Episode 32 - The Jersey Devil

You came here often. To think, or explore. To get away.

The trees stretched in every direction. The path itself was a narrow, meandering trail. It wound up and throughout the barrens, avoiding the lower and wetter portions as best as it could. You knew the area well, even if you didn’t know this particular path. It was a new one you were trying. So far it was a lovely day. The sun was out, the path was clear with the exception of a few small patches of mud.

It was a place of seclusion. A place far from the world, far from the cities, far from the noise.

It was peaceful, and although it was beautiful, it had a haunting desolation to it.

The Pines, or the Pinelands, in New Jersey are famed for many reasons. They have rare flora, including orchids and carnivorous plants, pitch pines and plants that rely on the area’s frequent fires. It began to develop an infamous reputation among European colonists when they discovered to their dismay that they could not cultivate crops there. And that reputation gave it the name it is most well-known by.

The Pine Barrens.

The Pine Barrens remain an important and strange place. Distinctly rural and undisturbed. It sits, surrounded by metropolitan cities, and yet, it remains a harbor of the natural, and if you believe the stories, the supernatural.

For if the stories are true, the pinelands are stalked by a terrible creature, a thing from the worst of nightmares. The Pine Barrens are stalked by the Jersey Devil.

The stories of the Jersey Devil begin centuries ago, in 1735. Also known as the Leeds Devil, this creature is, in my opinion, one of the strangest cryptids that stalks the wilderness of North America.

The Jersey Devil is described as a bipedal creature with the head of a goat or horse, small clawed arms, cloven hooves, large bat wings, and a whip-like forked tail.

It’s a fast thing, seen more often as a flicker at the side of your eye than straight on. But according to the stories, even if you can’t quite see it, you can certainly hear its famed blood-curdling scream.

I am Andrew Eagle, and I invite you to come with me Through the Veil and join me in exploring the Pine Barrens and its most famous inhabitant, The Jersey Devil.

You were leaving a particularly open portion of the trail, a stretch where the trees fell away and the trail wound through a small patch of hills.

It meandered along to the top of some of the hills, and then made its way slowly back into the woods on the opposite side of the clearing. The tree-less patch offered a series of good views, as the path reached the crest of several hills. Each hilltop offered the chance tot look out over the barrens. At least a small portion of them.

You had paused for a light lunch, on the last hilltop, and, having finished your meal, prepared to continue. The point where the trail branched was coming up soon. One branch became a loop that ran back to the trailhead, the other went deeper into the barrens.

As you neared the tree-line, you heard a strange sound. A high-pitched whining echoed across the air of the Barrens. It was unlike anything you had ever heard. You quickly started looking for the source, but couldn’t catch sight of anything. Curiosity began to rear its head, and you decide you need to know what’s causing that sound if you can figure it out. So you hurry along the path, keeping an eye into the woods.

The sound fades after a time, but then, as you arrive at the branch in the trail, and you hear the strange whining scream again, your eye catches on movement in the tree. It is moving fast, whatever it is, running through the underbrush.

And it is strange, the shape of it does not make sense. You cannot identify it. It moves on two legs, but they are lithe and quick. And if you didn’t know any better, it had the head of a goat or maybe a horse. Nothing about it made sense.

Two simultaneous thoughts occurred to you. The first, you obviously didn’t get a good look at it, there is nothing like that living in the pine barrens or anywhere else. It was a totally impossible creature.  The second, you needed to know more. To see it clearly and understand what you had witnessed.

The story of the Jersey Devil is an old one. One of the oldest cryptids of the United States.

Its tale begins in 1735. Several possible origins are offered, each stranger than the last. One of the most common is referred to as Mother Leeds’ Child. The story goes that a well-known resident of the Pine Barrens, Jane Leeds, had 12 children. Mother Leeds, as she was referred to by many in the area, discovered she was pregnant with what would be her 13th child, and she cursed the child, claiming indeed that the child would be the devil.

In 1735, on a quintessential dark and stormy night, Mother Leeds gave birth to a perfectly normal baby. However, the child quickly grew and transformed into a towering creature with hooves, wings, and a forked tail. It growled and screamed before disappearing up the chimney and into the barrens.

In some versions of the myth, Mother Leeds was a witch, and her 13th child was fathered by the devil himself.

Another origin links the creature to the widely known, and widely disliked, Leeds family in the region. In particular, Titan Leeds, who ran an almanac that competed with Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, was throughout his life described as a devil and a ghost. And ended up with a dire reputation in the region.

These origins developed into a popular and strange oral history of the Leeds Devil, eventually taking on the more popular name the Jersey Devil in the 1800s.

You lost sight of the thing quickly. It vanished into the underbrush. So you hurried in that direction, along the path that led deeper into the barrens, deeper into the wilderness.

Whatever the creature was, it was fast. You quickly fell behind, trying your best to follow the sound that echoed across the quiet barrens. The weird whiny and high-pitched scream.

