Joseph Bonaparte's Jersey Devil Encounter at Point Breeze

Joseph Bonaparte had worn two crowns, as King of Naples and then of Spain. In New Jersey, Napoleon's elder brother went by another name, the Comte de Survilliers. He bought Point Breeze, at Bordentown, from Stephen Sayre in 1815 or 1816, and the estate grew to more than 1,800 acres, nicknamed "Bonaparte's Park." He built a lake near the mouth of Crosswicks Creek. The first mansion burned on 4 January 1820, but he rebuilt, and stayed until 1839.

The story is usually placed about 1820. Bonaparte was hunting alone in the woods near his estate. He came across some weird tracks. He followed them until they "ended abruptly as if the creature had flown away."

Then came a sound. In Patricia Martinelli's version, told in Bonaparte's own voice, it was "a hissing sound like that of an alligator when it feels threatened." He turned. Before him stood "a creature like no other. It had a long neck, short arms, wings like a crane," with "the hooves of a horse, and the head of either a horse or a camel."

"Neither moved for what seemed like an eternity," one retelling says. About a minute. Then: "It hissed at me again and flew away." Martinelli has him firing at it, apparently without effect. His friends named it "The devil of the woods."

He never saw it again. But he hunted it, the story goes, for the rest of his life, and claimed he could still hear "the rustle of its wings." Until he returned to Europe, he is said to have kept a sharp eye out whenever he was in the woods, hoping to take the body as a trophy.

The tale has grown in the telling. A 2018 account moves it to "one winter day in 1813," with tracks in fresh snow, "hideous screeching and hissing sounds," huge eyes and bird-like claws. There the creature swoops, and Bonaparte falls "backwards in the snow as the large creature flew away." But in 1813 Bonaparte was still in Europe. The date cannot stand.

Martinelli says he wrote an account of the experience. No such document has been located. The New Jersey Historical Society holds his papers, the obvious place to look. Every version found so far dates from the 20th or 21st century, many tracing back to S. E. Schlosser's telling on AmericanFolklore.net.

Richard Veit, writing in 2021, calls it a "legendary encounter." His paper begins with a coin minted by Bonaparte as King of Spain and dug up at Cedar Bridge Tavern in Barnegat. A reviewer of Monster Chronicles accepted it as "an authentic sighting," but noted that local legend had folded in other folklore, including a Captain Kidd ghost story.

Others look to birds. Shannon Quinn wrote that historians believe Bonaparte saw a Great Horned Owl, a bird he would not have known in France, with a wingspan of about 4.5 ft. The crane wings and long neck fit a large wading bird. Jeff Brunner of the Humane Society of NJ has suggested vagrant sandhill cranes for Jersey Devil reports in general.

Bonaparte's meeting stands beside Commodore Stephen Decatur's cannonball at the Hanover Mill Works as one of the Jersey Devil's celebrity sightings of the early 1800s. Nearly a century later came the great flap of January 1909. And at Point Breeze, legend says, Bonaparte's ghost still watches the skaters on the pond.