The Jersey Devil, a hoofed, winged horse-goat-kangaroo creature, claims an impressively long list of sightings going back several hundred years, but without verification until recently — or so a man claims.
It seems that even monsters are not exempt from the influence of the digital world, because Dave Black snapped the picture you see below and sent it to local media. Black was driving home to Little Egg Harbor township in New Jersey, from his security job in Atlantic City when he pulled out his camera.
“I was just driving past the golf course in Galloway on Route 9 and had to shake my head a few times when I thought I saw a llama,” he wrote in his email.
What happened next is the bizarre part.
“If that wasn’t enough, then it spread out leathery wings and flew off over the golf course,” he added.
According to legend the Jersey Devil was born in 1735. Mother Leed, of Leed Point, was pregnant with her 13th child and during labor yelled out “the devil take him” or “let him be the devil’s child” of Mother Leed was a witch (depending on which version you subscribe to).
The creature she birthed may or may not have killed everyone in the room and then crawled out the chimney and flew away to haunt the the wooded Pine Barren of southern New Jersey. Tales of scary screams, strange sightings, killed animals, and unaccounted foot prints were consistently credited to the Jersey Devil, also known as the Leed Devil.
The story remained local for a few hundred years, however, until January of 1909. For a week, The Philadelphia Record and other local news sources reported sightings, enough to keep children and parents from school and work.
Live Science credits the scare to a Philadelphia businessman painting a kangaroo green and tying wings on it. But Black is questioning that conclusion. In his email to local news he writes “Either my mind is playing tricks on me or I just saw the Jersey Devil.”
But he is willing to hear explanations for his picture “I’m not looking for anything in return, just thought someone else could maybe explain this in a more rational way.”
“The mind plays tricks on you,” Black admitted. “A friend suggested that maybe it was an animal running and an owl grabbed it, the photo being a combination of them. That’s still not my first instinct, but I don’t know how to explain it otherwise.”
Our personal favorite version of the story might not answer for Black’s photo, but suggests we are being pranked by Benjamin Franklin. In this version, Mother Leed’s husband, Daniel Leed, angered the Quaker community with how pagan his astrological research and writing seemed.
Eventually he was accused of working for the Devil, which Benjamin Franklin picked up on when competing against Daniel’s son Titan’s almanac with his own.
Today there are lots of Leeds who live in the region and will openly admit to being relatives of the Jersey Devil, believed to be pictured above.