In cryptozoological terms, the Jersey Devil doesn’t have the cachet of the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, even the chupacabra. The Devil said to live in the New Jersey pine barrens, an isolated and wild area of southern New Jersey covering over one million acres. Despite its remote environment, the Devil does have its own local following, to the extent that the New Jersey professional hockey team was named, in 1982, the New Jersey Devils. The Devil has a much older history than the more famous and worldly cryptozoological creatures. In The Secret History of the Jersey Devil, historians Brian Regal and Frank Esposito trace the origins of the Jersey Devil from an eighteenth-century New Jersey settler named Daniel Leeds to the present day.
The Secret History of the Jersey Devil. By Brian Regal and Frank J. Esposito. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2018, 147 pp. Hardcover, $24.95; Kindle edition, $23.70.
Leeds came over from England in 1676 as a Quaker, but he left the Friends and became an Anglican. This led to acrimonious relationships between him and his former Quaker brethren. This was especially so when he began publishing an almanac that contained material the Quakers found offensive. As was the style of the time, the opponents on each side called each other “devils” and, when printing techniques were advanced enough, illustrated their screeds with wood block cuts of sort of devil-looking creatures. In Boston in 1638, Anne Hutchinson gave birth to “a disturbing mass that bore little resemblance to a child” (p. 15). Her child was transformed in legend into a monster. In the 1730s in New Jersey, another legend sprang up concerning a witch named “Mother Leeds” who—you guessed it—gave birth to a “hideous beast” that a few years later killed “both parents and head[ed] off into the woods” (p. 5). Perhaps coincidentally, in 1730 Benjamin Franklin published a satirical story titled “A Witch Trial at Mt. Holly” lampooning witch hunting that was set in New Jersey. Regal and Esposito speculate that this story, along with the case of Anne Hutchinson, formed the basis of the Jersey Devil legend.
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