What I Am Reading: "The Secret History of the Jersey Devil" by Brian Regal and Frank J. Esposito

This is a scholarly book tracing the origins of New Jersey’s most commercial fakelore cryptid, the Jersey Devil, a winged monster horse that lives in the remote region of the Pine Barrens. The Jersey Devil is said to have its origins in witchcraft, and to have its folklore origins in colonial-era pamphleteering and a controversial leading family of West Jersey. This book has a lot of interesting information on those and other topics, but it doesn’t always shape its material into a smooth narrative. 

The Jersey Devil story is fairly simple, I’ll quote the book’s epilogue directly:

“The Jersey Devil came into being from the collision of several different streams of history. The religious strife and bare-knuckled political maneuverings of the Keithian Schism and the pamphlet and almanac wars of the colonial era placed Daniel and Titan Leeds in a position to be accused of occult activity. This later melded nicely with the Native American traditions of forest dragons and spiritual beings to produce the Leeds Devil, which in turn found itself modified by a legion of other monster legends from home and abroad. By the turn of the twentieth century, this legend – now completely divorced from the actual Leeds family – was grafted into strange tracks in the snow and then promoted by a dime museum.” (p. 115)

The book often digresses, however, into ancillary information that isn’t always woven well into the coherent whole. In fact, the book would have benefitted from this simple summary being placed in the introduction as well as the conclusion, to orient the reader from the get-go. Sometimes I wondered whether a given digression, such as the multiple summaries of “monster studies” in early modern biology and medicine, was relevant to the main story, because I didn’t always have a clear grasp of what the main story was (and because the digressions sometimes seemed intended to pad out a rather short book).

This narrative is not helped by its fundamental disconnect: the fact that the Jersey Devil is related to the colonial-era Leeds family only by the fact that a folkloric progenitor was named the Leeds Devil, perhaps after the family but not explicitly so. The above description mentions how Leeds “melded nicely” into other elements, but that melding process is unrecorded and therefore unexplored. The first Leeds was Daniel, an earnest Quaker who emigrated to West Jersey in the late 17th century after facing repression in England. Leeds was a Christian occultist, interested in the supernatural ephemera and the philosophical advances of the early modern scientific era within an explicitly Christian framework. The Quakers of Burlington, West Jersey (just south of where I live) were tolerant of their Native American neighbors, but were less so of Leeds’ heresy; and after his book and his first almanac were suppressed his earnestness turned to bitterness, and he spent the rest of his intellectual career (distinct from his prosperous business career) in a pamphlet war with other Quaker luminaries.

Daniel eventually handed off his almanac empire to his son Titus, who was interested in the family publishing business but less interested in the culture wars. In the 1730s, Benjamin Franklin came along, early in his printing career, and decided that the best way to increase the circulation of his own almanac was to start a war with another. He criticized Leeds’ astrological predictions, and predicted his death (and after Leeds failed to die, asserted that his publications were produced by his ghost). Titus eventually left the publishing game and died fairly young.

This story was buried, however, by the Leeds Devil. As I’ve mentioned, there is a disconnect: the Leeds Devil was said to have been birthed by a witch, Mother Leeds, but there is no specific connection to the Leeds family in the myth or in history other than the name, which, because of the family’s colonial-era prosperity, was also the name of several places and institutions. This Leeds Devil myth lived only in the Pine Barrens and was barely recorded for most of a century; but it reappeared as a curiosity piece in newspapers in the late 19th century, written for readers to gawk at the backwoods “Pineys” of the Pine Barrens. The story mutated through slapdash newspaper accounts of mob hunts and tracks in the snow to become the Jersey Devil in the first years of the 20th century, and was promoted first by a freak show-type “museum,” the Ninth and Arch Street Museum in Philadelphia, trying to boost its own ticket sales. The newspaper fodder-cum-tourist attraction took on a life of its own from there.

It was chronicled by amateur historians in the ‘30s, most of whom made no effort to investigate beyond the earlier publications of their own subgenre and made no effort to filter out disinformation (a Henry Charlton Beck being the most-cited violator). These chronicles plus a dash of the ‘60s-‘70s cryptozoology craze made the Jersey Devil into the tourist attraction and hunted cryptid that it is today.

The book contains information on all this and more: the battles between the Quakers and the royalist/Anglican establishment in the colonies and those who switched sides out of political convenience like Leeds; histories of pamphlets and later publications on witchcraft and monstrous births; the rise of popular naturalism and paleontology in the 19th century and the corresponding monster hoaxes of that era; and other items. It sets out to rescue the Leeds family from obscurity as merely the namesake of the Leeds monster, and restore them to their place in the intellectual and political history of New Jersey. The book is undermined, however, by that fundamental disconnect: that the Leeds Devil is really just a name, even if it is helped along by the demonization by the Quakers of Leeds as a “demonic” political opponent of theirs, or by the tradition of monsters and devils in pamphleteering. There is a missing link. Leeds never came up with the Leeds Devil or with any writing on the spirits that the Native Americans believed to inhabit the Pine Barrens; Ben Franklin didn’t use the figure to caricature his selected target of Titan Leeds. The stories touch, but do not join.

It’s good, in any event, for scholars to tackle subjects that had previously been the realm of amateur historians, and the later chapters on the Jersey Devil’s rediscovery and popularity do provide a historiography of amateur historians preceding the conversational and citation-free Beck, such as the more disciplined (but unpublished) Francis Bazley Lee and the subsequent John Elfreth Watkins. As the purely conjectural loyal reader of this blog knows, I live for that kind of thing, even though it was covered only briefly here. Despite this book’s troubles, I’m not sure how much more one can say or write about the Jersey Devil. It’s kind of a dumb monster.