Episode Transcript
In March of 2014, a hiker in Lithuania stumbled upon a warm spring that was melting the ice on a frozen pond. It’s not unusual to find things like this, but he was curious. I would be too; the pond was frozen over, but there was a nice window into the still waters beneath. I have to think any one of us would have leaned in for a closer look.
When he did, though, he witnessed something that his mind had trouble processing. It appeared to be a living creature, but it was unlike anything he had ever seen. Thankfully, we live in a very connected, very digital age, and he used his phone to take a short video.
I have no idea what the creature was, or if it even was a living thing. And I’m not going to discuss it today, or tell you more stories about similar sightings, because there aren’t any. It was a one-off, a random occurrence that had never happened before, and would probably never happen again.
Some stories are like that. Sometimes, we bump into something new, with no history or record of events to lend it pedigree or validity. Those stories frustrate me.
Other stories, though, go deep. Some legends have been told for centuries. Some creatures have been sighted by hundreds of people over the years. And each new sighting lends credence to the story. Even if it’s all made up or just one big misunderstanding, these layers upon layers of story seem to somehow give life to the creatures they describe.
When we find these deep wells of folklore, our minds are presented with a challenge: do the centuries of first-hand accounts serve as proof, or do they highlight our incredible, cross-cultural, nearly-genetic predisposition toward gullibility?
Few places challenge us to such a degree as the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. Inside that wooded expanse, mystery runs far and wide. Mystery, and some say, the Devil.
The Pines
When we think of the East Coast of the united States, we think of urban sprawl, of endless strings of bedroom communities looping around massive metropolitan centers. New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. — all of these places are symbols of humanity’s inability to leave an undeveloped area untouched.
What most people don’t know, however, is that there’s a huge expanse of forested land cutting through the southern part of New Jersey that simply boggles the mind. It’s called the Pine Barrens, and it’s the largest undeveloped area of land in the Mid-Atlantic seaboard. Seriously, this place is massive: there are 1.1 million acres of forest, and beneath it all are underground aquifers that are estimated to contain over 17 trillion gallons of the purest drinking water in the country.
As you might imagine, such a massive area of untouched land comes with its own treasure chest of mythical creatures and frightening folklore. The local Lenape tribe of Native Americans tell stories about the Manetutetak — the “Wood Dwarves” — who live in the forest, a local version of the global “little people” legend.
There are other creatures rumored to exist in the Pines, including Big Red Eye, the Hoboken Monkey-Man, undocumented species of large cats, the Cape May Sea Serpent, the Lizardman of Great Meadows, and even something called a “Kim Kardashian”.
New Jersey, you see, is full of monsters.
But hovering over them all, like a patriarch perched at the top of an ornate family tree, is something that has haunted the Pines for nearly three hundred years.
The original story goes something like this: in 1735, one Mrs. Shroud of Leeds Point, New Jersey became pregnant with her thirteenth child. According to the legend, Mrs. Shroud secretly wished that this child would be a devil or demon child. Sure enough, when the child was born, it was misshapen and malformed.
Mrs. Shroud kept the deformed child in her home, sheltered from the curious eyes of the community. But on a dark and stormy night — because bad things only ever happen on dark and stormy nights, of course — the child’s arms turned to wings, and it escaped, flying up and out through the chimney. Mrs. Shroud never saw her devil child again.
That’s the story. Or one version of it, at least. A more prominent legend1 identifies the mother as Mrs. Leeds, not a Mrs. Shroud from Leeds, who was from the Burlington area of New Jersey. Mrs. Leeds, according to the legend, had dabbled in witchcraft despite her Quaker beliefs, and this hobby of hers made the old women attending her birth more than a little uneasy.
To their relief, though, a handsome baby boy was born that stormy night, and he was quickly delivered to Mrs. Leeds’ arms. That was when he transformed: his human features vanished, his body elongated, and even his skin changed. The baby’s head became horse-like, and hooves replaced his feet. Bat-like wings sprouted from his shoulders, and he grew to the size of a man.
Other origin stories have persisted through the centuries. One claimed that the monster was the result of a treasonous relationship between a colonial Leeds Point girl and a British soldier, while another story tells of a gypsy curse. There seems to have been no town or county in the Pines area without its own version of the story. Many of them vary wildly, one thing united them all: the descriptions of the creature.
In all the stories, it was some sort of hybrid or mutation of a normal animal. Most of the stories describe it in the same terms: head like a horse, wings like a bat, clawed hands, long serpent tail, and legs like a deer. In some accounts, the creature is almost dragon-like.
