It was a black, stormy night in Pine Barrens, 1735. As the rain pattered on the windows, Deborah Leeds felt the agonizing pain of childbirth. Her 13th child. Through her clenched teeth, she cursed her babe, her fortune, and wished the pain to end. The result was the birth of The Jersey Devil.
The 13th child was born dead, but before they could take the body away, it morphed into a beast. It grew wings, hooves, horns, and a tail, and then came back to life with a piercing screech. The creature shook itself free and flew up the chimney, and into the night.
Stories of the Leeds family and the Leeds Devil were kept alive in religious families (especially Quakers) throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Because of the long-standing bad reputation of the Leeds, plus the continuous stories of sightings in Pine Barrens, the creature even appeared in newspapers articles, which finally widened the devil’s notoriety, and gave it its now-famous name (The Jersey Devil), which would end up being the name it would be known as to this day.
The story of the Leeds family is a complex one but one worth investigating in order to fully comprehend all the stigma that made society birth such a dark and gritty legend. Even Ben Franklin’s name pops up at one point. If anything, this American folklore legend shows how your neighbors could dislike you so much, that they would make up ghost stories about you that would last centuries.
