The Devil of Leeds, Burlington County, 1887

Long before the world knew it as the Jersey Devil, South Jersey had a name for its monster. The Leeds devil. As early as 1859 the Atlantic Monthly wrote of Leeds devil tales among the people of the Pine Barrens. Almost every reference before 1909 uses that older name. In the autumn of 1887, it surfaced again.

October 2, 1887. The Sun of New York ran the story on page 5. As far as the surviving fragments show, it concerned a strange creature in Burlington County, New Jersey, and a resident who knew what it was.

Someone had found the thing on or near his place. He is never named. Whenever he went near it, it would give a most unearthly yell that frightened the dogs. It whipped at every dog on the place.

The man who identified it is known only as the colonel. "That thing," said the colonel, "is not a bird nor an animal, but it is the Leeds devil."

"I never saw the horrible critter myself," he said. But he remembered it "roaming around in Evasham woods fifty years ago." It was hunted by men and dogs and "shot at by the best marksmen there were in all South Jersey but could not be killed." By one account of the article, it had been born over in Evesham, Burlington County, a hundred years before. "There isn't a family in Burlington or any of the adjoining counties that does not know of the Leeds devil," he said.

The column did not stay in New York. The Morning News of Savannah reprinted it on October 11 under the heading "The Leeds Devil." The Weekly News and Advertiser of Albany, Georgia, and the Elkhart Sentinel, which headed it "The Devil of Leeds," followed on October 15. The South Western News of Dawson, Georgia, carried it on October 19.

This version has its own geography. The familiar origin story points to Leeds Point in Atlantic County. The colonel placed the birth in Evesham instead. The fragments that survive give no size, no colour and no eyes. Later writers describe a winged creature, but wings do not appear in the quoted text.

That same year, J. A. Singley wrote to the Galveston Daily News. The Leeds devil, described by correspondent Sam E. Hayes as a "bugaboo bird," was probably just a barn owl, he suggested. Skeptoid later offered the sandhill crane as a candidate for Jersey Devil sightings in general.

Brian Regal looked at the name itself. He traced "Leeds Devil" to Quaker-era political attacks on the almanac maker Daniel Leeds, with Benjamin Franklin among the attackers. For Regal, it is the name, not a living animal, that ties the legend to history. No one has alleged a hoax in the 1887 story. The hoax findings belong to the 1909 wave.

Twenty-two years later, in January 1909, the creature returned in a wave of reports, and the name Jersey Devil took hold. The 1887 column is a snapshot of the legend before then. A yell that frightened the dogs. A colonel who had never seen it, and a county where, he said, every family knew its name.