The Week the Devil was Real: The Great Jersey Devil Panic of 1909

 

On a cold night in the middle of January about a dozen farmers, shopkeepers and police officers set off into the woods.

This ragtag posse is armed with shotguns and revolvers.  They have brought their dogs along to fetch the game that they’re out hunting.  They are following tracks in the freshly fallen snow, hoofprints, but these hoofprints are not like those of a horse or of any animal that these men have ever seen before.  These hoofprints are large and cloven in two like the tracks of a devil.

All night, for the past several nights, the residents of Springfield Township, New Jersey, have heard a gut-wrenching screeching howl filling the air.  And they have been startled and awoken in the middle of the night, from their deep winter’s slumber, by the thudding sound of hooves landing on their rooftops.  Now, a group of armed citizens has taken it upon themselves to set out to try and kill or capture the creature that has been terrorizing them all.

The men relentlessly follow the tracks in the snow and come upon a large clearing in the middle of the woods.  In the clearing the dogs halt and the fur stands straight up on their backs.  The armed men stop.  The dogs whimper and desperately strain on their leashes in an attempt to turn around and run away.

In an instant, a high pitched guttural screech rises from just beyond the treeline, and as the men look up they catch a glimpse of an enormous winged creature with fiery red eyes, the head of a horse and the body of a reptile, darting past overhead.

They blast away with their shotguns and revolvers but hit nothing.

When the smoke clears and the noise ends nothing remains but the moonlight reflecting off the freshly fallen snow.  This is the Jersey Devil Panic of 1909.

During one week in January of 1909 there were over one-thousand reported sightings of the creature known as the Jersey Devil across New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.  Sightings occurred as far north as Union, New Jersey and as far west as Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

Tradition has it that the legendary cryptid known as the Jersey Devil only haunts the sparsely populated pinelands of southern New Jersey, but for one week in 1909 from January 16-23, it appeared as if the Devil was everywhere.

On Sunday of that week people in the city of Burlington New Jersey reported seeing the devil flying through the air and hopping down the street like a kangaroo.

In Trenton and Gloucester New Jersey schools, offices and factories were closed for nearly the entire week out of fear of the legendary creature.  Hundreds of people in Philadelphia claimed to have heard loud banging sounds on their rooftops at night and people in that city remained fearfully huddled behind locked doors all night long waiting to hear the terrifying screeching howl that the Devil was purported to make.

That week the Philadelphia zoo offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who was able to kill or capture the creature.  Armed posses set out from towns all across New Jersey and ventured deep into the pine barrens seeking reward and protection.  Most of them simply got lost amid the miles and miles of scrub pines and meandering trails of the southern New Jersey pinelands.

A few spotted large, unidentifiable footprints in the snow, and a couple like the searchers from Springfield Township even saw something they couldn’t explain and took desperate potshots at the creature.  In the end, though, everyone who went searching for the Devil returned home empty handed.

Back in January 1909 everyone agreed that the creature they saw and heard was about ten feet tall with giant wings, the body of a reptile, the head of a horse and had the red fiery eyes and cloven hoofs of a devil.

“I heard a hissing and then something white flew across the street.  I saw two spots of glowing phosphorous--the eyes of the beast.  There was a white cloud, like steam from an engine, and then it moved as fast an auto,” reported Trenton resident Thack Cozens in the Philadelphia Inquirer on January 20, 1909.

In the next day’s paper, on the 21st of January, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a frontpage image of hoofprints in the snow, supposedly depicting tracks left behind outside Trenton, by the Jersey Devil.

Many witnesses even claimed that the creature was bold enough to walk right up on people’s doorsteps, screech and howl, and then promptly fly off into the night sky.

For an entire week, all of southern and central New Jersey, plus most of eastern Pennsylvania, remained gripped by fear and panic, but then just like that, the sightings stopped.

Within days there were no more hoofprints seen in the snow and no more howling and screeching heard in the middle of the night.  Although sporadic sightings of the creature known as the Jersey Devil occur across southern New Jersey to this very day, life back in the winter of 1909 slowly began to return to normal.

