The Jersey Devil Livestock Killings of 1840

Long before it was the Jersey Devil, it had another name. In the old newspapers it was the "Leeds Devil". Folklore set its birth at Leeds Point, on the edge of the Pine Barrens, and told of a clerical exorcism around 1740. By the legend's own count, a century later, the animals started dying.

1840. Somewhere in South Jersey, livestock was being lost. The retellings speak of "many sheep and chickens" killed. Of a "piercing scream". Of "strange tracks".

Then 1841. The attacks came back, "accompanied by tracks and screams." One later account adds that "nothing could be located by local posses." Other pages fold both years into a single episode, or place it in "the mid 1840's".

No farm is named, no town, no witness. No one describes the creature's size, colour or eyes. It is not even clear that anyone saw it at all. What survives is the loss, the sound and the marks it left behind.

The Jersey Devil of tradition is a winged biped with hooves. It has a head like a horse or a goat, bat-like wings, horns, clawed hands, cloven hooves and a forked tail. It is reported to move quickly and to emit a high-pitched scream.

Older stories put it in the sky. Commodore Stephen Decatur saw a strange creature flying over his cannon range. "He fired and hit the creature but it kept right on flying across the field." Joseph Bonaparte, near Bordentown, described "a hissing sound like that of an alligator when it feels threatened." Then it "flew away."

The famous line is short. "During 1840, the Jersey Devil was blamed for several livestock killings." Wikipedia cites James F. McCloy and Ray Miller Jr., whose book The Jersey Devil appeared in 1976. Historian Brian Regal looked at what stood behind it. He found no footnotes, a bibliography under half a page, and a list of newspapers consulted with no specific articles.

Regal places the earliest documented mention of the legend with W. F. Mayer in the Atlantic Monthly, May 1859. The 1740 exorcism, he writes, has "no supporting documentation". In the Skeptical Inquirer he went further: "References to the Jersey Devil do not appear in newspapers or other printed material until the twentieth century." Even a Camden history page friendly to the legend admits that "from the pre 1909 era, few documented records of sightings still exist."

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid confirmed the older "Leeds Devil" name in newspaper archives. Explanations offered for the legend include bogeyman tales, local dislike of the Leeds family, stereotypes of "pineys", misidentified animals and vagrant sandhill cranes, a theory from Jeff Brunner. Dunning calls the specific animal theories speculation.

The pattern did not end in 1841. In January 1909 a flap brought hundreds of reports, chickens found "dead, with no marks on them" and hoofprints in the snow. A 1966 farm raid left "31 ducks, 3 geese, 4 cats, and 2 dogs" dead. In 1987, in Vineland, a German Shepherd was "torn apart", with "strange tracks" nearby. The 1840 killings stand near the start of that list, though whether they happened as told, no surviving page can say.