The Many Origin Stories
The Jersey Devil has been haunting New Jersey for over 250 years. According to Weird NJ, the Jersey Devil is New Jersey’s oldest, most enduring, and most important folklore.
There are many variations of this creature’s origin. While specifics vary, the story’s setting remains constant: the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
“Pine Barrens” is the ecological term that describes the unique ecosystem and natural treasure that covers most of southern New Jersey. This area is filled with acidic, low-nutrient water and soils, hence the barren in the pines. However, plenty of plants and wildlife have adapted to the challenging conditions in the pines so they aren’t really barren. This includes the Jersey Devil himself!
There is a specific place within the Pine Barrens where all the origin stories originate. It’s called Leeds Point in Galloway Township in Atlantic County.
The most popular origin story tells the tale of the Leeds family. In the early 1700s, Deborah Smith immigrated from England to marry Daniel Leeds (or Japhet Leeds, the first name of Mr. Leeds varies. He’s not important). Deborah Smith became Mrs. Leeds. She quickly became Mother Leeds after giving birth to 12 children.
Leeds is the name of one of Jersey’s earliest settlers and many descendants of the Leeds family can still be found throughout the state to this day.
According to the legend, Mother Leeds was not living her best life. Besides the stinky living conditions of the 1700s, Mr. Leeds was an alcoholic who made little effort to provide for her and he didn’t take care of his children at all. So, when she found herself pregnant with her 13th child, it was understandable that she was a little disappointed and stressed.
She then cried out, “If I have a thirteenth child, let it be the devil!” There are many variations of what she said since the story has been passed down for centuries, but the “let it be the devil” portion is included in every retelling.
On one cold February night in 1735, she went into labor, not even thinking of the curse she cried out months prior. Mother Leeds and her midwives were in one room delivering the baby while her husband and other children were in another room.
Rumor has it that the baby was born a perfectly healthy baby boy. However, the curse became a reality and the baby started to change within minutes. It transformed from a healthy newborn into a hideous, unearthly creature.
It flew around the room, some stories say it immediately flew up the chimney and into the woods, others say it flew at its mother and the midwives. It clawed and bit them. It tore some of them, including its mother, apart limb from limb. The monster knocked down the door and traveled to the next room where its father and siblings cowered in fear. It attacked them, killing as many as it could.
Those who survived reported that the creature flew up the chimney and destroyed it on the way out. It escaped into the darkness, leaving rubble and blood in its wake.
Another version of the story is that someone was trying to convince Mother Leeds to convert from Quaker to Protestant. When she refused, the clergyman told her that her next child would be an offspring of Satan.
Another story tells the tale of a young girl living in Leeds Point who had fallen in love with a British soldier. The British had come to the area for privateers which I learned are just pirates who work for the government. When the Battle of Chestnut Neck happened in 1778, the people of Leeds Point opposed the two getting together and called it treason. They cursed her and she later gave birth to a child known as the Leeds or Jersey Devil.
The final version of the story is sad and the most realistic. People in the 1700s were unaware and ignorant about childbirth and child development. People often believed that a child born with disabilities was the result of a curse from God or a demonic being. The story of the Jersey Devil may have stemmed from superstitions and judgment. Over time, the tale was twisted into a story of a devil haunting the woods.
While descriptions of the creature vary, he is most commonly described as having the body of a kangaroo or horse, the head of a dog, the face of a horse, large leathery wings, horns or antlers similar to those of a deer, a forked reptilian tail, and talon-like claws.
Encounters with the Devil
There have been countless stories passed down about the devil’s doings. The devil raided chicken coops and farms, destroyed crops, and killed animals.
Those who have seen and made reports of the monster include police officers, government officials, and local businesses and homeowners. People traveling down the Garden State Parkway or the Atlantic City Expressway have reported seeing the devil or some sort of mysterious creature.
The creature first appeared in print in The Atlantic in May 1859. Hannah Butler is one of the locals mentioned in the article. She said she had a “personal interview” with the Jersey Devil while strolling in the woods during a lightning storm.
She was not the first to notice him. He has been heard “howling and screaming” at night since 1835.
Some of the earliest sightings included Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother and former King of Spain. According to the legend, he was hunting alone in the woods near his New Jersey estate when he saw some peculiar tracks on the ground. They looked like they belonged to a horse or a donkey, but the animal was walking only on its hind legs. He followed the tracks until they ended abruptly as if the animal had jumped into the air and flown off.
