The Jersey Devil's Phenomenal Week

South Jersey already had its devil. The Leeds Devil was an old legend, with an origin story set around 1735. Then came the week of 16 to 23 January 1909. Newspapers published hundreds of claimed encounters, from all over South Jersey and the Philadelphia area.

Saturday, 16 January. Woodbury. Thack Cozzens was leaving the Woodbury Hotel. "I heard a hissing and something white flew across the street," he said. He saw "two spots of phosphorous," the eyes of the beast. "It moved as fast as an auto."

Across the river in Bristol, Pennsylvania, Patrolman James Sackville was on Buckley Street at about 2 a.m. He saw a "peculiar animal." It was "winged, and it hopped like a bird." He fired his service revolver. It fled. Postmaster E. W. Minster woke to an "eerie, almost supernatural" sound from the Delaware River. He watched a glowing shape like a "large crane" fly across toward New Jersey. The next morning, Bristol found strange hoofprints in the snow.

In Burlington, hoofprints turned up in almost every yard. They "went from roof to roof, disappeared in the middle of the road and stopped in the middle of open fields." Dogs refused to follow the trail.

Tuesday, 19 January. Gloucester City. At about 2 a.m., Nelson Evans and his wife watched from their window for about ten minutes. A creature stood on their shed roof. "It was about three feet and a half high, with a head like a collie dog and a face like a horse," Evans said. It walked on its back legs and held up two short front legs with paws. Evans opened the window and said "Shoo!" It "turned around, barked at me, and then flew away." Mrs. Evans remembered the wings: "s-zzz s-zzz s-zzz just like the muffled sound a woodsaw makes when it strikes a rotten place."

The reports multiplied. In Trenton, Councilman E. P. Weeden found cloven hoofprints in the snow on his roof. Trolley passengers at Haddon Heights said the creature circled overhead, hissing. In Camden, Patrolman Lewis H. Stehr Jr. fired on it at Kaighn Hill. He described the "body of a kangaroo, antlers like a deer, and wings like a bat." The West Collingswood fire company turned a hose on it. The Philadelphia Inquirer's front page announced: "WHAT-IS-IT VISITS ALL SOUTH JERSEY."

Schools and mills closed. Armed posses searched the pines. Papers reported a $10,000 reward from the Philadelphia Zoo. Nobody ever collected it.

24 January. The Ninth and Arch Street Dime Museum in Philadelphia advertised the captured "Leeds Devil." Admission, 10 cents. It was a painted kangaroo with fake wings. The press agent behind it, Norman Jeffries, later confessed. His New York Times obituary called the animal "a cleverly disguised kangaroo."

Robert E. Bartholomew and Peter Hassall call the week "a classic example of mass hysteria begun by a regional urban legend." Historian Brian Regal, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer, traces the Leeds Devil to colonial political feuds rather than a real birth. He argues that 1909 fixed its image for good: "batlike wings, horse head, claws, and general air of a dragon." No animal was ever identified from the tracks. No photograph of the creature exists. What survives is a newspaper sketch, said to be drawn from the description Nelson Evans gave from his window.