Coincidentally, the Lenape tribes refer to the Pines area as “Popuessing”, a word that means “the place of the dragon”. Swedish explorers even named the area “Drakekill”, “kill” being the Dutch word for “river”, and “drake” meaning “dragon”.
Whatever the truth is behind the origins of this legend, and whatever its core features really are, the people of the Pines were united in what they called it: the Jersey Devil. And this Devil was more than just a story that was passed from person to person. Over the centuries that followed, countless eye-witness reports surfaced that pointed toward one, overwhelming conclusion.
The Jersey Devil was real.
Glimpses
What makes the Jersey Devil so special is the quality of many of the sightings. Individuals with no need to make up stories, whether for political or professional reasons, all seem to have found the courage to report incidents that would normally be laughable.
Stephen Decatur was a United States naval officer who was known for his many naval victories in the early 1800s. Decatur was, and still is today, a very well-respected figure in American history. There have been five war ships named after him. He’s had his own stamp through the US Postal Service, and in the late 1800’s, it was his face that graced the $20 bill, rather than Andrew Jackson’s.
According to the legend, Decatur visited the Hanover Iron Works in Burlington, New Jersey in the early 1800s. The facility there manufactured cannonballs, something Decatur was very familiar with, and he had arrived to test some of the product.
On this occasion, Decatur was said to have been on the firing range operating a cannon. While there, he witnessed a strange creature flying overhead. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before, and like a true American, he aimed a cannon at it. He fired, and the shot was said to be true, striking the creature in mid-air. Mysteriously, though, nothing happened. The creature continued on uninterrupted.
Another early famous resident of New Jersey was Joseph Bonaparte, the brother of none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon had appointed his brother King of Spain in 1808, but Joseph abdicated just five years later before moving to the United States.
He took up residence in a large estate called Breeze Point near the Pine Barrens, and lived there for nearly two decades. One of his favorite pastimes was to go hunting in the Pines. On one of those hunting trips, the former King of Spain was in the woods near his home when he discovered some strange tracks in the snow.
They looked like the tracks of a donkey, but there were only two feet present, not four. Bonaparte commented that one of the feet appeared slightly larger than the other, as if deformed in some way. He followed the tracks into a clearing, but stopped when the prints vanished. It was as if the animal had simply taken flight.
As he was turning to leave, Bonaparte heard a strange hissing sound. He glanced back, only to find himself standing face to face with a large creature. He described it as having bat-like wings, the head of a horse, and it stood on thin hind legs. Before he could remember to use his rifle, the creature hissed one last time, flapped its wings, and flew off into the sky.
He later described the events to a local friend, who simply smiled and congratulated the man. “You’ve just seen the famous Jersey Devil,” he told him.
The following decades were filled with more and more sightings and reports.2 In the early 1840s, a handful of farmers began to report the death of livestock on their land. In most cases, tracks were found, but they could not be identified. Others claimed to have heard high-pitched screams in the Pines, a sound that would forever after be connected with the Jersey Devil.
By 1900, belief in the Jersey Devil was widespread and stronger than ever. Nearly everyone in the area believed that the something otherworldly lived inside the Pines, and anytime disaster or death entered their lives, they cast blame at this creature. But some had also begun to do the math: if this monster really was the child of Mrs. Shroud and was born in 1735, then it was very, very old.
Folklorist Charles B. Skinner commented on this in a 1903 publication:3
“It is said that its life has nearly run its course,” he wrote, “and with the advent of the new century many worshipful commoners of Jersey have dismissed, for good and all, the fear of the monster from their mind.”
Skinner, you see, thought that it was gone, that the Jersey Devil was too old to carry on terrorizing the people of the Pines. But when the events of 1909 unfolded just six years later, one thing became very clear:
Skinner couldn’t have been more wrong.
1909
January 1909 was a busy month for the Jersey Devil. In the early morning hours of January 16, a man named Thack Cozzens was out for a walk under the stars in Woodbury, New Jersey. A sound caught his attention and he glanced up, only to see a large dark shape fly past. Cozzens recalled noticing that the creature’s eyes glowed bright red.
Twenty-six miles away that same early morning, in the town of Bristol, Pennsylvania, a number of people reported seeing a similar creature. One witness, a police officer named James Sackville, actually fired his handgun at it, without effect. E. W. Minster, the town postmaster, also saw the flying thing, and according to him, it also unleashed a high-pitched scream.
