walking down the street in the middle of the Ironbound? I had seen just such a creature in an episode of Jonny Quest, so I knew how to recognize it, but what about everybody else? There were plenty of strange things on those streets, of course, but even this thing must have aroused comment. I filed those questions away and continued to dream of being an historian or a writer, or at least a tank driver like Pop. Then one day, I was in the candy store across the street with my mother. She was buying some household things while I perused the magazine rack. And I saw it. There, on the cover of a magazine was a picture of the thing that attacked us. The magazine had a title I found difficult to say, AR-GO-SEE. “Mom! Mom! That’s the thing I saw…” Just as I blurted that out she grabbed my hand and dragged me towards the door. “Don’t play with the books. Come on, we still have to go to the deli and then to the—” I didn’t hear the rest. I kept looking at the magazine cover. “But…but!” I waved and pointed feverishly but ineffectively at the magazine rack and tried to get her to understand. It was no use. The pot-roast and pierogies awaited and there was no way she was going to detour for some foolish magazine that her weird little kid was yammering about. But I was determined. After a few weeks of saving my pennies I returned to the candy store to get a copy of that magazine. Of course, they were all sold out. I never saw it again. It wasn’t until years later that I learned what strange creature had intruded upon our lives. I was told the story at the old Star-Z Tavern during a drunken family baby christening. It seems a young newlywed who lived in the tenement next-door had grown weary of her husband and began an affair with a wiry bakery truck driver. Beau Brummel was not the smartest loaf in the basket, and waited until her husband entered the front door and started coming up the stairs before making his stealthy withdrawal via the fire escape. The night we encountered him he had climbed over our balcony to continue down our iron ladder. My Polish father knew what had happened and that we were never in any danger. However, my Irish grandfather who lived up on the third floor felt that action was required. For several evenings in a row he hid in the darkened street-level glass entry doors, wielding my Louisville Slugger, and waited. His patience was rewarded when a few nights later the hapless lover came scrambling down the fire escape ladder. As the Lothario was about to drop down to the safety of the concrete, gramps stepped out, yelled, “Ya bastid, scare my grandkids will ya!” and swung for the fences with an expertise that would have made the Great Bambino proud.

The bat found the man’s shins more than once, and Don Juan fell from the ladder. With shouts of “I’m not a burglar, I’m not a burglar!” he bolted away, limping wounded into the night. The story passed into the lore of Fleming Avenue, and has been told at every family gathering from then on. Incidents such as this give useful insight into the formation of myths and legends. Some tales of monsters undoubtedly have their origins in some event that was poorly remembered by those involved. From Grimm’s fairy tales, to Jack and the Beanstalk, to the Blemmyae of the Middle Ages, to El Chupacabras, and to Spring Heeled Jack, more than a few fantastical stories began with mundane events expanded out of proportion. This can also teach us about the differences between rural and urban legends. They are a wealth of primary source material. Without including serial killers, dictators, racist, hatred-filled homophobic misogynists, people who drive Hummers, or those who wear shorts and sandals in the winter, it is difficult to prove the existence of monsters. They are annoyingly elusive and require a good bit of work to find. Often when we do, they turn out to be just as annoyingly prosaic. That, however, is the nature of the monster hunting game: lots of work to discover it was just a guy climbing down a fire escape in the middle of the night, scaring some kids. It makes the entire enterprise so much more interesting and fun, at least, if you begin with the idea that there probably is no flying devil horse or scaly aquatic beast to be found. Years later while I was working on my biography of Grover Krantz I was finally able to acquire a copy of the Argosy magazine with Ivan Sanderson’s article featuring the infamous PattersonGimlin film stills that allegedly captured Bigfoot. It seemed different to me as an adult to the way I remembered it as a kid. That’s the faulty nature of memory, especially the memory of monsters. We always seem to embellish them beyond the facts of what really happened. As an historian, I have been trained to see past the memories, to analyze the texts, to see the correspondences, and to compare against actual data. This is something the vast majority of monster hunters and cryptozoologists need to do a bit more. Maybe they were just not lucky enough to grow up in the Ironbound and have a grandfather who was handy with a baseball bat.

Dr. Brian Regal teaches the history of science, technology, and medicine at Kean University. He has never seen a UFO or a spirit orb, nor has he ever witnessed anyone spontaneously combust. He is the author of Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology, Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia and Icons of Evolution. His latest title is Satan’s Harbinger: The Real Story of the Jersey Devil.