Upon the Isle of the Jews, in the shadow of the great Cathedral of Notre Dame, a fire was kindled that would burn through the very fabric of history. It was the 18th of March, 1314. Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, bound to the stake, his flesh searing under the slow-burning flames, did not cry out in agony. Instead, with a voice that pierced the veil of the material world, he issued a summons—a cosmic mandate directed at the highest temporal powers of his age: Pope Clement V and King Philip IV of France. He summoned them to appear before the tribunal of the Most High within a year and a day. This was not a mere curse born of mortal vengeance; it was the pronunciation of an esoteric law, the initiation of the dissolution of the temporal order.

There is a sign at the entrance to Bhangarh Fort in Rajasthan, and it is not the work of a tour operator trying to raise a shiver. It was put there by the Archaeological Survey of India, which is a department of the government, staffed by archaeologists, in the business of preserving monuments and issuing tickets. The sign, in English and Hindi, states that entering the boundaries of Bhangarh before sunrise and after sunset is strictly prohibited, and that legal action will be taken against anyone who does.

Southern New Jersey hides, between the great cities of the American seaboard, a wilderness that has no business being there: the Pine Barrens — more than a million acres of stunted pines, sugar-sand roads, and tea-dark cedar water, a sparsely settled inland island of forest wedged against the most crowded corridor of the continent. Every wilderness gets the monster it deserves, and the Barrens got theirs early. He is the Jersey Devil — for two centuries before the marketers shortened it, the Leeds Devil — a creature described with remarkable consistency across three hundred years of frightened testimony: the head of a horse or a ram on a body part bird and part beast, leathery bat's wings, cloven hooves, a forked or serpentine tail, and a scream that empties the woods. He is the official demon of the American state of New Jersey in everything but statute — hockey teams bear his name — and his birth certificate, unlike that of most monsters, names his mother.