The Jersey Devil "Bones" Find, Wharton Tract

By 1957 the Jersey Devil already felt like a relic. In February that year, the Newark Star-Ledger ran a piece by Joseph R. Coyne titled "Poor Jersey Devil hasn't got a ghost of a chance today." The New Jersey State Library calls it the earliest known article to give the Devil "official state demon" status. The same day, the Atlantic City Press carried a headline of its own. "Better lighting, roads banished Jersey Devil."

Eight months later, the Devil was back in the news. This time as a body.

That summer, fires burned through the Wharton Tract, state land in the pine barrens of central South Jersey. A member of the Bureau of Forestry was working near the southern end of the Clayberger and Goodrich bogs at Hampton Furnace, cranberry country in Shamong Township, Burlington County. In the burned woodland, the worker noticed remains.

Hindlegs. Claws. A partial skeleton. Feathers.

Bone fragments lay scattered nearby. Nobody saw a living animal. There was no movement, no sound, no smell on record. Only what the fire had left behind.

On October 31, 1957, the discovery appeared under the line "Jersey Devil Bones Are Found." The article opened with a sentence made for the date. "The Jersey Devil may have met his final end this summer in the depths of the Wharton Tract." Foresters and other members of the state department reported the find. Conservation Commissioner Joseph E. McLean commented on it.

The state did not claim a monster. It left the door open, allowing "Unless the remains are truly those of the Jersey Devil," but it leaned toward a set up. The strange being had probably been stuffed and placed in the woods some time before the fire. Two culprits were offered. An "amateur taxidermist" bent on a hoax. Or a "desperate wife" getting rid of a "trophy" from her husband's den at spring cleaning time.

Whether specialists ever examined the bones is not recorded. Neither is what became of them. One later website claimed the Department of Conservation could not identify the remains, but that claim has never been confirmed.

In 1997, Charles Cummings of the Newark Public Library retold the find. The fire, he wrote, "unearthed the remains of a strange creature," one "half bird and half beast, thought somehow to be the remains of the Devil." A decade later, Chris McNab's Mythological Monsters noted that claims of a corpse matching the Jersey Devil's description arose in 1957. Fan wikis went further, describing a "bizarre rotting corpse," a word found in no early source. Somewhere along the way, the state's own hoax theory quietly dropped out of the story.

The 1957 bones belong to a long line of Jersey Devil evidence. In December 1925, a farmer in Greenwich Township shot an unidentified animal stealing chickens and photographed the corpse, saying 100 people could not identify it. Ripley's in Atlantic City once claimed to own the Devil's skeleton. The 1957 remains, burned, feathered and clawed, slipped out of the record almost as soon as they entered it, and even the newspaper that first ran the story has not been identified. The Devil, it seems, outlived his own obituary.