Leeds Point - Birthplace of the Jersey Devil

The 1735 birthplace of the Jersey Devil, where a Quaker almanac feud and a family crest wyvern calcified into America's strangest cryptid.

The Leeds family named twelve children in Japhet Leeds's 1736 will. The thirteenth is the one that got away.

Leeds Point is a coastal sliver of Galloway Township on the Mullica River side of Atlantic County, not a town so much as a scattering of houses among the salt marsh. It's also the address New Jersey folklore keeps assigning to the 1735 birth that produced the Jersey Devil. The legend, depending on which version you grew up with, goes like this: Mother Leeds, pregnant with her thirteenth, cursed the child mid-storm. "Let it be the devil." It arrived looking human for about a minute, then grew a horse's head, bat wings, and cloven hooves, beat the midwives bloody, and flew up the chimney into the Pine Barrens, where it has been terrorizing stage drivers, cranberry pickers, and teenagers ever since.

Historian Brian Regal has argued the legend isn't about a single cursed birth at all. It comes from a colonial feud. Daniel Leeds, a Burlington Quaker, published almanacs in the 1690s with astrological charts that horrified his fellow Friends, who labeled him "Satan's harbinger." His descendant Titan Leeds kept printing them and tangled with Benjamin Franklin, who mocked the family in Poor Richard's Almanack. The Leeds family crest happens to feature a wyvern. Put a Quaker smear campaign, an almanac war, a dragon-like heraldic animal, and a large rural family together, ferment for two hundred years in a forest that swallows sound, and you get the Jersey Devil.

People still go looking for the original house. There's a cellar foundation off Moss Mill Road that locals point to as the spot. No marker, no plaque, just a depression in the sand and whatever you brought with you. The Atlantic County government gamely calls it "fact or fiction" in its own history pages, which is diplomatic for "we know what this does for tourism."

The sightings are the reason the legend didn't die out with the almanac war. In January 1909, the Devil went on what newspapers called the Phenomenal Week. Tracks appeared in snow across twenty South Jersey towns at once. Pets vanished. A Haddon Heights trolley crew reported their car attacked on the line. The Philadelphia Zoo posted a $10,000 reward. Whatever caused it, the panic was real enough that some schools closed. You can still read the original Philadelphia Inquirer headlines in archive collections.

Modern visits tend to be quieter. People driving through Leeds Point at night report hoofprints in the mud that don't match any known animal, a long blue-red glow seen hovering over the marsh, and a scream described by multiple witnesses as something between a goat and a jet engine. Hunters in the adjacent Edwin B. Forsythe refuge have reported the same cry over the years, and nobody agrees what animal makes it.

Scott's Landing Road runs out where the asphalt goes soft at the marsh edge. The cellar foundation sits on private land a little beyond that. The Pine Barrens start on the other side of the highway and run for another million acres, which is roughly the point. There is more uninterrupted forest here than in most of New England. Whatever the Leeds family did or didn't produce in 1735, the forest itself is big enough that you can't rule anything out just by walking around in it.

Mother Leeds, the legend says, never took it back. She knew what she'd said.