The Mays Landing Shrieks and Tracks

Mays Landing is an unincorporated community in Hamilton Township, the county seat of Atlantic County. It sits on the Great Egg Harbor River in the southern Pine Barrens. This is Jersey Devil country. One version of the legend's origin even places it at Esteville, near Mays Landing, around 1855, where a "Mrs. Leeds" is said to have rejected her baby. In January 1909, hundreds of reports swept the region. In Trenton, councilman E.P. Weeden heard "flapping wings".

1960. No month. No day. Just the year. Near Mays Landing, residents began to hear something in the dark. The New Jersey Historical Society later recorded it as "loud shrieks". Other accounts call them "blood-curdling screams in the middle of the night".

"Unable to identify the source, the residents were frightened," one writer recounted. Another put it more plainly. "There was no explanation for the noises and people began to panic." Nobody claimed to have seen a creature that year. Only the sound. And then, at least once, tracks. Their shape, size and number were never described in any surviving account.

According to later write-ups, police distributed fliers assuring residents that the Jersey Devil was a hoax. No department is named, and no copy of a flier has surfaced. Then came the reward. The oldest account, a 2000 note by Grace-Ellen McCrann for the New Jersey Historical Society, says Camden merchants offered $10,000 and would build a private zoo to display the creature. "The reward is unclaimed." Later retellings inflate it. One credits a circus owner with $100,000. Others speak of $250,000. Neither larger figure has a source behind it.

There is no 1960 newspaper article on record, no named witness, no police document and no photograph. Every account comes from later popular histories. Some say the events ran "throughout the 1960s". A list kept by The Devil Hunters places the noises and tracks in "Dorothy and May's Landing", taking in a hamlet in neighbouring Weymouth Township. One 2025 web article adds hoof-like tracks on rooftops, "vanishing over fences and streams". That image closely matches the famous reports of 1909, and it appears nowhere in the older accounts.

No source offers an ordinary explanation for the 1960 shrieks. Sceptics usually attribute Pine Barrens night screams to foxes, owls or other wildlife, but none of the accounts of Mays Landing makes that case. The police fliers, if they existed, called the Devil itself a hoax. They named no prankster for the tracks. "The potential rewards also led to a number of hoaxes over the years," one history observes.

Wikipedia's entry on the Jersey Devil gives the case a single line. Tracks and noises heard near Mays Landing in 1960, claimed to be from the Jersey Devil. It sits among other mid-century reports, from the 1951 Gibbstown boys to a claimed corpse in 1957. The file is thin. Yet the screams near Mays Landing remain part of the Pine Barrens story. A sound in the dark. A set of tracks. And a reward that, in the oldest account, still stands unclaimed.