When the sun rose that morning, several people reported finding strange hoof prints in the snow. No one could identify the kind of creature who would leave such tracks.
Just one day later on the 17th, unusual hoof prints were found in the snow outside the home of the Lowdens in Burlington, New Jersey. The tracks surrounded their trash can, which had been knocked over and rummaged through.
Other people found tracks on their rooftops. Trails were followed into streets, where the tracks would simply vanish. The Burlington police tried tracking the creature with the help of hunting dogs, but the dogs refused to follow the trails.
At 2:30 in the morning on Tuesday the 19th, a Mr. and Mrs. Evans were asleep in bed in Gloucester, New Jersey, when a scream awoke them. They both climbed out of bed and approached their window, and then stopped, paralyzed by fear. There, on the roof of their shed, stood a creature unlike anything they had ever laid eyes on.
According to Mr. Evans, it was roughly 3-feet tall, and had the head of a horse. It walked on two legs and held smaller, claw-like hands against its chest. The leathery wings were still present, as was the long, serpentine tail.
The couple managed to frighten the creature away after watching it for nearly ten minutes. Later that day, professional hunters were called in to attempt to track the creature, but they had no success.
The following day brought more of the same. A Burlington police officer was the first to see the creature, followed by a local minister. A hunting party that was formed to track the beast claimed they watched it fly off toward Moorestown. In Moorestown, it was seen at the Mount Carmel Cemetery. From there it was seen to fly toward Riverside, and there, hoof prints were found in a cluster around a dead puppy.
A day later, an entire trolly full of passengers in Clementon watched a winged creature circle above them. The Black Hawk Social Club reported their own sighting, and when a Collingswood fireman saw one up close, he turned his hose on the creature, chasing it off.
Later that night, a woman named Mrs. Sorbinski in Camden heard a noise outside in the dark. She grabbed her broom and stepped outside, only to find the mysterious beast trying to catch her dog. Mrs. Sorbinski beat at the creature with her broom until it released the dog and flew away.
When a crowd gathered as a result of her screaming, they all claimed to see the creature off in the distance. The mob charged toward the thing, and a police officer even fired shots, but whatever it was managed to escape into the sky.
The creature made a few more random appearances across northern New Jersey during late January of that year, but it was one final sighting in February that leaves many questions to be answered.
An employee of a local electric railroad was out working on the tracks when he saw what he described later as the Jersey Devil flying overhead. He claimed to have watched the creature fly into one of the overhead electrical wires, generating an explosion large enough to melt the metal tracks directly underneath.
A search was made, but no body was found.
Alone and Afraid
Maybe the stories of the Jersey Devil are really about fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the dark, fear of what might be lurking out there in the trees. Humanity has feared those things for millennia. But perhaps the people of the Pines feared something more basic, more fundamental than whatever might be waiting for them in the darkness. Perhaps they simply feared being alone.
There is nothing worse than experiencing a loss you can’t explain, or noises you can’t identify, especially if you are in a new and strange place. The sources might very well be real and normal, but in the setting and culture of their day, the unexplainable only served to highlight the loneliness of the early settlers of New Jersey.
The Barrens had a way of giving permission to fear the unknown. They still do to this day. When settlers discovered rare or unusual plants and animals inside those woods, it became easy to take it one step further. Demon children, creatures dancing on rooftops, livestock and pets being attacked. We explain our existence with fantasy because sometimes that’s the only thing that can help us cope.
In 1957, some employees from the New Jersey Department of Conservation4 found a partial animal corpse in the Pines. It was a mangled collection of feathers, mammal bones, and long hind legs that appeared to have been burned or scorched.
It might be logical to assume that the creature that flew into the electrical wires in 1909 had literally crashed and burned, only to be discovered decades later. It might, in fact, sound like the creature was gone for good.
But in 1987, an unidentified woman in Vineland, New Jersey reported that her German Shepherd had been killed during the night. The dog had been torn to pieces and dragged over 25 feet from the end of its chain.
The only evidence the authorities could find around the body were hoof prints.
Notes:
1 James McCloy and Ray Miller, Jr., The Jersey Devil (Middle Atlantic Press, 1976), p.24-25.
2 McCloy and Miller, The Jersey Devil, p.35.
3 Charles X. Skinner, American Myths and Legends, Vol. 1 (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1903), p.243.
4 James McCloy and Ray Miller, Jr., Phantom of the Pines (Middle Atlantic Press, 1998), p.74.
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