A strange hissing noise then came from behind him. He whirled around and came face to face with an animal he had never seen before. It had a long neck, wings, legs like a crane with horse hooves at the end, stumpy arms with paws, and a face like a horse or a camel. He froze, and for a minute neither of them moved or even breathed. Then, the creature hissed again and flew away.
Bonaparte later told his friends what happened, and they filled him in on the local legend. Until he returned to Europe, Bonaparte is said to have kept a sharp eye out for the creature whenever he was in the woods. He wanted to kill it and take the body as a trophy. I hate men.
The most infamous Jersey Devil haunts occurred in January 1909 when over 30 sightings were reported in one week. It started in Trenton, NJ when Councilman E.P. Weeden claimed to have been woken up by flapping wings outside his bedroom window. He also reported to have found cloven footprints in the snow.
Not even a day later, more reports of strange tracks in the snow started emerging from all across the region including large cities like Camden and Philadelphia. The mysterious footprints went over and under fences, through fields and backyards, and across the rooftops of houses.
Panic immediately began to spread and groups of hunters and trackers formed. It was reported that bloodhounds refused to follow the creature’s trail, which terrified hunters. These Jersey Devil sightings caused schools to close throughout southern New Jersey and Philadelphia. Mills in the Pine Barrens were forced to close because workers refused to leave their homes and go through the woods to get to work.
Published police and newspaper accounts during this week took the story of the devil from folk belief to authentic folk legend.
During this week alone, the devil was spotted across the Delaware River from NJ to Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Here are just a few of the reported sightings from that week:
Eyewitnesses spotted the beast in Camden, NJ, and Bristol, PA. In both cities, police shot at it but did not manage to bring it down.
A few days later it reappeared in Camden, attacked a social club, and then flew away. A few hours before, it was in Haddon Heights, NJ terrorizing a trolley car full of passengers before it flew away. Witnesses claimed that it looked like a large flying kangaroo.
Another trolley car-full of people saw it in Burlington, NJ when it scurried across the tracks in front of their car.
It appeared on the roof of a house in West Collingswood, NJ. It was described as an ostrich-like creature. Firefighters used their hose, but it attacked them and then flew away.
It reappeared later in the week in Camden, where a local woman found the beast attempting to eat her dog. She hit it with a broomstick and it flew away.
People reported that their livestock, particularly their chickens, were being slaughtered.
While there has not since been another week like the one in January 1909, numerous sightings of the Jersey Devil have continued to be reported. The most common report is strange, unidentifiable tracks in the soil in desolate areas of the Pine Barrens.
Some reports claim that they are the footprints of a strange bird. Others say that they closely resemble hoof prints, although whatever it is, it walks on just two legs. It’s walking upright, like a human.
It’s less frequent; however, people have caught glimpses of ol’ JD himself within the past 100 years.
While researching this topic, I found this insane show called MonsterQuest which is essentially Ghost Adventures but searching for monsters. It’s just as dramatic and absurd as that show. This episode centers around the Winkelmann family who encountered the devil. The family lives near Wharton State Park in the Pine Barrens. In January 2004, Laurie Winkelmann went outside with her son to turn off the Christmas lights.
When she looked at her son, he looked terrified. He pointed to something up in the tree behind Laurie. The beast swooped down and Laurie ran with her son into the house. She heard the creature on the roof. The next morning they saw footprints in the snow, exactly where she said they were on the roof. The tracks were unbelievably big, so they took pictures and brought them to the NJ Office of Fish and Wildlife. They couldn’t explain the footprints. According to officers, the animal that made those tracks would’ve weighed around 200 to 400 pounds.
It’s hard to tell if this happened or if this show is all for theatrics because they hook the two witnesses to a polygraph test. MonsterQuest wants to confirm they are telling the truth about what they saw. It’s insane.
They also put together a 60-person team to investigate the Pine Barrens. I’m not joking. The search started at 6 a.m. and they take it extremely seriously. It’s almost as if they are looking for a missing person.
There are retired NYPD officers who have nothing better to do with their pensions involved with this show and they interview someone from the NJ Audubon Society about the incident at the Winkelmann household. This person lists about 15 animals that it could’ve been.