The day was wearing on toward the proper afternoon. And really, you were beginning to think you may need to turn back. To abandon this pursuit and hope to catch sight of the strange creature some other time.

But each time you were nearly convinced you’d lost the creature, you’d hear it again. Close enough to push on for a little while longer.

You had not caught another glimpse of it since the initial one, only hearing it. Finally, you were done. You were worn out, and your feet were tired. You hadn’t heard anything for a good long while, and you decided it was time to head back. You began walking back the way you came. That’s when you heard the creature’s scream again. This time from directly ahead of you.

Then the figure burst from the trees, not along the ground. Not running, or jumping, or crawling. The creature burst beyond the tops of the trees, with the heavy flapping of its bat-like wings, and a quick whipping motion with its strange forked tail.

Whatever this impossible creature was, it could fly. It vanished quickly from your view, as it glided behind the treetops and into the distance.

Sightings of the Jersey Devil have spanned centuries. With its roots in the supernatural, the Devil was a frightening figure on its own. But it was not solely responsible for the frightening reputation of the Pine Barrens. During the 1700s and into the 1800s, the people of the area, known as pineys, became known as the dregs and outcasts of society.

And while some of this reputation was warranted, the area was plagued by brigands and highwaymen, they were greatly exaggerated. These stories are perhaps the reason the Jersey Devil became such a popular representation of the strange and inhospitable land.

A particularly well-known sighting occurred in 1909. Newspapers around New Jersey, and into Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, published hundreds of sightings of the creature. There were claims that a trolley car was attacked by the creature, and that police in the area had opened fire on it with absolutely no effect.

Eventually, the panic and fear caused by the reports resulted in a number of schools and businesses temporarily closing. Groups of hunters roamed about the barrens trying to find and kill the Devil.

And according to rumor, the Philadelphia Zoo offered a $10,000 reward for the creature. This reward of course encouraged a number of hoaxes.

You were hurrying at this point. Not only with the hope of seeing the creature, or perhaps the fear of the same, but also because the daylight was fading, and you had a distance left to go before you arrived back at the trail-head.

You had not planned on this hike taking the better part of the day. You were hungry and thirsty, and tired.

You reached the fork in the path. Backtracking the way you had come would be slightly shorter than finishing the loop, so you decide to go that direction, back toward the clearing and the hills.

You did your best to put the creature from your mind, hoping really, that you weren’t still on the trail in the dark, with that thing out here too. You focused on the path. On making it out of the woods. So when you broke from the tree line into that hilly clearing, you didn’t really even notice, and when you crested the first hill, you barely lifted your eyes to the rapidly darkening view.

It wasn’t until you reached the second hilltop that you broke your focus. A scream pierced the evening sky. Too nearby to ignore. You jumped and started looking around. And you saw it. The next hilltop over. The creature. Standing tall, you saw the creature in vivid detail. The strange curling goat’s horns and head, the curved claws of the creature’s hands, the hoofed feet. But stranger still was the forked tail, and the massive bat wings.

It was a creature of nightmare. And as you stared at it, stopped in your tracks, it looked toward you. And with a piercing scream, launched itself into the air. In a flash of motion, it was gone again. You were stunned for a while, but eventually, you finished your hike, and went home, still trying to understand what it was you had seen.

Like most cryptids, the Jersey Devil has had its fair share of hoaxes. During the famed rash of sightings in 1909, a series of photographs showing footprints of the creature were published.

These were eventually proven to be horse hoofs, and according to one author, someone did admit to faking the footprints.

However, the most famous, and particularly excessive hoax was performed by Norman Jeffries. He worked as a publicist for a Philadelphia museum, and upon hearing that the museum may close if attendance could not be boosted, Jeffries turned to an elaborate hoax.

He decided that the Jersey Devil was the thing to pull in the best crowds.

Jeffries arranged an exhibit, mostly containing newspaper articles and photographs related to the Devil. Some of which he faked. But the star of the show was the captured Jersey Devil. Jeffries and one of his associates purchased a kangaroo from a circus, attached artificial claws and bat wings to the animal, and declared to the public they had captured the Devil.

It wasn’t until twenty years later that Jeffries admitted to the hoax and told the newspapers what his captive devil had been.

The Jersey Devil is such a strange creature. Everything from its origins to its appearance to its behaviors are at odds with the natural world.

It is a creature steeped in mystery and the supernatural. A creature whose story spawned panic and superstition in a region without a single piece of hard evidence.

Although it is far from the only folklore local to the pine barrens, it is by far the most well-known. The only story from the region that evolved from oral tradition and folklore through to popular culture and phenomena.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Through the Veil. I hope you enjoyed. I encourage you to subscribe to receive new episodes weekly wherever you listen as we continue our exploration of folklore, myth, and magic.

If you are enjoying the show, and have subjects you would like to hear covered, please email me at throughtheveilpodcast@gmail.com or reach out on Twitter, you can find me @ThroughVeil.

As always, thank you, for listening.