Laura Wright 
For nearly three centuries, something has supposedly lived among the pines of southern New Jersey.
It has been described as having the head of a horse or goat.
Its feet end in hooves.
Leathery wings spread from its back.
Some witnesses give it claws, horns, a long tail, and glowing eyes.
Others agree on almost none of those details.
But there is one sound that appears again and again in the stories.
A terrible scream coming from somewhere in the darkness.
Today, the creature is known throughout America as the Jersey Devil.
Once, however, people called it something else.
The Leeds Devil.
And the story of how that name became attached to a monster may be almost as strange as the monster itself.
Mother Leeds
The most famous version of the legend begins in 1735.
Somewhere near the New Jersey Pine Barrens lived a woman remembered simply as Mother Leeds.
She already had twelve children.
Then she discovered she was pregnant again.
According to the legend, the exhausted woman reacted to the news with a curse.
Her thirteenth child, she declared, could be the Devil.
Months later, during a violent storm, Mother Leeds went into labor.
At first, nothing seemed particularly unusual.
A child was born.
Then it changed.
The Thirteenth Child
The details differ considerably depending upon who tells the story.
In some versions, the baby was born normal and transformed moments later.
Its face elongated.
Hooves appeared.
A tail emerged.
Wings unfolded from its back.
The infant became an impossible combination of human being and animal.
Then it screamed.
The creature attacked those around it before escaping through the chimney and disappearing into the surrounding wilderness.
The thirteenth child of Mother Leeds had become the monster of the Pine Barrens.
Other versions are considerably darker.
Mother Leeds herself becomes a witch.
The child’s father becomes Satan.
Sometimes the creature kills the midwife or members of the family before escaping.
Those details vary because there has never really been one Jersey Devil story.
There have been generations of them.
Into the Pine Barrens
The landscape couldn’t have been better suited to the legend.
The Pine Barrens cover an enormous portion of southern New Jersey.
The region contains forests, wetlands, sandy roads, abandoned settlements, and large stretches of country that historically remained sparsely populated.
A strange animal glimpsed between trees could disappear almost immediately.
A scream heard at night might come from somewhere impossible to locate.
Something could theoretically remain hidden in the pines for years.
Or centuries.
And according to the legend, that is exactly what the Leeds Devil did.
Who Was Mother Leeds?
Attempts have naturally been made to identify the woman behind the story.
One candidate is Deborah Leeds, wife of Japhet Leeds.
There is a tantalizing piece of historical evidence behind the identification.
Japhet Leeds’s 1736 will names twelve children.
The family also lived in the Leeds Point area associated with the later legend.
That certainly makes Deborah interesting.
It does not prove she was Mother Leeds.
Nor does it prove there ever was a mysterious thirteenth child.
In fact, there may be a completely different explanation for why the name Leeds became associated with the Devil.
And that trail leads back farther than 1735.
Daniel Leeds
The Leeds family had been prominent in colonial New Jersey.
Daniel Leeds was a surveyor, landowner, almanac publisher, and writer.
He was also controversial.
Leeds became embroiled in bitter religious and political disputes with his fellow Quakers. His writings included subjects his opponents regarded as inappropriate or even blasphemous, including astrology.
The dispute became ugly.
Religious disagreement turned into personal attack.
Daniel Leeds was increasingly portrayed by his opponents as someone associated with darkness, occultism, and evil.
The family name was acquiring a sinister reputation long before anyone began describing a winged monster.
Satan’s Harbinger
Daniel Leeds eventually broke with the Quakers.
His political loyalties also made him unpopular.
He supported the British Crown in a region where attitudes toward royal authority were changing dramatically.
His opponents attacked him in print.
The dispute became the sort of poisonous religious and political quarrel at which the eighteenth century excelled.
Eventually, Daniel Leeds was characterized in language connecting him with Satan.
Then his son entered the story.
His name was Titan Leeds.
And Titan managed to quarrel with one of the most famous men in American history.
Benjamin Franklin Versus Titan Leeds
Titan Leeds continued publishing the family’s almanac.
His competitor was Benjamin Franklin, publisher of Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Franklin decided to have some fun at Titan’s expense.
Using astrological calculations, Franklin predicted that Titan Leeds would die.
Titan didn’t.
Naturally, Titan objected.
Franklin responded with a joke that he continued for years: if Titan Leeds claimed to be alive, Franklin suggested, then the person protesting couldn’t possibly be Titan.
The real Titan Leeds was dead.
This fellow must be an impostor or ghost.
It was satire.
But once again, the Leeds name was being connected publicly with something supernatural.
The Leeds Dragon
There is another extraordinary detail.
The Leeds family crest included a wyvern, a dragonlike creature with wings.
Titan Leeds used the family emblem on his almanacs beginning in the eighteenth century.
Look at the later Jersey Devil.
Wings.
Claws.
An elongated animal body.
A dragonlike appearance.
Now combine that image with a family already attacked as blasphemous, politically suspect, ghostly, and associated with Satan.
A very different possibility emerges.
Perhaps the Jersey Devil didn’t begin with a monstrous baby at all.
Perhaps it began with people demonizing the Leeds family.
Over generations, political insult and religious hostility may have transformed into folklore.
The Leeds family became associated with a devil.
Eventually, the Devil of Leeds became something that lived in the woods.