They also have another expert explain that there are a lot of similarities between the reported sightings of the Jersey Devil and the hammerhead bat which is indigenous to Africa.
I watched another video posted on the Real History YouTube Channel. This film crew interviews Gerri Plumeri who encountered the beast in 1964. Gerri was in the car with two of her friends, coming home from the Jersey Shore. They were in a convertible with the top down and she heard a blood-curdling scream. She looked at a tree and saw two red lights, which she later realized were its eyes.
It began swinging from tree to tree. Then it flew in front of their car and they slammed on their brakes. All three people in the car stared at the creature. They were too scared to scream and they were too scared to back the car up.
She claimed the monster was 8 feet tall with the head of a horse and horns. His long arms had claws on the end of them. The body was decrepit and similar to a horse, but it was up on two legs and the legs on the back were crooked. He sprouted his wings and flew into the forest.
Rochelle Christopher is a local historian who was interviewed for the video. She explained that many cults believe in the New Jersey Devil. Since the Leeds family is the most common origin of the creature, many people want the house. The owner of the house wants NOTHING to do with trespassers or anyone interested in using the house to conjure up any spirits.
I am going to rapid-fire through some more sightings and facts about the Jersey Devil before we start wrapping this up:
This is just one of the many first-hand accounts published by Weird NJ:
“Let me tell you of a sighting of the Jersey Devil. I was driving up Route 9 in Bayville at around 10:00 pm. There were two cars in front of me and we were traveling about 35 mph. To the right of Route 9 is a mini-mall-type building with woods behind it. To the right is all woods. All of a sudden I saw this BIG thing running across Rt. 9! It looked like one of the classic pictures of the Jersey Devil. It had no tail, no fur, its ribs showed, and it had a long odd head with short ears that laid flat. It looked almost 10 feet tall! I noticed it because the first car stepped on its brakes, as did the second car. When I looked ahead I saw this thing galloping across Rt. 9 and straight into the woods. I was not really scared because it did not register yet. I stopped to mail something in the mailbox, about 300 feet from the main road, and I saw a child’s shirt, shorts, and one sneaker lying on the ground! I mailed my letter, ran into my car, and laid rubber all the way home! I was certain that I had seen the Jersey Devil. No one believes me. They say it was a deer. I have never seen a “deer” that big, that fast, or that weird looking in my life. What is really creepy is that the other two people driving in front of me stepped on their brakes, so they must have seen it too.” –Sonny Z.
In 1870, a fisherman in Long Beach claimed he saw the Jersey Devil serenading a mermaid or maybe the mermaid was serenading him.
In 1939, the Jersey Devil was designated the official New Jersey State Demon. The country’s only demon.
One version of the story included in the 1976 book The Jersey Devil written by James McCloy and Ray Miller Jr. is that this monstrous creature haunted the pinelands after its birth until the 1740s when an exorcism banished it for one hundred years. In 1840, “he did reappear right on schedule.”
In 1978, two teenage boys were ice-skating near Chatsworth in the Barrens and smelled an odor like “dead fish” and saw two red eyes staring at them. They didn’t stay around to investigate but claimed they had encountered the Jersey Devil.
There have been plenty of bounties put out for the creature, dead or alive. In the 1800s, Superintendent Robert D. Carson, of the Philadelphia Zoo, offered a $10,000 reward for the creature’s capture.
At one point, as much as $100,000 was offered for the capture of the Jersey Devil.
According to the Asbury Park Press, a man living in Howell Township encountered the Jersey Devil in 1981. He described the creature as having a furry body, huge feet with three toes on each one, large teeth, and stood about six feet tall.
Several people have claimed, not to have seen the Devil, but to have heard him, rampaging through woods, or emitting blood-curdling cries.
After the 1909 appearances, the scientific community was asked for possible explanations for what the hell everybody saw. Reportedly, science professors from Philadelphia and experts from the Smithsonian Institution thought the devil was a prehistoric creature from the Jurassic period.
New York scientists thought it may be a marsupial carnivore. However, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia could not locate any record of species resembling the Jersey Devil.
However, others report it could be the Sandy Hill crane. An animal that stands four feet high and can be up to 15 pounds. It has an 80-inch wingspan and is known to be ferocious when cornered.
Because of the history and tales passed down generations, the Jersey Devil has spread throughout the state and is embraced by many. It has even been largely commercialized, obviously. It’s been portrayed in toys and t-shirts. There have been countless books, movies, and shows that feature the Jersey Devil.
