There are buildings all over this city where the elevator panel reads 11, 12, 14.
Not most of them. But an Otis executive estimated back in 2002 that among buildings with thirteen or more floors and Otis elevators in them, something like 85% had no floor labeled the thirteenth, which is a lot of buttons that somebody sat down and decided not to make.
The floor is there. Obviously the floor is there. You can't just leave a gap in a building and hope the plumbing figures it out. The people on 14 are standing on twelve floors of other people, and they know it, and nobody involved has ever pretended otherwise. It's a naming problem, handled at the panel.
And it works. That's the part I keep chewing on. Gallup asked in 2007 and 13% of American adults said a hotel room on the thirteenth floor would bother them, and 9% said they'd ask to be moved, which means roughly one in eleven grown people with a job and a rolling suitcase will stand at a front desk and request a different number for the same air. Nobody laughs at them. The clerk moves them. Everybody has agreed that the fix for an unlucky thing is to relabel it and go about the day, and the fact that this is unbelievably stupid has never once slowed it down.
You can do that with a floor. A kid, no.
Because there's no 12A in a family. When a household has twelve and one more is coming, the arithmetic is right out there in the open where everyone can see it: the beds, the shoes, the bread, the names. Especially the names. Look at what happens to a big family's names by the back half of the list, where the good ones are gone, the grandparents have all been used, and somebody has started recycling. Japhet Leeds of Leeds Point, New Jersey, wrote a will in 1736 naming twelve children, and the genealogies give the first several as Mary, Robert, John, and then Japheth.
Named him after the father. Fourth kid in. Twelve to go and they'd already gone back to the well.
So.
The Mother Leeds legend, told the way it gets told
Southern New Jersey, and the usual date attached is 1735.
A woman known as Mother Leeds is pregnant with her thirteenth child. Twelve already, and this one arriving anyway, and at some point she says out loud the thing you're never supposed to say out loud. The line gets quoted a few different ways depending on who's telling it. "Let this one be the devil." "Let the child be the devil." Pick your version, they all do the same job.
Then a storm night. Thunder, wind, the whole production. The birth goes normally and the baby is a normal baby, which is the part of the legend I find genuinely well constructed, because the story gives her a moment of relief first.
And then it changes in her arms. Horse's head, long neck, leathery wings, a forked tail, hooves, claws. In the versions with the most mileage on them it turns on the people in the house, goes up the chimney or out the window, screams once over the trees, and is gone into the pines.
The descriptions have never settled down and I'd be lying to you if I said otherwise. It's a horse's head and also a collie's head. It's got antlers, or it doesn't. It's three and a half feet tall, or it's over six, and the six-foot version is mostly a twentieth-century arrival. What holds steady across two hundred years of retelling is the wings, the hooves, the scream, and the arithmetic. Thirteen. Always thirteen.
Even the mother's name won't hold still. She's Jane Leeds in some tellings and Deborah Leeds in others, and Deborah is the one with an actual paper trail behind her, since she was married to that same Japhet Leeds with the twelve-name will.
Nobody wrote any of this down at the time. Worth saying early.
Where the Pine Barrens are, and who lives in them
The Pinelands National Reserve covers about 1.1 million acres across seven southern New Jersey counties, which comes to roughly 22% of the state. It was the first National Reserve in the country, established in 1978. Sandy soil, pitch pine, cedar water the color of strong tea, and a huge amount of nothing in a state that's otherwise famously, gloriously full of something.
Here's the number that stopped me. The reserve contains all or part of 56 municipalities and somewhere north of 700,000 permanent residents.
Seven hundred thousand people. In the haunted wilderness. There are diners in the haunted wilderness. There are people in the haunted wilderness renewing a car registration.
Which is the correct way to understand this landscape and the reason it grows a legend better than an actual empty place would. Nothing about the Pine Barrens is remote in the sense that a mountain range is remote. It's a big dark unlit gap inside one of the most densely settled corridors on earth, forty-five minutes from Philadelphia, wrapped on all sides by people who aren't in it. That's a much stranger arrangement than wilderness. You can be at a wedding, and then be alone under trees, and then be at a Wawa.
The Leeds family were real, and they were in trouble with the Quakers
Now the good part, and I mean that. The history under this legend is better than the legend.
Daniel Leeds, 1651 to 1720, was a Quaker in Burlington who took up almanac publishing in 1687. An almanac in that period wasn't a joke book, it was the household's calendar, weather guide, planting schedule and general operating manual, and Leeds packed his with astrology, which he considered natural philosophy and which the Philadelphia Quaker Meeting considered pagan garbage. They censored him. His book The Temple of Wisdom went the same way.
He didn't take it well.
He left the Society of Friends for the Anglican church, went into colonial politics on the side of the royal governors, and started publishing anti-Quaker tracts, including one in 1699 with the title The Trumpet Sounded Out of the Wilderness of America, which I want to point out is a better title than anything on the current bestseller list. The Meeting answered in kind. In 1700 the response came out under the heading Satan's Harbinger Encountered, meaning that a printed document produced by his own former congregation put Daniel Leeds and the devil in the same sentence, in public, for the neighbors.
