According to legend, Mother Leeds of the Pine Barrens cursed her 13th child in 1735, and the baby turned into a winged, horse-headed creature that flew up the chimney. It has haunted the pines ever since.
In the week of January 16 to 23, 1909, thousands of people across New Jersey and Pennsylvania reported strange tracks and sightings. Schools and mills closed, and the Philadelphia Zoo offered a reward. New Jersey's NHL team is named after the creature.
What witnesses report
- Hoof prints on rooftops and in snow
- Blood-curdling screams in the pines
- Bat-like wings and a forked tail
Reader reports
Encounters sent in by our readers and checked by a moderator.
Famous cases
- 1733Ben Franklin's 'ghost' rival
Burlington, New JerseyHistorian Brian Regal traces the 'Leeds Devil' to the Leeds family's feuds. Quakers had called almanac maker Daniel Leeds a servant of the devil, and Benjamin Franklin joked for years that his rival Titan Leeds was a ghost. The Leeds family crest even showed a wyvern, a winged, upright dragon.
- 1735Mother Leeds's thirteenth child
Leeds Point, New JerseyThe best-known version of the legend says a Mrs. Leeds, pregnant for the thirteenth time, cursed the baby, which grew wings, hooves and a tail and flew up the chimney into the Pine Barrens. A real Deborah and Japhet Leeds lived at Leeds Point, and Japhet's 1736 will names twelve children.
- 1909Phenomenal Week
Delaware Valley, NJ/PADuring the week of 16-23 January 1909, newspapers printed hundreds of reports of the Jersey Devil from across South Jersey and the Philadelphia area, including strange hoof prints in the snow and claimed attacks on a trolley and a social club. Police in Camden and Bristol said they fired at it. Historians see it as a classic case of mass hysteria fed by newspapers and some hoaxes.
In the old newspapers
- 1887The Leeds devil 'turned up again'
Burlington County, New Jersey (and Mulberry, North Carolina)An old Burlington County resident, reading of a strange creature seen in North Carolina with an owl's head, a monkey-like face with white cheeks and an unearthly yell that frightened every dog on the place, declared that it was the Leeds devil. He remembered when it roamed South Jersey fifty years earlier, hunted by men and dogs and shot at by the best marksmen without effect, and retold the century-old legend of its birth.
Source: The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), October 11, 1887, from the New York Sun
- 1893The engineer who quit his run
Pine Barrens rail line, New Jersey (reprinted in Savannah, Georgia)A locomotive engineer told the New York Sun that at dusk one October evening, running through the pines, something with huge silent wings swooped down and thrust its head through the cab window. It had an owl-like head, a sunken white ape-like face, fiery protruding eyes and pointed ears, and it kept pace with the engine at forty miles an hour. His fireman fainted. He struck it between the eyes with the furnace poker and it never flinched. Then it gave another yell and was gone. He said he quit the run soon after.
- 1909Hoof prints in pairs at Groveville and Trenton
Groveville, Trenton and Mount Holly, New JerseyDuring the great scare of January 1909, two Trenton-area men reported hoof prints like a small horse's, but set in pairs rather than fours and broken off as if the animal leapt great distances. One set was in a Groveville back yard and one in a city park. At Mount Holly, an elderly resident said a shadow fell across his window at dinner and he looked up to see a huge bird with long, hoofed legs dangling beneath it, flying high overhead.
- 1909A 'Jersey devil' found dead near Kinkora
Kinkora, Burlington County, New JerseyIn October 1909 two young men brought into Burlington the carcass of an animal they had found in the woods near Kinkora, and hundreds came to look. It was about twenty inches long, with a kangaroo-like spine and a squirrel-like tail of reddish fur. Its long, four-jointed forelegs ended in broad, flat, hoof-like bones, which the paper argued could explain the paired prints in the snow the winter before. Something like the frame of short wings rose from its back. The state museum's curator was asked to identify it.
- 1910Red wings over Hightown, Virginia
Hightown, Highland/Augusta County area, VirginiaA Virginia news column reported that a man near Hightown had just seen what neighbours called the famous Jersey devil, flying directly over him. He described a head like a horse's, legs and feet like a mule's, and great red wings. The paper added that something similar had been reported in West Virginia months earlier and was thought to live in the mountains, feeding on bear and deer.
Source: The Times Dispatch (Richmond, Va.), February 5, 1910
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