It is an intriguing theory.
But even that doesn’t explain everything.
Because people eventually began claiming that they actually saw the creature.
The Leeds Devil Is Seen
By the nineteenth century, stories about a strange creature associated with the Leeds name were circulating in southern New Jersey.
One of the most famous supposed witnesses was Joseph Bonaparte, elder brother of Napoleon Bonaparte and former king of Spain.
After Napoleon’s downfall, Joseph lived for years in New Jersey.
Later tradition claims that while hunting near his estate, he encountered the Leeds Devil.
It is a magnificent story.
Unfortunately, historians have been unable to locate contemporary documentation from Bonaparte confirming it.
The same problem surrounds another famous alleged encounter involving naval hero Stephen Decatur.
The stories are old.
The documentation is elusive.
That is going to become a recurring problem with the Jersey Devil.
The Devil of Leeds
By the later nineteenth century, however, printed references become easier to find.
An 1887 newspaper account described sightings of a winged creature identified as the Devil of Leeds, suggesting that the legend was already familiar in the region.
This is important.
The monster wasn’t simply invented during the twentieth century.
Some form of the Leeds Devil tradition existed earlier.
But the creature people imagine today really took shape after one extraordinary episode.
In 1909, the Devil apparently came out of hiding.
And New Jersey temporarily lost its mind.
The Jersey Devil Panic of 1909
During January 1909, reports of a bizarre creature exploded across New Jersey and the surrounding region.
People claimed to see something flying overhead.
Others discovered mysterious tracks.
Strange footprints appeared in snow.
Witnesses described an animal that seemed unlike anything they recognized.
Reports spread into Pennsylvania and beyond.
Newspapers eagerly followed the story.
Schools supposedly closed.
People armed themselves.
Posses searched for the creature.
For approximately a week, the Jersey Devil became a genuine public sensation.
And something important happened during that outbreak.
The monster acquired a recognizable body.
What Does the Jersey Devil Look Like?
Earlier descriptions varied enormously.
After 1909, a more standardized Jersey Devil emerged.
It usually possessed some combination of:
a horse or goatlike head,
a long neck,
batlike wings,
short front limbs,
powerful rear legs,
cloven hooves,
a long or forked tail,
and an elongated body.
Witnesses also described an extraordinarily loud, frightening scream.
The result looks almost as though someone assembled a creature from whatever parts happened to be lying around.
Horse.
Bat.
Goat.
Kangaroo.
Dragon.
And something vaguely human.
That became the Jersey Devil recognized today.
Tracks in the Snow
The footprints reported during the 1909 panic became particularly mysterious.
Tracks supposedly appeared in places where an ordinary animal should have had difficulty traveling.
They crossed yards.
They continued across roads.
Some accounts claimed they appeared upon rooftops or passed over obstacles without interruption.
People followed them until they disappeared.
Then the newspapers reported another sighting somewhere else.
The Devil seemed to be everywhere.
Whether all those witnesses were seeing the same thing is another question entirely.
Explanations
Attempts to explain the Jersey Devil have produced almost as many possibilities as sightings.
Large birds have been suggested.
So have owls.
Deer glimpsed under unusual circumstances.
Misidentified livestock.
Hoaxes.
Mass excitement.
One particularly popular candidate has been the sandhill crane, a tall bird with an impressive wingspan and a startling call.
None of these explanations has ended the legend.
Perhaps no single explanation could.
If people have been reporting unrelated animals, hoaxes, strange sounds, and frightening nighttime encounters for generations, there may never have been one phenomenon requiring one solution.
The Jersey Devil could be many different things sharing one name.
A Monster Created by Folklore
That may be the most interesting possibility of all.
The Jersey Devil didn’t necessarily begin as a cryptid.
It may have begun as an insult.
A controversial colonial family becomes associated with Satan.
Their coat of arms contains a winged dragon.
Stories circulate about a Leeds Devil.
A legend develops about Mother Leeds giving birth to a monstrous thirteenth child.
People begin reporting strange creatures in the Pine Barrens.
Then newspapers turn a burst of sightings in 1909 into a sensation.
Each generation inherits the story and adds something.
Eventually, nobody remembers which part came first.
That is how folklore grows.
The Jersey Devil
Whether anything genuinely unexplained has ever wandered through the Pine Barrens is impossible to determine from the legend alone.
People have certainly reported strange encounters.
Some undoubtedly believed what they saw.
But the historical story behind the Jersey Devil may be even more remarkable than a surviving unknown animal.
A family quarrels with its neighbors.
Religion enters the dispute.
Politics makes it worse.
Almanac publishers insult one another.
Benjamin Franklin declares his competitor dead as a joke.
A dragon appears on a family crest.
Generations pass.
Somewhere along the way, the Leeds family becomes the Leeds Devil.
Then the Devil acquires wings.
Hooves.
A horse’s head.
A scream.
And a home deep within the Pine Barrens.
By 1909, it was no longer merely a family legend.
It belonged to New Jersey.
And more than a century later, it still does.
Perhaps somewhere beyond the last house, where the road narrows and the pines close together, something occasionally screams in the darkness.
Maybe it’s an owl.
Maybe it’s a fox.
Maybe it’s something else.
But after three centuries of storytelling, anyone who hears it already knows its name.
The Jersey Devil.
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