Harbinger. Out of every available insult they picked the one that means whatever's coming hasn't got here yet.
Hold onto that.
Benjamin Franklin killed Titan Leeds in print, and Titan wrote back
Titan Leeds, 1699 to 1738, took over his father's almanac and the family's local reputation along with it.
In 1732 a younger publisher in Philadelphia launched a competing almanac under a made-up author's name. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, and if you've only ever met Franklin as a face on money and a man with a kite, this is going to reorganize him for you.
Franklin's promotional strategy was to use the astrological apparatus Titan's own family had built and predict, in print, the exact hour of Titan Leeds' death. October 17, 1733. He was very specific about it. He also affected to be sorry about it, which is worse.
Titan Leeds, who was alive, published a public response calling Franklin a fool and a liar. The spelling in the period is "lyar," and I'm keeping it, because "lyar" is a better-looking word and because it's the actual thing he wrote.
Franklin's counter is the part where you understand why this man ended up on the money. He announced that Titan was in fact dead, exactly as predicted, and that the person writing angry replies under the Leeds name was clearly an impostor, since the real Titan Leeds had been a gentleman who would never have used such language about a colleague. Every subsequent Leeds almanac was therefore being produced by a ghost. Franklin ran this bit for years. Titan couldn't say a single word in his own defense without providing more copy for it, because the more he insisted he was alive the funnier it got, and he did keep insisting, and it did keep getting funnier, and he died in 1738 with the joke still in circulation and the last word going, permanently, to the other guy.
The historian Brian Regal, who with Frank J. Esposito wrote the 2018 book that assembled most of this, notes that the traditional "birth" of the monster and the actual death of Titan Leeds sit within a few years of each other.
A family gets called Satan's harbinger by its church. Then the most quotable printer in America spends five years telling the colonies that the Leeds name is being signed by something that isn't alive.
The wyvern on the Leeds family crest
In 1728, Titan put the family crest on his almanac masthead.
The Leeds crest carried a wyvern. A wyvern, for anybody who has better things to hold in their head, is a heraldic dragon that stands upright on two clawed feet and has bat wings and no front legs, and heraldry is lousy with them because they look terrific on a shield.
Bat wings, clawed feet, and a face doing its level best.
Regal's word for the resemblance to later descriptions of the Jersey Devil is "suspiciously reminiscent," which is scholar for "come on."
So the picture on the household letterhead of the most publicly devil-adjacent family in the county, printed and reprinted and carried into kitchens across South Jersey for years, was a winged clawed thing standing on two feet. If you want a mechanism for how a political grudge turns into a monster with a body, that's a mechanism. It doesn't require anybody to lie. It requires people to remember an image and forget where they saw it, which is the single most reliable thing human beings do.
For a long stretch afterward the thing wasn't even called the Jersey Devil. It was the Leeds Devil. The family's name was on it.
The week in January 1909 when the whole Delaware Valley saw it
Then comes the week that built the modern version, and it really is one week.
Snow fell on the night of January 15, 1909. The next morning people across South Jersey and into Pennsylvania started finding tracks: two-toed hoofprints, in single file, crossing yards and fields, over fences, over rooftops, stopping and starting where nothing on four legs or two should have been able to stop and start. By the week of January 16 through 23 the papers were carrying hundreds of reports across the Delaware Valley and out into Delaware and Maryland.
The sightings piled up fast and got bolder as they went. It turned up at a trolley car in Haddon Heights and then at a social club in Camden, and police in Camden and in Bristol, Pennsylvania, are supposed to have opened fire on it with no effect whatsoever, which is the detail that always tells you a story has left the ground, because the bullets never work.
The best-documented household account came from Nelson Evans and his wife in Gloucester City, up at half past two in the morning, at the window in whatever people wore to bed in 1909, watching the thing on the roof of their shed for a solid ten minutes. Ten minutes. That's long enough to get bored, and long enough to go and fetch a shotgun, and they did neither, they just stood there in the cold looking at it. Evans told a reporter it was about three and a half feet high with a head like a collie dog and a face like a horse.
Schools closed. Mills and factories reported people not showing up. Armed groups went out into the pines to hunt it, which in a week where everybody is jumpy and armed is its own separate emergency.
By the 23rd it was over.
The painted kangaroo at Ninth and Arch
I need to tell you about the kangaroo and I need you to know I'm not embellishing.
A reward was reportedly put up for a live capture during the panic, with $10,000 the figure most often repeated, and I'll flag that the sourcing on the reward is the shakiest link in this whole page. What isn't shaky is what happened at a dime museum on Ninth and Arch Street in Philadelphia.
A dime museum was a storefront attraction: pay a dime, look at the exhibits, one of which is going to be a person or an animal you were promised would be amazing. The Ninth and Arch was struggling. Its press agent was Norman Jefferies, a former newspaperman, and working with the proprietor J. F. Hope he arranged a solution.
