Crowds throng the beach at Atlantic City, New Jersey. circa 1908. Photo credit: Detroit Publishing Company
The town of Beach Haven, on the southern end of Long Beach Island off the coast of New Jersey, has been a popular summer resort for more than a hundred years. Located just twenty miles north of Atlantic City, Beach Haven has been the favourite destination for couples and families from New Jersey and Pennsylvania looking for a seaside escape.
The summer of 1916 was one of the hottest in recent memory, and Beach Haven was packed with vacationers. To provide shade to visitors, more than two hundred trees were planted and a new express train from Philadelphia shortened the travel time to just under two hours.
Among the vacationers was Charles Vansant, a 25-year-old stockbroker from Philadelphia. On July 1, 1916, he arrived in Beach Haven and, after checking in at the Engleside Hotel, headed straight to the beach for a late-afternoon swim in the Atlantic. Vansant waded into the surf just beyond the breakers, where the water reached his chest, and began calling out to a large Chesapeake Bay retriever that was playing on the beach. The dog, however, seemed uninterested in joining him.
At that moment, several people on the shoreline noticed a dark shape lurking beneath the surface, with a black fin cutting through the water. It was moving toward Vansant. Alarmed, the people began to shout warnings, but Vansant didn’t understand what they were saying and continued calling to the dog. Suddenly Vansant shrieked and began frantically splashing as he struggled to move towards the shore. The water around him turned crimson from his blood. When the lifeguard dragged Vansant ashore, his left thigh was found stripped off its flesh. Some witnesses later claimed they saw the shark still clamped onto Vansant’s leg as he was dragged towards the beach, and that “the shark did not let Vansant free until its belly scraped the bottom of the sand”.
Vansant died less than two hours later in excruciating pain. His death was the first recorded fatal shark attack along the East Coast of the United States. While local newspapers reacted with horror and disbelief, national coverage was minimal. James M. Meehan, the Fish Commissioner of Pennsylvania, even sought to reassure the public in an article in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, stating that bathers had no reason to fear sharks. He dismissed the incident as a fluke, claiming the shark had likely been trying to attack the dog swimming near Vansant.
Just five days after the first attack, Charles Bruder, a twenty-seven year-old Swiss bell captain at the Essex & Sussex Hotel, was swimming in the sea in Spring Lake about 45 miles north of Beach Haven, when he was attacked by a shark. The shark completely bit off his right leg just above the knee, and when Bruder fell back into the water, the shark made another lunge, this time severing his left foot. Bruder slipped out of consciousness almost immediately and was dead before he could be brought back to the shore. Many hotel guests who saw the mutilated corpse vomited and fainted.
Map of the Jersey Shore attacks
The second fatal attack sent a wave of panic and hysteria across the coastline. Newspapers nationwide ran dramatic headlines, turning what had once seemed like an isolated incident into a terrifying pattern. Resort owners set up motorboat patrol to spot rogue sharks as they tried to lure visitors back to the beach in order to make up for the few days of lost business. Wire netting was installed in the waters covering the entire stretch of beach at Engleside and also at Asbury Park’s Fourth Avenue beach. Some of these measures seemed to work, because by the week following Bruder’s attack, a record crowd flocked Jersey Shore beaches.
At Matawan Creek, about 30 miles north of Spring Lake and 16 miles inland from sea, eleven-year-old Lester Stillwell was playing in the creek with his friends in the scorching afternoon of July 12. One of kids felt a sandpaper-like object graze his leg, and when he trained his eyes at the object beneath the water, he saw what looked like the tail of a huge fish. At the same time the other kids spotted what appeared to be an “old black weather-beaten board or a weathered log” bob the surface of the water. A dorsal fin appeared in the water and the boys realized it was a shark. Before Stillwell could climb from the creek, the shark pulled him underwater.
The boys ran to town for help, and several men, including local businessman Watson Stanley Fisher came to investigate. Fisher and others dove into the creek to find Stillwell, thinking he had suffered a seizure. They soon located the boy's body and while attempting to return to shore, Fisher was seized by the shark in front of a full crowd. The shark dug its teeth into Fisher’s right thigh and tore the muscles out. He bled to death about two hours later.
Some 30 minutes after the double tragedy at Matawan Creek, the shark attacked again, half-a-mile away. The fifth and the final victim was fourteen-year-old Joseph Dunn. The shark clamped down on his left leg, stripping it of flesh. But unlike the others, Dunn survived. His brother and a friend managed to pull him free after a desperate tug-of-war with the shark. He spent weeks in recovery and was eventually released from the hospital two months later.
