The Downingtown Red-Eyed Animal

Downingtown is a borough in Chester County, Pennsylvania, about 33 miles west of Philadelphia. It sits on the East Branch Brandywine Creek, among hills, fields and mill villages.

The town had seen a scare before. January 1932. A gardener reported a hairy figure in the "Pine Belt" woods north of town, "looking like a man, acting like a man, and covered with long hair." One scoffer had an answer ready. "It's the Jersey devil."

July 27, 1937. Evening. According to a reprint of the newspaper account, it was shortly after 9 PM when Cydney Ladley reported "the strange monster." Ladley worked at a paper mill and lived near Milford Mills, a mill village a few miles north of Downingtown.

Residents of Downingtown reported an unknown animal "with red eyes." The reprinted article calls it a "bounding critter with huge eyes." A later timeline kept by the Devil Hunters, a New Jersey group, remembered it as a "strange kangaroo-like creature" seen around dusk. No one recorded its size, its colour or any sound it made. What survives is movement and eyes.

The response was swift. About two dozen farmers formed a "hastily-formed posse." They carried guns and clubs. They brought dogs. Through the night they searched the hills and fields.

No record of tracks, a trail or a capture has turned up. Whatever the animal was, it was not found.

July 28, 1937. The story ran in the Evening Bulletin, the Philadelphia daily. The reporter made a comparison every reader in the Delaware Valley would have understood. The Jersey Devil. In January 1909 a week of Jersey Devil reports had swept the region, and the Bulletin had covered them.

No official body is known to have investigated. There was no hoax claim, and no published explanation deals with the case directly. General write-ups on the Jersey Devil offer cranes, bats, hoaxes and mass hysteria. A bounding shape with bright eyes at night could also fit an ordinary animal such as a deer, its eyes reflecting light. No one in 1937 is recorded as saying so.

The 1932 figure got its own verdicts. Locals blamed a wailing deer. Patrick Gross, who catalogued that case, rates it a "probable misinterpretation, tramp or mad man."

The case survives as a single line in Wikipedia's list of Jersey Devil sightings, copied onto fan wikis and travel pages. The Devil Hunters once reprinted the original article online. Their site is gone, and so is Milford Mills. It was flooded in 1972 when the Marsh Creek Dam was finished, and it now lies under Marsh Creek Lake. The animal with red eyes was never identified.