Sightings

A dark and stormy night in 1735 is the earliest date recorded of the Jersey Devil being sighted. For that was the date the Leed’s woman gave birth to the legend.

At the beginning of horror-monster movies we’ll often see the trope of a loony drunken old man being the sole witness to the beast. The townsfolk are often too late to catch on, but can you blame them? Cryptids have a reputation for being accompanied by blurry photos, witnessed by those under the influence, and elaborate hoaxes. However, the earliest sightings on record for JD are from those with an already reputable history. In 1778 and 1820 were the most notable recounts of a JD encounter.

First by Stephen Decatur, a Commodore of a US naval fleet. At the time the marshy Pine Barrens were partly industrialized to smelt locally sourced bog iron. The commodore was visiting Hanover Mill Works to inspect the cannonballs smelted with this impure ore when he noticed an unidentified creature flying over the treeline. He decided to test these cannons, shot, and fired at the fiend mid-air. According to this account the villain was struck through the wing but sailed on and away. Stephen Decatur’s visit to Hanover Mill Works is undisputed and hundreds of others claimed to have beared witness to those events.

Second by Joseph Bonaparte, the exiled King of Spain and brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. Joseph Bonaparte owned 800 acres of land in Bordentown, NJ and resided in his estate known as Pointe Breeze. During a snowy winter hunt on his land, Joseph Bonaparte began to notice and track a pair of hoof prints that were left by something bipedal. The tracks eventually came to an end with the only possible conclusion that the creature had taken flight. The exiled king recounted that he then heard a hissing sound. This hiss was emanating from a standing, winged, horse-headed demon. So stricken with fear Joseph Bonaparte forgot he was carrying a rifle, but the monster had flown off before he could fire. He was unaware of the local legend until he retold his encounter to others that concluded who and what that thing was.

For one week in January of 1909 the TriState area resurrected the legend. Thousands of residents reported to their local newspapers their encounter with the Jersey Devil. The sightings from this period are reports that vary in interestingness: tracks left in the snow, a trolley car under attack, stomping on a roof, a partially devoured puppy, unidentifiable roaring/howling/screaming, and dead chickens with no wounds. Witness descriptions are all consistent describing an amalgamation of a dog and horse head, large bat-like wings, and a tail. One of these reports involved hundreds of residents chasing a creature to Kaighn Hill in Camden, NJ. Multiple police officers were on site and opened fire on the monster but it flew off unfazed and out of sight. Unfortunately around this time there was some poison in the well of reports. Norman Jeffries had created some of the tracks left in snow that were reported as remarkably perfect, so remarkably perfect that it was attributed to the legendary beast. He then painted, glued claws, and added wings to a kangaroo which he marketed as the captured Jersey Devil for his dime museum. This hoax left us with probably the most ubiquitous image of the Jersey Devil.

We're not left with any mass sightings after 1909 and individual accounts are very sparse. The next recorded event was in 1927 by a cab driver in Salem, NJ that saw this devil violently shaking his car then fly off. A few other sightings happened in 1936, 1953, 1961, 1966, and 1987 but what's recorded is more interesting if I leave it a mystery.