The Jersey Devil

The Jersey Devil is an excellent example of what happens when European attitudes about the wilderness and religion were grafted onto the New World during the Colonial era.  Just the name "Pine Barrens" sounds terrible, doesn't it?  And yet, the Pine Barrens is a vast and varied wilderness, a valuable ecology, and the kind of thing that would be called "old growth forest" anywhere else.

The Jersey Devil is also one of the few cryptids I know of which has no equivalent in the legends of the local Native American tribes.  Unlike Sasquatch or the Swamp Ape, the Jersey Devil was never seen by the local tribes before the arrival of Europeans.  That's your first hint about what's going on!

The Jersey Devil also has an origin story, unlike most other cryptids. The Leeds family, a very powerful and prolific family in the area, is said to have cursed and then given birth to it.  According to legend, in 1725 Mother Leeds became pregnant with her 13th (!) child.  

Mother Leeds swore that "this one will be the devil."  And when it was born, sure enough her curse came to fruition.  It was born a normal baby, but transformed into a monster within a few minutes of its birth, slaughtered Mother Leeds and her attendants, then fled up the chimney.

I think it's funny to look at the Jersey Devil pictures, and pick out the features from the nocturnal woodland creatures which have been misidentified as the Jersey Devil.  We have the hooves, long face, large eyes, cloven hooves, and sometimes even the antlers of a white tailed deer (which are prolific in the area).  We have giant wings, either from a bat (membranous) or from a Great horned owl (feathered).  And horns from a Great horned owl, as well (the owl has horn-like tufts of feathers atop its head).  The creature's unearthly wails can easily be attributed to the sound of a bobcat in heat - a sound I have heard, and I can verify it is an unearthly sound indeed.

A subset of reports and eyewitness sketches describe something which looks exactly like the African hammerhead bat, down to the slightest detail on the face.  Although the bat would not survive long in New Jersey's climate, and it isn't likely to have come across by accident (since the transatlantic voyage was long, and the bat requires a great deal of food), the resemblance is still remarkable and worth noting.

But if you are not familiar with the natural world, and you get startled by a big owl, it's probably natural for your mind to jump to the Jersey Devil.  I mean, for some people, anyway.

Despite popular belief, eyewitness accounts are probably the worst kind of evidence.  Most untrained observers are unable to distinguish between a large animal far away, or a small animal nearby.  The eyewitness sighting investigated in the MonsterQuest episode, for example, could easily have been a bat or owl five or six feet away, instead of a giant beast bigger than a human fifteen or twenty feet away.  Heck, I ran across a case recently where a woman had mistaken a house cat for Sasquatch!  People get confused when they are scared, and even eyewitness accounts of human events are notoriously unreliable.