So what the hell actually happened back in mid-January of 1909?  And why, at least for one week, did the cryptid creature of folklore known to history as the Jersey Devil appear to be so real?

Legend has it that the Jersey Devil has been with the residents of New Jersey for a very long time.  

Known originally as the Leeds Devil the story behind the origins of the creature dates back to the early eighteenth century.

At a place now called Leeds Point on the edge of the pinelands, near the coast in Galloway Township New Jersey, so the story goes, back in the year 1735 a woman called mother Leeds was giving birth to her thirteenth child.

It is said that it was a difficult labor for mother Leeds and that in her anguish she screamed out, “Curse this child and let it be a devil,” or something to that effect.  When the child was finally born it was said to have cloven hooves for feet, wings, and the face of a devil.  Rejected by his mother, this thirteenth cursed child then flew out the window (or up the chimney as some retellings would have it) and continues to reside in the pine barrens to haunt and terrorize the residents of New Jersey and surrounding areas to this day.

There are many variations to the Jersey Devil story, but all of them seem to agree that the Jersey Devil is some version of a cursed thirteenth child of a woman named mother Leeds that took the form of a devilish winged animal.

Leeds home 19th Century Photo

At the time, back in January 1909, the more level headed individuals among the population had a very interesting theory for what might be going on.  Scientists believed that, perhaps, the creature was some type of flying dinosaur, such as a pterodactyl, that had somehow survived extinction and been able to thrive in the pine barrens of New Jersey.  This is a fascinating theory, given how desolate and inaccessible some parts of the New Jersey pinelands actually are, but one that has no proof behind it whatsoever.

Even to this day the New Jersey pinelands remain one of the largest unbroken wilderness spaces in the United States east of the Mississippi.  

For generations, the pinelands have been populated by a hearty group of fiercely independent settlers, who before about the year 1950 with the popularization of the automobile and subsequent construction of the Garden State Parkway that made southern New Jersey shore towns more accessible to the urban masses from the north and west, were largely cut-off from the outside world.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the individuals who populated the wilderness known as the New Jersey Pinelands were, largely, escaped slaves, Tories that had been loyal to the British cause during the American Revolution or Swedish and Scotch-Irish immigrants who were considered persecuted minorities at the time.  These were people who wanted to be cut-off from the outside world on purpose and it would have been in their best interest to claim that the land they inhabited was haunted by a fearsome creature such as the Jersey Devil.

By 1909 almost everyone who lived in the area had heard one form or another of the Jersey Devil story.  Although most residents of Pennsylvania and New Jersey at the turn of the last century may not have whole-heartedly believed in the story of the Jersey Devil, they also probably didn’t whole-heartedly disbelieve the story of the Jersey Devil either.

Given the prevalence of the Jersey Devil story, it is best also to keep in mind that journalistic standards in 1909, were well, simply nonexistent.

The first decade of the twentieth century was the very heart of the era of “yellow journalism” when newspaper editors and reporters would bend the truth, and even outright lie, in an attempt to sell papers or influence events.

When newspapers began to receive reports of suspicious footprints in the snow, or strange sounds at night, it is highly possible that they simply ran with the story and that the whole thing eventually went viral in a sense and caused the early twentieth century equivalent of a fake news sensation.

Today, most sightings of the Jersey Devil are ascribed to the Sandhill Crane, a bird that inhabits the low lying wetlands of southern New Jersey and has a large wingspan and emits a very loud whooping sound. In the middle of the night, in the pitch dark pinelands, it is very easy to be startled and frightened out of your wits by the call of the Sandhill Crane.

However, the story of the Jersey Devil has been with us for nearly three-hundred years now and it shows no signs of going away.  Sightings have been reported in major newspapers in the Garden State as recently as 2016. 

Each year hundreds of searchers, most unarmed this time, still venture into the protected areas of the New Jersey pinelands on so called Jersey Devil hunts, and every week people still recount their own stories online about run-ins with this most elusive of cryptids.

 We would be naive to think that we today are any less susceptible to the panic caused by the Jersey Devil back in 1909, or to believe that the devil’s of our folklore are any less real now than they were over one-hundred years ago.