A bull shark, the kind that was probably responsible for the attacks. Photo credit: Earth Touch
The New Jersey shark attacks had a profound psychological impact on beachgoers and the American public at large. Mostly it shattered the prevailing belief that sharks did not pose a serious threat to humans, especially in temperate coastal waters like those off the north eastern United States. For the first time, Americans saw the ocean not just as a playground but as a place where nature might strike without warning. The attacks marked the first time sharks were portrayed in American media as malevolent predators targeting humans. Prior to that, sharks were rarely considered a serious threat. Scientific consensus held that they wouldn't attack people unless provoked.
The 1916 attacks changed that perception. Communities along the Jersey Shore petitioned the federal government to organise hunt sharks. As the Atlanta Constitution reported on July 14, “Armed shark hunters in motor boats patrolled the New York and New Jersey coasts today while others lined the beaches in a concerted effort to exterminate the man-eaters ...”. Residents of Matawan lined Matawan Creek with nets and detonated dynamite in an attempt to catch and kill the shark that was responsible for two deaths. New Jersey governor and local municipalities offered bounties to individuals hunting sharks. Hundreds of sharks were captured on the East Coast following the attacks.
The legacy of these attacks lasted well into the 20th century. When Peter Benchley wrote Jaws in 1974, he drew clear inspiration from the 1916 events, especially the idea of a rogue shark terrorizing a small coastal community. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film adaptation brought those fears to the screen in a visceral way.
The “Jersey man-eater” was never identified, although several fishermen claimed to have caught it in the days following the attacks. A blue shark was captured near Long Branch, and a sandbar shark was captured near the mouth of the Matawan Creek. A Barnum and Bailey lion tamer named Michael Schleisser caught a 147 kg great white shark in Raritan Bay, only a few miles from the mouth of Matawan Creek. When Schleisser opened the shark's belly he found “suspicious fleshy material and bones”. Later, the ingested remains were examined by Dr. Frederic Lucas, the director of American Museum, who identified them to be human. “They are the parts of the left radius and ulna [lower arm bones] and one of the anterior left ribs, all human. There is no doubt about this,” he wrote to Schleisser.
Schleisser, who was also a taxidermist, mounted the shark and placed it on display in the window of a Manhattan shop on Broadway. Some thirty thousand people blocked up the sidewalk in their efforts to catch a glimpse of the monster they read so much about. Later, Schleisser announced plans to take the now-famous white shark on a tour across Asia and the Far East. Unfortunately, the rushed taxidermy and the inferior early-20th century methods of preservation led to the deterioration of the carcass. However, the jaws of that specimen survived and may have decorated the walls of a fish shop on Broadway for many years, before this last remaining relic was also lost.
Michael Schleisser and the great white shark he caught in Raritan Bay purported to be the "Jersey man-eater". Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Some sceptics wondered whether the New Jersey man-eater was a shark at all. A lot of people, especially during the early days of the attack, believed the perpetrator was a sea turtle. Some scholars even asserted that a shark's jaws did not have the strength to sever a human leg in a single bite.
A letter to The New York Times blamed the shark infestation on German U-boats near America's East Coast. The anonymous writer claimed that these sharks may have devoured human bodies in the waters of the German war zone and developed a craving for human flesh which would have accounted for their newfound aggression.
Some shark experts believe that the real culprit behind the 1916 attacks might not have been the great white shark but bull shark—a species known for its aggressive nature and its ability to swim from saltwater into freshwater rivers and streams. Bull sharks have been involved in confirmed attacks in lakes and rivers, lending credence to the theory, especially since several of the 1916 attacks occurred far inland.
A warning put up on a beach, somewhere in the Pacific coast, after a recent fatal shark attack. Photo credit: acapacio
Regardless of the exact species, the attacks of 1916 left a deep and lasting impression on the public consciousness, especially in the north eastern United States. In an article published that July in the Newark Star-Eagle, ichthyologist and National Geographic editor Hugh McCormick Smith reflected on the incident, noting that while some shark species are “harmless as doves,” others represent “the incarnation of ferocity.”
The great white shark bore most of the blame. Smith continued: “One of the most prodigious, and perhaps the most formidable of sharks is the man-eater, Carcharodon carcharias [great white]”.
In another article, the Scientific American wrote that the white shark “would not hesitate to attack a man in open water,” and that “even a relatively small white shark, weighing two or three hundred pounds, might readily snap the largest human bones by a jerk of its body, after it has bitten through the flesh.”
The panic triggered by the 1916 attacks also changed the way scientists and institutions approached shark research. Once a largely overlooked subject, shark behaviour became a focus of new studies, drawing attention from both the scientific community and the public.
According to the International Shark Attack File (ISAF), an average of 80 unprovoked shark attacks occur globally each year, with 7 to 8 resulting in fatalities. The United States leads the world in reported cases, with over 1,100 confirmed attacks and 37 deaths between 1958 and 2023. While shark attacks remain rare, these statistics remind us that, despite all our knowledge and precautions, the sea is still wild.
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