62. The Jersey Devil

How prejudice, misogyny and a kangaroo in bat wings created a monster.

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The legend is rooted in the Pine Barrens, the million-acre stretch of sandy pine forest across southern New Jersey.

The legend begins in 1735 when a woman remembered only as Mother Leeds went into labor with her thirteenth child. Exhausted and cursing her fertility, she cried, "Let this one be the devil." The child was born normally, then twisted before the midwife's eyes into something with a horse's head, leathery bat wings, cloven hooves, and a forked tail. It shrieked, beat its way up the chimney, and vanished into the pines.

Historically this woman was likely Deborah Leeds wife of Japhet Leeds, who records show had 12 children. But the creature was likely born from politics, not a woman crying out in pain and frustration, exhausted by pregnancy and birth. Daniel Leeds, a colonial almanac publisher, broke with his Quaker neighbors and printed astrology and occult lore. They branded him "Satan's Harbinger."(great metal band name) His son Titan (also great name) continued the feud and was mocked by Benjamin Franklin, who jokingly predicted Titan's death, then insisted his ghost lingered on. The Leeds family crest bore a wyvern a winged, clawed dragon. A hated family, a devilish reputation, and a monster on the coat of arms fused over generations into the "Leeds Devil," renamed the Jersey Devil only in the twentieth century.

Its most famous week came in January 1909, when hundreds of sightings and mysterious hoofprints swept New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Schools and factories closed, armed posses combed the woods, and a Philadelphia showman, Norman Jefferies, cashed in by exhibiting a painted kangaroo fitted with fake wings.

The Jersey Devil was born from a colonial grudge, regional prejudice, and a curse on a woman who would DARE to not want to have more kids.

SOURCES (full sources on Patreon)

• 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) — the foundational scholarly work, and the source for the Daniel Leeds / Titan Leeds / wyvern / Franklin argument.
• Brian Regal, “The Jersey Devil: The Real Story,” Skeptical Inquirer, November 2013.
• W. F. Mayer, “In the Pines,” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. III, May 1859 — first known print appearance of the “Leeds Devil.”
• Caleb Pusey, Satan’s Harbinger Encountered, 1700.
• Daniel Leeds, An Almanack for the Year of Christian Account 1687; The Temple of Wisdom for the Little World, 1688; The Trumpet Sounded Out of the Wilderness of America, 1699.
• Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1733–1738 editions — the Titan Leeds death prediction and the “ghost of Titan Leeds” sequence.
• Japhet Leeds will, 1736, Burlington County records — twelve named children.
• Encounter 1 (Nelson Evans, 1909): Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and allied Philadelphia press, January 19–20, 1909,

• Geoff Tibballs, The World’s Greatest Hoaxes (2006) — Norman Jefferies, Jacob Hope, and the Arch Street Dime Museum kangaroo.
• Robert E. Bartholomew on the 1909 flap as mass hysteria seeded by regional legend.
• Jeff Brunner, Humane Society of New Jersey — the sandhill crane hypothesis.
• Henry H. Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (1912); Elizabeth Kite, “The Pineys” (1913); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981), on the retouched photographs.
• John McPhee, The Pine Barrens (1968).
• Weird NJ magazine, Jersey Devil reader files — three decades of submitted first-hand accounts.