They got a kangaroo.
They painted stripes on it, attached a set of wings, and put it on display as the captured Jersey Devil.
The wings were fastened on with a harness, and by every account the harness was perfectly visible to anybody standing in front of it. Which didn't matter even slightly. People came anyway, and paid, and came back. Jefferies had also been placing invented sighting stories with cooperative reporters during the panic itself, which is the part that stops this being a funny footnote and makes it the actual origin of the creature you can picture right now, because the newspapers weren't covering a wave of sightings so much as running one.
He admitted the whole thing about twenty years later.
So a painted kangaroo in a visible harness did the thing that two centuries of ghost stories and curses had never managed, which was to give everybody one agreed-upon body to picture.
Is the Jersey Devil real? Sorting the legend from the paperwork
Three separate things are stacked up here and they don't carry the same weight, so they go in order of how much I'd bet on them.
Documented history. Daniel Leeds' almanac, the Quaker censorship, the Anglican turn, Satan's Harbinger Encountered, the 1728 wyvern masthead, Franklin's death prediction and Titan's furious reply, Titan's death in 1738. This is printed record. You can go look at it. There genuinely was a Leeds family in southern New Jersey with a public reputation for consorting with the wrong side, and it was earned in politics and religion rather than in a swamp.
Legend. Mother Leeds, the thirteenth child, the storm, the curse, the transformation, the chimney. No contemporary documentation whatsoever. Regal's finding, and it's the one that reorganizes everything, is that no newspaper or printed reference to the creature turns up until the twentieth century. Two hundred years of alleged monster and the first person to write it down is a reporter. There's a Commodore Stephen Decatur story where he fires a cannonball through it, and a Joseph Bonaparte story where Napoleon's older brother spots it while hunting near Bordentown around 1820, and both of those are exactly as documented as the cannonball sounds.
Newspaper invention. January 1909, and the kangaroo. The consolidated modern description, the wingspan, the two-toed prints, the whole visual, dates from a week of competing papers and one press agent with a failing museum and a livestock budget.
So the honest answer to whether it's real is that something here is extremely real and it isn't an animal. Nobody has ever produced a body, a bone, a photograph, or a single track that got kept. What's still sitting in the archive, with everybody's actual names attached to it, is a family that got run out of its own church by people who then put that in writing, plus a printer who thought the whole business was hilarious, plus a city that sold tickets to a marsupial.
How a hockey team ended up with the name
In 1982 the NHL franchise that had been the Kansas City Scouts and then the Colorado Rockies moved to the Meadowlands, and the new ownership ran a "Name That Team" contest.
Eleven names made the shortlist. Americans, Blades, Colonials, Lightning, Meadowlarks, Meadowlanders, Coastals, Generals, Gulls, Jaguars, Patriots. More than 10,000 ballots came in. Devils took it with about 2,400 votes and Blades came second with about 1,700.
The principal owner, John McMullen, didn't want it. He floated Meadowlanders instead, which his own family reportedly declined to support, and I'd like a moment of silence for a man who looked at a list containing the Meadowlarks and the Meadowlanders and picked the second one. He was also getting calls objecting on religious grounds. The New York Times reported in June 1982 that one caller threatened the life of a reporter who'd written about the naming contest, calling him an agent of Satan.
Agent of Satan, about a hockey team, in 1982, over the telephone.
You will notice that this is the same accusation, in the same state, aimed at the same name, roughly 282 years after the Burlington Meeting printed it about Daniel Leeds. Nobody involved in 1982 was thinking about the Burlington Meeting. The complaint just doesn't wear out.
Anyway, they went with Devils, which is the correct answer, and the state has since put the thing on jerseys and on roughly everything else that will hold ink.
The thirteenth child, which is where we came in
Across three hundred years, two states and one kangaroo, not one person involved in this ever managed to get rid of it.
Not one.
The Quakers censored Daniel Leeds and he came back louder in a different church. Franklin killed Titan in print and Titan kept publishing, and then Titan actually died and the almanacs kept coming out anyway under the family name, which means the ghost joke outlived the man it was about. The papers ran the panic dry in eight days and the creature only got more specific afterward. Jefferies confessed and the wings stayed on. Regal and Esposito published the receipts in 2018, laid the whole thing out as a Quaker political grudge with a heraldic dragon printed on top, and the Pine Barrens didn't lose one single visitor.
And Mother Leeds, who probably wasn't named Jane, who may have been Deborah, who was married to a man who by the fourth child had already run out of names and started reusing his own, is remembered for one sentence she almost certainly never said, in a house that had twelve kids in it and one more coming, on a night when the arithmetic finally stopped working.
Twelve names in a will and a thirteenth with nothing left to give it. So it got wings instead, and a hoofprint, and a scream over the trees, and three hundred years of steady employment in a state that has never once let it go hungry.
Which is what I'd call a solution, honestly, and it's more than any building on this island has ever offered its thirteenth floor.
