Reporter Peter Mucha revisits the legend of the Jersey Devil in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, recalling an outbreak of hysteria that took place following alleged sightings of a bizarre, winged creature with the "neck of a crane" and a "horse-like" or "dog-like" head in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey 100 years ago last January.
"What-Is-It Visits All South Jersey," screamed the front-page headline of the January 21, 1909 edition of the Inquirer. Eyewitnesses reported seeing "hooflike tracks" in the snow in Burlington City — tracks that even "hounds put on the trail" refused to follow.
The story even made the pages of the august New York Times, which devoted one snarky column-inch to a January 23 sighting in Burlington:
BURLINGTON, NJ, Jan. 23. — The Leeds devil appeared in this town tonight at 9 o'clock, waking up the family of Timothy Robinson on Main Street. He saw it leaving. It looked something like a goose.It was around this time that the moniker "Jersey Devil" took hold, apparently, though locals continued to refer to the phantom as the "Leeds Devil," per an eighteenth-century legend about a New Jersey witch who gave birth to a "dreadful being" with a "snake-like body, a horse's head, a pig's feet, and a bat's wings" that terrorized the region by kidnapping children and eating them alive (said legend is recounted in full in the 1903 edition of Charles Montgomery Skinner's American Myths and Legends).
The dragon-like beast was actually captured and killed during the Jersey Devil panic of 1909 — or so some enterprising Pennsylvania hucksters claimed. Suspicions must have arisen when the perpetrators admitted hunting it down in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park instead of South Jersey, but the carcass was nevertheless displayed in a local museum until it was found to consist of a kangaroo adorned with fake wings.
Read more about it:
• The Jersey Devil - Artist's Rendering
• The Jersey Devil - Sightings and Theories
• American Myths and Legends (1903): The Jersey Devil
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