Imagine, sitting in your house on a mild Fall day in New Jersey. The leaves are changing, and the weather will soon bring in the cold, chilling you to the bone as it always does. However, you know not it yet, but something else will also chill you to your core. With that comes Halloween and the kids can’t help but be excited about the candy they’ve accumulated, only wanting to tear open their treats. The blinds are drawn for the night and the kids are finally in bed, after you let them eat some candy and run for a bit in the living room in their new costumes of course. The wife or husband went to sleep hours ago and now there’s only you. Its late and you figure it would be best to follow suit for the rest of the family. But before you head to your bedroom you hear smash and a shriek from the kid’s room! You dash to the door, slamming it off the hinges. Inside, the window is hanging from its frame, swaying like a pendulum, with broken glass littering the floor. Your second born is crying as if a demon had come for them, and the other child is nowhere to be seen. You go to the remainder of your children and he says through heavy breathing and weeping “It flew, mom! It flew in and got him!” After he stopped speaking and continued to wail you hear footsteps on your roof, but they sound more like clunks, rocks hitting each other, or hooves trotting on wood. Looking out the window you feel a whoosh pass over and the horrifying figure of a goat with small arms and large bat wings comes into view. Dread fills your very being as it glides off into the moon light with an arm dangling from its maw. A screech is sent from the thing out into the neighborhood, waking all others who have gone to sleep but only you and your last child know where that sound resonated from. What you just witnessed is something called the Jersey Devil.
The Jersey Devil is a creature said to inhabit the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey, a land thick with wildlife, berry, bramble, oak and pine. A place comparable to the location of the Evil Dead and Cabin Fever movies. How this monster came about is said to have occurred sometime in the 1700s with the Leeds family. The mother, simply known as Mother Leeds, had twelve children but upon realizing she was pregnant with her thirteenth she cursed the child saying he would be the devil. With his birth the child was normal, however it changed shortly after into something else with hooves, a goat’s head, bat wings, and a forked tongue. He then killed his mother, tearing her to pieces as the midwives watched in terror. It then went along killing most of the midwives as well as the father and the other twelve children who were his brothers and sisters.
Sightings of the beast can stretch far with people like Joseph Bonaparte, elder brother to Napoléon Bonaparte, who reportedly saw the beast flying over Bordentown, New Jersey, when he was hunting. But it didn’t take the form it has today until 1909 when a newspaper started printing widespread reports of the beast baring down on people in trolley cars and police officers firing on a monster with no effect. The reports went as far as south Jersey and even to Delaware. The writings put so much fear into the hearts and minds of the people that some schools and work places were shut down. Bounty hunters roamed the forests of the Pine Barrens in search of the Devil and even a bounty was said to have been put up for a $10,000 reward.
However, in light of all this it is said that the beginnings of the Jersey Devil started with a man named Danial Leeds, who resided in the Pine Barrens, which published almanacs but became infatuated with Christian mysticism, demonology and natural magic. He had a rivalry with Benjamin Franklin over these almanacs that was so fierce that it followed over into Danial’s son’s, Titan Leeds, life when he took over the publishing business. It was during this time that Benjamin Franklin mocked Titan for using astrology in his almanac, just as his father had done, and used this astrology to predict Titan’s death. Titan took offence to these predictions responding that Franklin was a “fool” and “liar”. To poke fun even more, Franklin published a response saying that the continued publication of the Leeds almanac must be written by a ghost, a resurrected Titan Leeds to haunt and torment Franklin. Eventually it was said that an actual beast did indeed roam the Pine Barrens land which sprung from the idea that the ghost of Titan Leeds was there.
A myth, yes, but a legend. It's stories like these that make life a little more interesting and worthwhile. That’s why they spread so fast and are absorbed so quickly. Because it’s beyond the mundane. It's not what’s in front of us that makes us want to explore but what hides behind the corner. And no matter how terrifying it can be we always want to see what lurks inside the dark abandoned building miles from civilization. Nor will it stop us from wanting to know what those abnormal screeches came from inside the thick forest off the edge town.
