I spent 21 years looking for the wrong monster.
I grew up in Northeast New Jersey. I spent my childhood summers waiting for the Jersey Devil to show himself. Every July evening, as the sun bled out of the sky, as the moon reflected on the lake water through the trees, I would stand in our backyard and scan the shadows for the glint of red eyes. The silhouette of impossible wings.
At the age of nine, I was introduced to Weird New Jersey Magazine. I labored over it, scaring the shit out of myself. I brought it to school and shared it with my friends in secret in the bushes on the playground - branches scratching at our arms. Then I was ten, eleven, twelve years old. I had a very specific list of Weird NJ ghouls I was afraid of running into in the dark: the bunnyman who carried an axe, the eyeless man who walked backroads at night and was all together pretty friendly, the water-clogged child at the bottom of a pond who I imagined was somehow hiding in my grandfather’s pool, ready to drown me by grabbing my ankle and holding me under.
The Jersey Devil was the one that really stuck. I was old enough to know monsters weren’t real, but young enough to understand that knowing and believing occupied entirely different territories.
The Jersey Devil never appeared, of course. But years later, when I first learned to drive and found myself alone on New Jersey’s rural back roads after dark, that old terror would resurface. It was intense. Turning a corner on some wooded stretch of Route 206, I would grip the steering wheel and brace myself for the moment my headlights would catch something impossible standing on the asphalt. Something with the head of the horse and the wings of a bat. The worst were the foggy nights, when I would be driving down the mountain towards my parents’ place from the highest point in New Jersey. Sometimes I couldn’t see more than a few foot ahead of me. The Devil could have emerged from the thick cloud and I may not notice until it was too late.
I know the legend by heart: Mother Leeds, exhausted by twelve pregnancies, cursing her thirteenth child in a moment of desperation. The creature was born normal but transformed quickly into something monstrous, flying up the chimney into the Pine Barrens where it haunts South Jersey to this day. In some stories, he kills everyone in his vicinity. In some stories, he simply destroys the chimney.
I never thought about Mother Leeds as her own character. She was like a prologue. The woman who cursed her child and then disappeared or murdered by that same cursed child. The Jersey Devil was the protagonist. Mother Leeds was the inciting incident.
I was obsessed with her but could never really articulate why. Maybe it was more of a curiosity. Obsession seems to strong. The story barely mentioned her. The curiosity just sat, festered. There was just that moment of desperation. That curse. Then nothing. She vanished from her own narrative as completely as if she’d never existed at all.
This is a topic I have wanted to explore for a long time. Especially since a trip in 2017. It was my 22nd birthday and I was visiting the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. My partner and I were there with our friends Katie and Troy who would later marry at that museum. A stranger outside handed me their entrance sticker so I wouldn’t have to pay for a ticket.
The exhibition was called “Imperfecta” and it explored how people throughout history have understood birth defects, disabilities, and physical differences. The museum was using artifacts from The Historical Medical Library and their own collections to examine historic perspectives about “abnormal” human development. It explored fear and wonder and curiosity and disdain and clinical science.
It also introduced me to the idea of “monstrous births”. “A monstrous birth” is what folks in the turn of the century called babies born with physical differences or disabilities. The term monster is key here, both in its absolute ablelism and also in the way it was weaponized against the women who carried these children.
And holy shit, I couldn’t stop thinking about my old friend, The Jersey Devil.