The 2026 Apple TV hit “Widow’s Bay” quickly became a hit for a reason. Its “cursed” island, 40 miles off the coast of New England, runs on the lore and mysteries that built its history. Creator Katie Dippold, who grew up in Freehold, wrote the original script inspired by a haunted house on a Jersey Shore boardwalk that fascinated her in the 1980s.

But the draw of the unexplained is not unique to Dippold. After all, the Jersey Devil has 13th-child origins in the Pine Barrens, and the mystique of…