The New Jersey family that lived in the infamous “Watcher” house — where they were terrorized by creepy, anonymous letters for years — has broken their silence.

Derek and Maria Broaddus of Westfield have described for the first time how their lives were turned upside down by the eerie messages in an interview in this week’s New York magazine.

“I was a depressed wreck,” Derek said, to the point where he began hand-delivering anonymous letters of his own to neighbors who believed it was all a hoax.

“It’s like cancer,” the father-of-three went on. “Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘What would my life be like if this didn’t happen?’ We lost Christmas a couple times, and you don’t get that back.”

Maria Broaddus recalled how the “Watcher” letters gave her terrifying nightmares. One involved a man “wearing these boots and carrying a pitchfork and calling to the kids,” she said.

“I couldn’t get to them,” Maria remembered.

From June 2014 to February 2017, the letters came — four of them — all written by a person identifying himself as “The Watcher.”

“How did you end up here?” the writer asked in the first letter. “Did 657 Boulevard call to you with its force within?”

The person claimed to have taken up the “Watcher” mantle as part of a family tradition.

“657 Boulevard has been the subject of my family for decades now and as it approaches its 110th birthday, I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming,” one letter claimed.

“My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time. Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out.”

From the start, the letters kept the Broaddus family on edge, especially around their neighbors.

“People must have thought we were crazy,” Maria said, recounting how the family went to a barbecue across the street days after the first letter arrived.

“We kept screaming [at the kids] to stay close.”

Many people thought the family had conjured up the idea of the “Watcher” as part of a real-estate hoax. But Derek and Maria insisted that they hadn’t.

“There’s a natural tendency to say, ‘I’ve lived here for 35 years; nothing’s happened to me,’ ” Derek said. “What happened to my family is an affront to their contention that they’re safe, that there’s no such thing as mental illness in their community. People don’t want to believe this could happen in Westfield.”

The couple still has no idea who was behind the letters, but cops have suspected it was someone within a 300-yard range of the house, now home to a new tenant.

Derek, however, has a narrower list of suspects.

“In my view, it’s one of 10 houses in the world,” he said.