Leeds Point - Birthplace of the Jersey Devil

The story New Jersey tells about Leeds Point, a marshy sliver of Atlantic County on the Mullica River, is that a monster was born there. The legend dates it to 1735. A woman called Mother Leeds, pregnant with her thirteenth child, is said to have cursed it before it came: "Let the child be the devil!" The newborn grew wings, a tail, and claws, and flew out into the Pine Barrens, a million acres of forest just across the highway.

No contemporary source from the 1700s records any such birth; the 1735 date is folklore, not a register. But people have looked for the creature ever since. The most concentrated wave came the week of January 16 to 23, 1909, when South Jersey woke to mysterious hoofprints in the snow and the newspapers filled with hundreds of reported encounters. The names came with them: Thack Cozzens near a Woodbury hotel, William Cromley at a Trenton theater door, a city councilman named Claudius Weeden. The creature was said to have attacked a trolley in Haddon Heights and a social club in Camden. Schools closed and workers stayed home. The Philadelphia Zoo posted a $10,000 reward, which mostly produced hoaxes. The most famous was a kangaroo fitted with artificial claws and bat wings, displayed by a Philadelphia museum publicist as the captured Devil, a deception he later admitted.

Here is the part that holds up better than the curse. Kean University historian Brian Regal traces the monster not to a birth but to a grudge. Daniel Leeds, a colonial Quaker printer, packed his 1690s almanacs with astrology his fellow Friends found heretical; they branded him a harbinger of the devil. His son Titan printed the family crest on his own almanacs starting in 1728, and that crest carried a wyvern, a winged dragon. Then Benjamin Franklin, a rival almanac man, mocked Titan in print by joking he had died and gone on writing as a ghost.

So the record holds no cursed child. The Leeds family was real, the feud was real, the dragon on the coat of arms was real. Historians most often identify Mother Leeds as Deborah Leeds, whose husband Japhet named twelve children in the will he wrote in 1736, one short of the legendary thirteenth. The Japhet Leeds House still stands on Moss Mill Road, photographed behind a picket fence in 1933. What the documents describe is a man's neighbors calling him the devil's servant, and a forest on the far side of the highway that kept saying it back.