Most famously, the Jersey Devil has inspired the name of the state’s NHL team.
A Lesson to be Learned
Now that I have gone over the history and told some stories about the Jersey Devil, I would like to highlight the underlying lesson to be learned through this folklore.
I was inspired to look into the Jersey Devil after finding an article on JSTOR Daily titled, “Birthing the Jersey Devil.” The description for the article is as follows: “For centuries, a fork-tailed mythical creature that lurks in the pinelands of the Garden State has served as a reminder of the horrors that result when reproductive freedoms are destroyed.”
The author, Katherine Churchill, explains that this folklore falls under “gynaehorror.” This type of horror was introduced by film and media scholar Erin Harrington who explains that this horror is concerned with all aspects of female reproductive horror. From reproductive and sexual organs to virginity, pregnancy, birth, motherhood, and menopause.
This makes me feel a little bit better about Stephen King. Guess he isn’t just a pervert.
The author of this article uses the film Rosemary’s Baby as an example of this and connects the Jersey Devil to Rosemary’s baby. Both stories criticize forced birth.
The events in the devil’s origin story supposedly took place in the 1700s, but the myth of the Jersey Devil began to circulate in the 19th century when American reproductive rights were under attack by the legal system and the medical establishment.
Abortion was being brought into the public eye and the Jersey Devil’s origin story’s emotional backbone is an unwanted pregnancy, a mother’s anger, and a curse.
The story of the Jersey Devil falls under what folklore scholars Joan Radner and Susan Lanser refer to as a “coded” tale. Coded tales are stories that encourage multiple, even contradictory, interpretations to “protect the creator from the dangerous consequences of directly stating particular messages.”
This is a hallmark of feminist folklore since it allows the storyteller to convey ideas that are controversial or forbidden by camouflaging morals in ambiguity, ensuring the story reads differently to different audiences. This is the original if you know, you know.
For example, listeners who are hostile toward reproductive care may see Mother Leeds as self-centered or uncaring and the person who is to be blamed for the creation of the monster. However, others may see her as a victim of circumstance. The circumstance was a lack of reproductive care that would’ve allowed her to control whether or not she had a thirteenth child.
With limited means for preventing pregnancies, some 19th-century New Jersey women turned to abortion as a means of controlling reproduction. Before the 1840s, abortion early in pregnancy was seen as an acceptable means of birth control long tolerated under English common law.
Hellebore, pennyroyal, tansy, and other herbs had been used for centuries to treat “blocked menses” and end pregnancies before what was referred to as “quickening,” when a fetus first moves. During the 1830s and 1840s, newspapers ran ads for “female monthly” and “lunar” pills to end pregnancies, and new devices for surgical abortion were invented.
However, abortion quickly came under increasing scrutiny across the US. At the time, white men dominated medical schools, associations, and other sections of medical practice. In New Jersey, degreed doctors competed for business with self-taught herbalists, such as James Still, whose success in South Jersey as the “Black Doctor of the Pines” made white physicians very angry.
As part of a movement to limit medical practice to those with official credentials (aka white men practicing white man’s medicine), university-trained doctors stoked fears about the safety and ethics of abortion, which had long been the domain of black and female healers, midwives, and other seasoned but unlicensed practitioners of gynecology.
In 1849, New Jersey instituted its first law against performing an abortion.
In newspapers, abortion providers were often slandered as “evil” and devil-like. One 1872 book, Satan in Society, referred to abortion as “a monstrous heresy.” An illustration from the National Police Gazette depicted real-life abortion provider Madame Restell as a dour brunette accompanied by a winged, baby-eating devil. This baby-eating devil resembles the Jersey Devil.
When the Jersey Devil first began to entertain listeners in parlors and dinner tables, abortion was effectively criminalized for the first time in the United States. Due to stigma, legal persecution, and other mechanisms of silence, there are few 19th-century materials offering perspectives of pregnant women on forced birth.
While the spooky stories and devious adventures of the Jersey Devil are fun to share around the campfire, we need to remember the lesson to be learned from this folklore.
I would like to wrap this up with a quote from Katherine Churchill’s JSTOR article because I really couldn’t say it better myself:
“A society without choice is monstrous - just ask Mother Leeds.”
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