The Terrifying Truth Behind Jaws: The 1916 Shark Attacks That Changed Everything

Before Steven Spielberg ever pointed a camera at a rubber shark named Bruce, before Peter Benchley sat down to write the novel that would keep an entire generation out of the water, there was a real summer. A real coastline. And a real string of attacks so strange, so contradicted by everything scientists thought they knew about sharks, that it rewrote the relationship between humans and the ocean for the next hundred years.

That summer was 1916. That coastline was the Jersey Shore. And what happened over twelve sweltering days in July didn't just terrify a nation, it created the blueprint for Jaws, and it planted a fear of sharks so deep that we are still, more than a century later, trying to undo the damage. Grab your glass. This one has a body count on both sides of the water.

THE SUMMER THAT EMPTIED THE BEACHES

In the summer of 1916, America was in the grip of a brutal heat wave and a polio epidemic, which meant the Jersey Shore's cool Atlantic waters were more crowded than ever. Nobody was thinking about sharks. At the time, most scientists, including officials at the American Museum of Natural History — publicly insisted that sharks posed no real threat to living humans in temperate Atlantic waters. That confidence didn't survive the month.

●      July 1, Beach Haven: Charles Vansant, a young man vacationing with his family, was bitten while swimming just off the beach in full view of onlookers. He died that evening on the front desk of his hotel, the first authenticated fatal shark attack on record in New Jersey.

●      July 6, Spring Lake: Charles Bruder, a hotel bellhop swimming during his break, was fatally attacked about 130 yards from shore. Witnesses initially thought his blood-red wake was an overturned red canoe.

●      July 12, Matawan Creek: Eleven miles inland, along a tidal creek where nobody imagined an ocean predator could reach, eleven-year-old Lester Stillwell was pulled under while swimming with friends. Watson Stanley Fisher, a local tailor, drowned trying to recover the boy's body and was fatally bitten himself. A short time later and further downstream, young Joseph Dunn was bitten but survived, he was the final casualty of the string.

Four people were dead, one badly injured, and a coastal tourism economy was in freefall. Resort towns lost enormous sums as visitors canceled by the thousands. The public reaction was less grief than pure panic: bounty hunts, dynamite tossed into rivers and inlets, and a scramble by scientists and journalists alike to explain how this could have happened at all. Whether one shark was responsible for every attack, or several, remains debated by researchers to this day. A great white was killed near Raritan Bay days after the Matawan attacks with human remains reportedly in its stomach, though some historians argue a bull shark, capable of tolerating the creek's brackish water, is the more likely culprit for the inland deaths.

Whatever swam those waters in July of 1916 did more than kill four people. It created the modern shark villain.

FROM MATAWAN CREEK TO AMITY ISLAND

Fast-forward to 1974. Author Peter Benchley was researching a novel about a great white shark terrorizing a small beach town, and the 1916 attacks, still New Jersey folklore, still cited as the only mass shark-attack event in U.S. history, were part of the cultural water he was swimming in. Benchley also drew heavily on conversations with Long Island shark hunter Frank Mundus, whose real trophy-fishing exploits shaped the character of Quint. The result, Jaws, became a publishing phenomenon; Steven Spielberg's 1975 film adaptation became the first modern summer blockbuster and, not incidentally, one of the most effective pieces of animal propaganda ever produced.

Benchley spent the rest of his life trying to walk it back. He became an outspoken ocean conservationist, writing and lobbying on behalf of the very animal he'd turned into a monster, and admitted more than once that he couldn't have written the book with the knowledge of shark science he later gained. It didn't matter. The image was already loose in the culture: a rogue, calculating, vengeful killer lurking just past the sandbar. That image, born partly out of a real and genuinely terrifying 1916 summer and cemented by a work of fiction, has proven far more durable than the truth.

THE REAL BODY COUNT RUNS THE OTHER WAY

Here's the number that should terrify you instead: humans kill an estimated 100 million sharks every single year, driven by demand for fins, meat, liver oil, and cartilage, plus enormous volumes of accidental bycatch in gear meant for other fish. Converted into an hourly rate, that's something like 11,000 sharks killed every hour, around the clock, all year long.

Set that beside the other side of the ledger: worldwide, shark attacks kill roughly six to ten people a year. And yet the fictional predator still wins the public-relations war.

●      Open-ocean collapse: Populations of oceanic sharks and rays have declined an estimated 71% since 1970, largely from the intensifying reach of commercial fishing fleets.

●      Extinction risk: More than one-third of all known shark and ray species are now threatened with extinction, according to the IUCN Red List. The great white shark, the very species that Jaws made infamous, is itself currently listed as Vulnerable.

●      Finning: Fins are often sliced from living sharks, which are then thrown back into the water to sink, suffocate, or bleed to death, a practice that persists even in places with finning bans, since demand has simply shifted toward whole-carcass "mystery meat" sales.

●      Bycatch: Tens of millions of sharks a year die not because anyone wanted them, but because longlines, gillnets, and trawls set for tuna and swordfish don't discriminate. Many are dead or dying long before anyone pulls them from the water.

●      Slow biology, fast decline: Sharks mature late, carry pregnancies for months or years, and produce few offspring in a lifetime. A population that took decades to build can be fished out in a fraction of that time, and takes far longer to recover, if it recovers at all.

●      Habitat loss and climate change: Coastal development, coral reef degradation, and shifting ocean temperatures are squeezing nursery grounds and prey availability for species already under fishing pressure.

Sharks aren't just victims of bad PR, they're keystone predators. They keep the species below them in the food web in check, which keeps ecosystems like coral reefs and seagrass beds functional. Lose the sharks, and the whole structure of the ocean starts to wobble. A creature that a 1916 headline turned into a monster is, in fact, one of the reasons the ocean stays balanced enough to support everything else living in it, including us.

WHAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO ABOUT IT

This isn't a problem you can solve alone, but the fear-based mythology only survives because most people never hear the other side of the story. Here's where to put your energy if the Matawan story left you rooting for the shark instead of against it.

●      Skip shark products: Avoid shark fin soup and be wary of squalene-based cosmetics, supplements, and pet food, which can be made from shark liver oil without clear labeling.

●      Choose sustainable seafood: Look for Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification and use a sustainable seafood guide (like Seafood Watch) to avoid products from fisheries with high shark bycatch.

●      Support the organizations doing the work: The Shark Trust, Shark Advocates International, Oceana, the Shark Research Institute, WWF's shark and ray program, and the PADI AWARE Foundation (formerly Project AWARE) all run policy, research, and on-the-water conservation campaigns you can fund or volunteer for.

●      Back international protections: Advocate for stronger enforcement of CITES trade protections and regional finning bans, and support elected officials who back science-based fisheries management.

●      Go see them responsibly: Reputable, well-regulated shark ecotourism, cage diving, snorkel tours with reef sharks — creates a direct economic incentive for coastal communities to protect live sharks instead of dead ones.

●      Correct the record: The single easiest thing you can do is stop repeating the Jaws mythology as if it's biology. Sharks are not mindless killers hunting humans; most bites are cases of mistaken identity in murky water. Every conversation that replaces fear with fact chips away at a hundred years of bad press.

Peter Benchley spent his life trying to undo what one summer and one novel did to sharks. We can each undo a little more of it.

🎙️ Listen: The Full Fear & Wine Episode

This post is the companion to our full deep dive into the 1916 Shark Attacks That Inspired The Movie Jaws

🎙️  Listen now:  Fear & Wine is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Search “Fear & Wine” · Episode: "The Summer The Ocean Turned Red: The True Horror That Inspired The Movie Jaws”