Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire.

We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney.

And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction.

We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime

campfire.

When you were a kid, were you ever scared to go in the swimming pool in case you might get eaten by a shark?

Or just get in the bathtub?

Hell, one time I even managed to freak myself out just from laying on a waterbed.

This is mainly thanks to Stephen Spielberg and a 25-foot mechanical shark called Bruce,

but Jaws wasn't made in a vacuum.

Shark attacks are thankfully very rare, but over a century ago there was a series of

attacks so shocking and so close together that they cemented the shark as a figure of sharp-toothed horror in the American psyche, the serial killer of the sea, you might say.

Basically what we're saying here folks is it's Shark Week on True Crime Campfire.

This is out of your depth, the story of the 1916 New Jersey Shark

Attacks. The shark swam slowly through the warm shallow waters, a panoply of information falling into its senses.

Senses sharpened over hundreds of millions of years of evolution to an exquisite point.

It could feel the pressure waves through the water of clumsy splashing at the surface. It could taste a new creature. Strange but

similar enough to the shark's ideal prey of seals and dolphins to be enticing.

A mammal.

As it got closer, it could sense the electrical impulses from moving muscles and could see

the exciting bright flashes of hands and feet

hitting the water. Sharks are usually cautious hunters but this one was hungry

...