The Jersey Devil: A Political Animal
January, 1909.
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The Jersey Devil: A Political Animal
It starts with a mystery in the snow.
January 1909, Burlington, New Jersey. Residents step outside on a Saturday morning and find hoofprints in the fresh snow — single-file, two-legged gait, appearing on rooftops and doghouses and drainpipes. Within days, the panic has spread across thirty newspapers. Schools close. Armed search parties enter the Pine Barrens. And a creature gets famous that — as one historian puts it — was never really a creature at all.
This episode traces the full life cycle of the Jersey Devil: from a colonial-era political smear campaign against a Quaker almanac publisher, through Benjamin Franklin's genuinely petty almanac rivalry, into the January 1909 newspaper frenzy that made the legend national — and then into the 1982 NHL fan vote that made it global. Along the way, we visit the urban legend inside the legend: the claim that New Jersey once designated the Jersey Devil as its official state demon. It didn't.
Sources
- Brian Regal: The Jersey Devil: A Political Animal (New Jersey Studies, 2015)
- Skeptical Inquirer: The Jersey Devil: The Real Story (Regal, 2013)
- Johns Hopkins University Press: The Secret History of the Jersey Devil (Regal & Esposito, 2018)
- Order of the Jackalope: What-Is-It? — The 1909 Jersey Devil Panic
- Philadelphia Inquirer: The Jersey Devil, a viral story from 110 years ago (2019)
- Orion Magazine: The Mother of the Jersey Devil
- Tedium: Jersey Devil Origin Story
- NJ State Library: Is the Jersey Devil the Official State Demon?
- NJ Spotlight News: How the New Jersey Devils team was named
- New Jersey Council for the Humanities: The Jersey Devil in Myth and History
- Hoosier Kin: Family Folklore: The Jersey Devil
- North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook (Puglia, ed., 2022)
- University of Sydney: Encountering the Wilderness — Quirk PhD thesis (2024)
- Pinelands Alliance: The Jersey Devil and Folklore
- New Jersey Isn't Boring: Jersey Devil Fable Festival
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