The Leeds Devil Legend — Leeds Point, New Jersey (1735)

The origin legend of the Jersey Devil traces to the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey in 1735, when a woman known as Mother Leeds — often identified as Deborah Leeds — was said to have given birth to her thirteenth child. According to the most common version of the legend, Mother Leeds, exhausted and exasperated by the prospect of yet another mouth to feed, cursed the child during labor, crying 'Let it be the Devil!' The infant was born normal but quickly transformed into a horrifying creature with the head of a horse, bat-like wings, cloven hooves, a forked tail, and a terrible scream. The newborn devil attacked its family and the attending midwives, then flew up the chimney and disappeared into the Pine Barrens. The Leeds Point area, a remote settlement along the Mullica River in Atlantic County, sits at the heart of the Pine Barrens — over a million acres of dense, sandy-soiled forest, cedar swamps, and cranberry bogs that remain one of the most sparsely populated areas on the East Coast. The historical Deborah Leeds was a real person; her husband Japhet Leeds's almanac publishing was a rival to Benjamin Franklin's, and Franklin himself published satirical attacks on the Leeds family. Some historians have suggested that the 'Leeds Devil' originated partly as political and religious satire targeting the Leeds family's Quaker-to-Anglican conversion.