THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Jersey Devil is a patchwork monster: a long horse- or goat-like face, leathery bat wings, thin hind legs ending in cloven hooves, and a forked tail, all announced by a piercing shriek. Its haunt is the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, more than a million acres of sandy pine forest that has sheltered smugglers, fugitives, and isolated villages since colonial times.
The standard origin tale is set in 1735 at Leeds Point on the forest's edge. Mother Leeds, finding herself pregnant a thirteenth time, cursed the child to be a devil. The baby was born normal, then transformed before the household's eyes, sprouting wings and hooves before screaming up the chimney and into the pines. The story shadows a real family: Daniel Leeds, a late-seventeenth-century almanac writer, feuded with his Quaker neighbors over astrology, and the Leeds family crest happens to bear winged dragon-like creatures. An 1859 Atlantic Monthly sketch of the region, "In the Pines," already records local dread of the Leeds Devil.
The creature's most famous week ran from January 16 to 23, 1909, when dozens of towns between Philadelphia and Trenton reported strange hoofprints in the snow, shapes on rooftops, and a winged thing at a trolley stop; some schools closed, mills shut early, and the Philadelphia Zoo posted a $10,000 reward for a live specimen. It has since settled into the role of New Jersey's unofficial mascot, lending its name to the NHL's New Jersey Devils when the franchise arrived in the state in 1982.
