Jersey Devil

the United States
The New Jersey Pine Barrens: Leeds Point, Galloway Township, Atlantic County, and the Bordentown–Mount Holly belt in Burlington County

Jersey Devil — the winged monster of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, born as a political insult against the Leeds family and made into a creature by the newspapers of January 1909

Variants and names

In nineteenth-century print the name is Leeds Devil or Devil of Leeds, that is «the devil of the Leedses»: not a place name but a surname, that of Daniel Leeds's family, which also gave Leeds Point its name. The form Jersey Devil takes over in the first decades of the twentieth century and all but replaces the older one. Mayer in 1859 writes «Leeds devil» in lower case, as something the local people believe in; the «Trenton Evening Times» of 20 January 1909 still has «Leeds Devil» in quotation marks. The Philadelphia museum's handbills of January 1909 also call the thing an Australian vampire, but that is sideshow labelling, not a traditional name. I have found no form of the name in Lenape: the spellings «Popuessing» and «Drake Kill» that circulate as indigenous ancestors of the name have no lexical documentation behind them (see the note).

What is told

In the New Jersey Pine Barrens the Jersey Devil is described as a creature about the height of a man or a little less, with a horse's or goat's head, a long neck, bat wings, hind legs ending in hooves and a forked tail; it gives out a shrill cry and leaves hoof-like prints in the snow, roofs included.

The testimonies gathered by the newspapers in January 1909 do not agree with one another: some speak of a kangaroo's body, some of a collie's or a horse's head with wings two and a half feet across, some of monkey-like hands and feet. The shape of the story, on the other hand, is almost always the same: the creature crosses a settlement by night, frightens whoever sees it, does no established damage, and disappears towards the pines.

In the version current today it is Mother Leeds's thirteenth child, born deformed at Leeds Point and gone up the chimney. The older texts do not tell it that way: they speak of the Leeds devil, the devil of the Leedses, and the Leedses were a real, documented family who lived there.

What it was forthe author’s reading

For most of the eighteenth century «Leeds devil» is not an animal but an accusation: it serves to brand a family as the devil's allies inside a quarrel between neighbours over religion and politics, and it works because that is how opponents' names were worn down.

Once the accusation comes loose from the Leedses it becomes a boundary. It names the wood you do not enter at night and the people who live in it — the «Pine Rats» Mayer writes about with contempt in 1859 — and it lets those outside the Pine Barrens say that there is something not human inside.

In the twentieth century the function reverses: the same creature becomes a badge of belonging, a team name, a draw for visitors, and it is claimed precisely by the communities that used to be the object of the scorn.

Where it is attested

The earliest printed attestation scholars manage to date is W. F. Mayer, «In the Pines», in «Atlantic Monthly» 3:19 (May 1859), pp. 560-569: the author describes the pine dwellers with contempt and mentions in passing their belief in the «Leeds devil». The volume is digitised on HathiTrust, but I was unable to open the page: I am citing Brian Regal's collation.

Upstream of this lie documents of a different kind: Daniel Leeds's almanac printed by William Bradford in 1687, which the Burlington Monthly Meeting had destroyed; «The Temple of Wisdom for the Little World», 1688, of which a single copy is known to survive; Caleb Pusey's pamphlet «Satan's Harbinger Encountered», 1700, which calls Leeds Satan's herald; and Benjamin Franklin's almanac for 1733, in which Franklin predicts Titan Leeds's death for 17 October.

The shift to the form known today is documented by «The Devil was Bordentown Born», «Trenton Times», 15 July 1905, p. 2, which is the first to put on stage a Captain Leeds and a Mother Leeds given to the occult. For 1909 Regal cites «Fly Rival of 'Leeds Devil' has Jersey People Frightened», «Trenton Evening Times», 20 January 1909, p. 1. The overall reconstruction is in Brian Regal and Frank J. Esposito, «The Secret History of the Jersey Devil. How Quakers, Hucksters, and Benjamin Franklin Created a Monster», Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, reviewed by Amanda Porterfield in «Journal of American History» 106:1 (June 2019), pp. 167-168.

Caution

Grade B and not A because I have not read the chain that matters in the original. I verified the full text of Regal's 2015 essay and the record of the «Journal of American History» review, but I could open neither the 1859 «Atlantic Monthly» page on HathiTrust nor the 1905 and 1909 issues of the «Trenton Times»: the dates and pages I give are those in Regal's notes.

The date 1735 does not hold. No eighteenth-century document contains it, and there is no contemporary source calling any Leeds wife «Mother Leeds». The only archival datum is Japhet Leeds's will of 1736, which names twelve children: the legend of the thirteenth was built on that gap, after the fact. Nor does the curse hold, appearing as it does for the first time in a newspaper of 1905 and not before.

The Lenape origin does not hold. «Popuessing» is the name of a watercourse, Poquessing Creek, and the gloss «place of the dragon» has no lexical support; «Drake Kylen» goes back to the Swedish missionary Johannes Campanius in the 1640s and says nothing about dragons. This refutation, however, I have read only on a popular page, not in a linguistic study: I give it as plausible, not as established.

I have found no legislative act making the Jersey Devil New Jersey's «official state demon» in 1939, and no primary source for the ten-thousand-dollar reward attributed to the Philadelphia Zoo. The photographs and plaster casts of footprints in circulation have no traceable provenance.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.