Jersey Devil

Mother Leeds and her thirteenth

The oldest version is a curse. Mother Leeds, in the pines near what is now Leeds Point, is said to have announced during a hard thirteenth labor that this one could belong to the devil. The child was born, changed shape, and went up the chimney.

Underneath the folklore sits a family quarrel. Daniel Leeds was a Quaker almanac publisher in colonial West Jersey whose astrological content got him denounced by his own meeting as an instrument of the devil, and the Leeds family arms carried a wyvern. A neighbor turned into a monster in print tends to outlive the argument that produced him.

The week of January 16, 1909

It started with tracks in snow across South Jersey: hoofprints that crossed fences, went over rooftops, and stopped in open ground. Over the following week, sightings ran through South Jersey and into Philadelphia and the newspapers carried them daily. Close to 1,000 encounters were reported between January 16 and 23. Mills sent workers home, schools emptied, and armed posses went into the pines.

The man selling tickets

Norman Jeffries was the press agent for the Ninth and Arch Museum in Philadelphia, a dime museum short of customers. Partway through the panic he announced that the Jersey Devil had been captured, and put it on display: a kangaroo painted with stripes and fitted with a pair of mechanical wings. He admitted later that he had helped start the panic in the first place, placing reports with cooperative newspapers.

The confession covers the exhibit and a large share of the coverage. It does not cover the tracks in the snow, which came first, were reported across towns that had no reason to coordinate, and have never been explained.

Reports still come in from the Pine Barrens. New Jersey's NHL team has carried the name since 1982.

There is no single site, so Batsto Village inside Wharton State Forest is the usual anchor: a preserved ironworks settlement with a visitor center, a sawmill, a mansion, and trails running out into the pines from the parking area. Entry to the village grounds is free and parking carries a seasonal fee.

The Pine Barrens are far larger and emptier than most visitors expect, cell coverage is patchy across much of the forest, and the sand roads that look like shortcuts on a map are where two-wheel-drive cars get stuck. Staying on marked trails and carrying a paper map is ordinary practice here rather than excessive caution.

Spring and fall are the comfortable seasons. Summer brings mosquitoes and greenhead flies in numbers that shorten most walks.