The Jersey Devil – a Week of Panic in 1909

When

16 January 1909 date from records made at the time

Where

Pine Barrens and Delaware Valley (Leeds Point – birthplace of the legend), New Jersey, United States

Verdict

Disputed

In January 1909 hundreds of people reported a winged creature with a horse's head and hooves – schools closed and police fired at the “devil.”

What happened

According to legend from New Jersey's Pine Barrens, in the 18th century a certain “Mother Leeds” of Leeds Point, giving birth to her thirteenth child, cried out in anger: “Let it be the devil!” The child supposedly turned into a winged monster with hooves and a forked tail and flew up the chimney into the woods. For the next century the “Leeds Devil” was a local bogeyman – until, in the week of 16 to 23 January 1909, a real panic broke out. Newspapers published hundreds of reports from southern New Jersey and around Philadelphia: mysterious hoofprints in the snow, a creature with a horse's head and bat wings that supposedly “attacked” a trolley car in Haddon Heights and a social club in Camden. Police in Camden and in Bristol, Pennsylvania, were said to have fired at it. Schools closed, workers stayed home, and armed groups combed the woods.

Witnesses

Residents of southern New Jersey and Philadelphia and police officers in Camden and Bristol; hundreds of accounts were published by the press of the day.

Explanations and hypotheses

Sociologist Robert Bartholomew describes the events of 1909 as a classic case of mass hysteria whipped up by the press around a local legend. The tracks in the snow may have been left by ordinary animals, and hoaxes fed the panic – in Philadelphia, for example, a kangaroo fitted with fake wings was put on show. Historian Brian Regal traces the legend itself to 18th-century religious and political quarrels around the Leeds family, whose crest featured winged dragons.

Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.

Sources

More: Wikipedia (pl) Wikipedia (en)