Jersey Devil
the Pine Barrens
Born 1735 by the telling. Verifiably a newspaper sensation in January 1909.
The Pine Barrens are one million acres of sand, pitch pine and cedar water in the most densely populated state in the union, and until well into the twentieth century large parts of them were effectively unwatched. The people who lived there had a name and a reputation, the pineys, and the creature belongs to that country in a way that is hard to separate from how the rest of New Jersey talked about it.
The standard telling is the Mother Leeds story. A woman at Leeds Point, pregnant with her thirteenth child in 1735, curses the pregnancy. The child is born, transforms, kills the midwife, and goes up the chimney into the pines. It has a horse's skull, leathery wings, cloven hooves and a forked tail, and it screams.
The historian Brian Regal has traced a more interesting and much better documented line. Daniel Leeds was a real colonial almanac publisher at Leeds Point who fell out badly with the local Quaker establishment over astrology and theology and was denounced in print for years as an agent of the devil. His son Titan Leeds then had a long public feud with Benjamin Franklin, who in a 1733 almanac joke predicted Titan's death and then insisted, when Titan failed to die, that the man still publishing under that name must be a ghost. The Leeds family crest bore a wyvern. A family publicly branded as devils for two generations, in a specific place, with a winged monster on its coat of arms, is a decent explanation for where a legend comes from.
Reported from
- Leeds Point, Atlantic County. The origin site by tradition.
- Across the Delaware Valley, 16 to 23 January 1909. The event that made it
national. This is the well-documented part.
- Bristol, Pennsylvania and Burlington, New Jersey. Hoofprints found in snow
on roofs and in yards on the morning of 17 January 1909, on both sides of the river.
- The Wharton and Bass River state forests. Where modern reports cluster, for
the straightforward reason that this is where people walk at night.
On the record
The January 1909 week is real history and it was extraordinary. Thousands of people across southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania reported prints in fresh snow, some of them on rooftops and crossing spaces no walking animal could have. Mills and schools closed. Posses went out. The Philadelphia Zoo offered a ten thousand dollar reward.
It was also worked hard by showmen while it ran. Norman Jefferies, a publicist for the Arch Street Museum in Philadelphia, later admitted to acquiring a kangaroo, fitting it with painted wings and claws, and exhibiting it as the captured Jersey Devil to paying crowds. That is a documented hoax attached to the flap, though it came after the prints, not before them.
The state named a hockey team after it in 1982 by public vote, which is the completion of the arc every entry in this guide seems to want: from an accusation, to a panic, to a sideshow, to a logo.
A family gets called devils in print for forty years. Two centuries later the state puts it on a jersey.
Also in the guide: Mothman · Sasquatch · Chupacabra · Wendigo