Jersey Devil livestock attacks in South Jersey, 1840 to 1841

The Pine Barrens of South Jersey are the home ground of the Jersey Devil. In the wider legend the creature walks on its back legs. It has a horse or goat-like head, bat wings, horns, clawed hands, cloven hooves and a forked tail. Its cry is a blood-curdling scream.

Those descriptions belong to other eras, mostly 1909. The story of 1840 and 1841 is stranger. Nobody in it ever sees the creature at all.

1840. Across South Jersey, the Jersey Devil was blamed for several livestock killings. National Geographic puts it simply: "A series of livestock attacks in 1840 were also attributed to the monster."

Then 1841. Similar attacks, this time "accompanied by tracks and screams." One widely shared line sums up both years: "In 1840-41 many sheep and chickens were killed by a creature with a piercing scream and strange tracks." Vice speaks of "screams, hoofprints, and slaughtered livestock."

The farmers had dead animals, marks in the ground and a sound they could not place. That was all. No town or farm is named. No witness is either.

Some retellings frame the attacks as a homecoming. In 1740, the story goes, a minister exorcised the creature and promised it "would not prey on anyone for a hundred years." JSTOR Daily, following James F. McCloy and Ray Miller Jr., writes that in 1840 "he did reappear," right "on schedule." The same article says the creature had been heard "howling and screaming" at night since 1835.

Here the trail goes cold. No contemporaneous newspaper, diary or court record of the attacks has turned up. The accounts that exist repeat each other almost word for word. Their earliest identifiable common source is the McCloy and Miller book The Jersey Devil, published in 1976.

Historian Brian Regal, writing in New Jersey Studies in 2015, notes that the book gives no citations for its stories. He calls a diary entry the authors often cited "of spurious origins." Regal places the earliest documented printed mention of the "Leeds Devil" in W. F. Mayer's Atlantic Monthly article of May 1859, about 18 years after the attacks. Most reports, he writes, do not begin until the turn of the 20th century.

No one has offered an explanation for 1840 and 1841 in particular. For the legend as a whole, the debate has ranged widely. Some point to misidentified animals, or to vagrant sandhill cranes with loud calls, a suggestion from Jeff Brunner of the Humane Society of NJ. Others see bogeyman stories and prejudice against the Pine Barrens "pineys." Regal argues the legend grew out of colonial-era politics and the reputation of the Leeds family. On that view, the 1740 exorcism and its prophecy are a storytelling device.

The episode sits in a long chain of Jersey Devil tales. Before it came the legends of Commodore Stephen Decatur and Joseph Bonaparte. After it came the Atlantic Monthly piece of 1859, a train attack in 1893 and the wave of January 1909. Today the creature lends its name to an NHL team and a roller coaster. The attacks of 1840 and 1841 remain what they have always been: screams, tracks and dead sheep, written down long after the fact.