The Jersey Devil: Unpicking the History Behind the Mystery
Everybody’s heard of the Jersey Devil, the crazy-looking cryptid which haunts the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. Said to resemble a screaming, flying kangaroo with an oversized horse’s head, for almost three centuries this weird monstrosity has terrified travelers on the remote tracks in the wilderness.
The eastern seaboard of the United States seems filled with such strange creatures, each with their own legends and each usually with a prosaic explanation. You could be convinced that the Mothman is a blue heron, you could be convinced that the Goatman is a… goat, but when it comes to the Jersey Devil we are dealing with something a little different.
Truth is, almost anything that spooked people alone in the wilds of the Pine Barrens was said to be the Jersey Devil. We know it flies because people have seen something flying, we know it has red eyes because other people have seen something with red eyes. It has hooves like a horse because hoofed tracks were seen nearby.
But if one creature is responsible for all these disparate (and infrequent) sightings across the centuries, that creature must look strange indeed. And things are not helped by the hoaxes.
Almost all sightings of this creature come from unreliable witnesses, either through their character or through circumstance. The reason the Devil is mainly seen at night, for example, is because one is much less likely to make an incorrect identification in the day.
And the Pine Barrens has always historically been a dangerous place. There were plenty of bandits, outlaws and other hazards which caused the area to become notorious for disappearances, more victims of the Jersey Devil.
But, unlike most other cryptids which are thought to be a remnant population or other undiscovered creature, the Jersey Devil is much more. This monster has its own origin story, and this may well be the key to unpicking the whole mystery.
Mother Leeds and her Thirteen Children
The truth is that the original Jersey Devil was not some giant flappy horse-faced monster at all. The name was first associated with a family, not because they were haunted by a creature but as a description of one of them.
It was a dark and stormy night in 1735, and Jane Leeds was in labor. The child was her 13th, and the Leeds family was hard pressed to feed and clothe their existing children.
According to the legend, in a moment of frustration upon discovery she was again pregnant, “Mother” Leeds had cried out, cursing the child as an unwanted “devil.” She would come to regret this when the child, initially born healthy, began to change.
No sooner was the child born than it began to transform, sprouting hooves, wings and a tail, its’ head elongating into something resembling a goat. It flew around the room, attacking the occupants before escaping up the chimney and flying off into the night.
Was there any truth to this story. There was a Leeds family in the area at exactly this time, and the parents Deborah and Japhet did indeed have at least twelve children: Japhet’s will, prepared in 1736, specifically references all twelve.
However the story of a cursed thirteenth child turning into a monster and flying off into the Pine Barrens to live for the next 300 years is perhaps stretching things a little beyond credulity. From where then does this story come?
It could be that the Leeds family, which at the time was prominent and powerful, had many local enemies who were willing to throw mud at their name in an effort to turn public opinion against them. This is the theory espoused by the historian Brian Regal, who believes that stories swirling around the family crystallized into a tale of a Jersey Devil.
Regal however identifies another Leeds, Daniel Leeds, as the target of these stories. Leeds was the publisher of a popular almanac, and may have attracted the ire of another prominent politician and rival almanac publisher in the area at the time: Benjamin Franklin.
Daniel Leeds had also found himself in trouble with the local population of Quakers. Leeds, himself a Quaker, had included astrological symbols in his almanac, and when confronted by local leaders over his “pagan” publication, had doubled down and published ever more esoteric and magical information. To the Quakers, this was indeed a man in league with the Devil.
In 1700 the Quaker community published a pamphlet against Daniel Leeds, denouncing him as “Satan’s Harbinger” but this didn’t stop him, and later his son, from continuing to publish their almanac for the next thirty years. And from 1728 these publications included the Leeds family crest, featuring a wyvern: a two-legged, winged monster resembling a dragon.
So the story seems to have originally come from a smear campaign against a prominent local publisher from his own community. This story, combined with the remote and inaccessible nature of the Pine Barrens, has led to every odd sighting or disappearance being associated with the local legend.
Such incidents are always isolated, seen by few people, and always without evidence. It would be easy to simply write off the stories of the Jersey Devil as simple local folklore and rumor, except for what happened in 1909.
In January of that year there were hundreds of sightings of something monstrous in southern New Jersey and around the nearby city of Philadelphia. All the reports were similar: a large, aggressive creature which appeared and attacked onlookers.
A wave of panic swept the area, and groups of armed locals roamed the area guarding against attack and seeking the monster. Schools and businesses were closed and a reward was offered by the Philadelphia zoo for its capture.
What was this creature? The sightings themselves led to many hoaxes, from people claiming to have seen the Devil to, amazingly, a kangaroo being equipped with metal claws and fake wings and being released into the wilds. It is near impossible to separate those who knowingly lied from those who saw something they could not explain.
This was obviously not the creature from the original legend. But, for a moment in 1909, there seems to have been something out there in the Pine Barrens which defied all explanation. It is with this rash of sightings that we may get closest to anything true behind the legend of the Jersey Devil.
Header Image: Over the years the Jersey Devil has built up a laundry list of features based on every strange sighting in the Pine Barrens put together. Source: Cory Brown / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
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