Pine Barrens (Jersey Devil country)

The Barrens are an industrial graveyard before they are a haunted one. Bog-iron furnaces at Batsto, Atsion, and Martha ran through the Revolution — Batsto's iron supplied American privateers — and when Pennsylvania coal and ore killed the bog-iron trade in the mid-1800s, the company towns were simply left standing in the woods. Batsto, Atsion, and a dozen smaller settlements survive as genuine ghost towns, and the back-country people the cities called pineys generated their own folklore economy of lights in the swamp, hermits, and warnings. In 1978 Congress made the region the country's first National Reserve — 1.1 million acres legally protected, monster included by implication.

The story goes that in 1735 a woman the legend calls Mother Leeds, of Leeds Point in Atlantic County, already burdened with twelve children and a worthless husband, declared of her thirteenth pregnancy: let this one be a devil. The baby, born on a stormy night, is said to have changed in the midwives' hands — horse's head, bat wings, cloven hooves, forked tail — dispatched the attendants, and gone up the chimney into the pines. Genealogists have obligingly located a candidate: Deborah Leeds, who bore twelve children between 1704 and 1726. Earlier worthies filed sightings too — Commodore Stephen Decatur reportedly fired a cannonball at the thing while testing shot in the Barrens in the early 1800s, and Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, resident of Bordentown, claimed his own encounter around 1820.

The description witnesses keep filing is consistent enough to draw: a biped roughly the size of a kangaroo, horse- or goat-headed, winged, hoofed, possessed of a scream no audit has ever recorded. The January 1909 wave is the file's center of gravity — sightings logged across New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and Delaware, footprints photographed by the press, a trolley reportedly attacked, posses formed and nothing found. Reports have continued at a drizzle ever since, steady enough that in 1939 the creature acquired, without ever being seen, a National Hockey League team.

What remains is the strangest preserve in the archive: a wilderness big enough to hide in, a monster old enough to have a baptism story, and a ghost-towns landscape that makes the whole thing plausible at dusk. No specimen exists, no photograph holds up, and the Leeds birth is folklore down to the thunderstorm. The file closes where it began — the footprints were real newsprint, the fear was real behavior, and the Devil, if he keeps to schedule, has been in the pines going on three centuries.