Shark attacks that inspired ‘Jaws’ took lives at the Jersey Shore on this week in Philly history
Before the fictional story of a killer shark terrorizing a sleepy beach town, there was the very real summer of 1916 at the Jersey Shore.
In the summer of 1975, an American classic ambushed moviegoers.
But before the fictional story of a killer shark terrorizing a sleepy beach town, there was the very real summer of 1916 at the Jersey Shore.
Five shark attacks in less than two weeks that left four people dead and one injured.
Before ‘Jaws’
At the turn of the last century, one fatal shark attack in New Jersey’s stretch of the Atlantic Ocean, or anywhere else in the United States, would have made front-page news.
According to former Inquirer reporter Michael Capuzzo’s book Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence, interactions with sharks were exceedingly rare. Tales of confrontations were mostly associated with fisherfolk and mariners.
For most Americans, great white sharks existed only in stories.
So when that shark attack happened in 1916 in Beach Haven, set on Long Beach Island in Ocean County, the country — let alone the state — was shocked.
That shock fueled a morbid inspiration, spawning Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws and the subsequent Steven Spielberg blockbuster that defined the shark as an American monster.
The attacks
The first victim was a Philadelphian.
Charles Vansant was a 23-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate who waded into the Atlantic’s brine in Beach Haven on July 1, 1916.
He was playing with a dog in the surf when a shark latched onto his left thigh, and chewed through his femoral artery. Vansant bled to death as his physician father desperately administered care.
Five days later, a second attack took place about 54 miles north in Spring Lake, Monmouth County.
Charles Bruder, a 27-year-old hotel bellman, was swimming 100 yards from beach when a shark tore through his lower body, and ripped off both legs. Bruder died in a rescue boat as it scurried to the shore.
The next attacks happened July 12, oddly about 10 miles inland from the Atlantic in Matawan Creek, a small tidal inlet of Raritan Bay.
Lester Stillwell was swimming with his preteen friends, a group described by newspapers as the “best kind of American boys,” when the shark pounced. Stanley Fisher, a 24-year-old from Matawan, dove in to find the boy, and then the shark found Fisher, who was mauled as bystanders watched.
Both were killed.
The only surviving victim that summer was Joseph Dunn, 14, of New York City, who was hospitalized for months and rarely spoke of the attacks afterward.
An eight-foot juvenile great white shark was caught in Raritan Bay on July 14, 1916. Human remains were reportedly still in its stomach.
“Hysteria spread,” Capuzzo wrote of the attacks’ aftermath, “afflicting the lowly and the mighty, as a single shark prevented people from entering the water.”