Jersey Devil-real or unreal?

Does the Jersey devil exist

  • Yes

    Votes: 15 38.5%
  • No

    Votes: 24 61.5%

  • Total voters
    39

leeds

New Member
Aug 2, 2005
1
0
49
Leeds Devil

Hello from the state of New Hampshire, does anyone know if there is a real Leeds house or land that belonged to the family?
 

uuglypher

Explorer
Jun 8, 2005
381
18
Estelline, SD
bruset said:
Woah, he lives!!!![/QUOTE

By the age of four my Dad had populated my mind with the Headless Horseman, Mrs. Leeds unfortunate, fearsome get, Hitler, Baron Munchausen, Musollini, the wraith who lost his "golden arm...", Quisling, Tojo, Hirohito, ... and John Dewey.

When, by the age of five, I was sufficiently curious as to which were the most fearsome I was quickly brought to understand that the contemporary monsters, those to whom could be absolutely and definitively ascribed the wanton deaths of millions of innocents, were of the sort that would have to be met with and dealt with in our own time. And that such as the Leed's Devil, the headless Horseman, and others of their ilk were truly fearsome in their appearance and potential for havoc, but totally lacking in a proven "body count." By the end of every tale of them I heard as a child they thwarted doers of evil and, surprisingly, arranged for a positive outcome to the honest and rightious... According to Dad Mrs. Leed's kid scared the Hell outta Washington which helped him cross the Delaware ... and later traveled down to Yorktown to help the French and the colonists put some whup on Cornwallis.

Years later, Joseph Campbell reinforced to me the notion that myths and the beings that populate them live ... exist ... in the informed actions and attitudes of the folk who have learned, learn from, and pass on those myth traditions.

So , does the Jersey Devil exist? I'll vote yes.

And by-the-bye, I do think my Dad was pretty hard on John Dewey, but he was certainly right that, with time, more contemporary monsters would appear and demand of the world to be dealt with.

Dave in Estelline
 

Gerania

Explorer
May 18, 2004
280
30
Marlton
Wow, sounds like your Dad had a pretty interesting notion about what a bedtime story should be!


uuglypher said:
bruset said:
Woah, he lives!!!![/QUOTE

By the age of four my Dad had populated my mind with the Headless Horseman, Mrs. Leeds unfortunate, fearsome get, Hitler, Baron Munchausen, Musollini, the wraith who lost his "golden arm...", Quisling, Tojo, Hirohito, ... and John Dewey.....

Dave in Estelline
 

uuglypher

Explorer
Jun 8, 2005
381
18
Estelline, SD
Gerania said:
Wow, sounds like your Dad had a pretty interesting notion about what a bedtime story should be!


Oh, my Dad's tales weren't limited to bedtime; anytime a point of some sort needed to be made was a good time for a new (or a repeated) story!

Dave
 

woodjin

Piney
Nov 8, 2004
4,338
326
Near Mt. Misery
Dave,
I like your perspective on the Leeds devil and myth in general. When something influences a persons actions, interests and thoughts it certainly does lend merit to its' "realness". Fact is, more people are aware of the Jersey devil than they are aware of my own existence. How many people have lived and died and have been forgotten in the last 270 years while the Leeds devil has remained a constant. So is flesh and blood the only reality? Imagine how empty the world would be without all the intangibles.

Jeff
 

Windsor

Scout
Aug 11, 2005
66
0
49
Somerdale
Howdy folks. I'm hesitant to post this for my first post, but I did have something mildly eerie happen to me about a month or so ago.

I normally go fishing in the Pine Barrens and enter at Quaker Bridge road off of 206 and Atsion Rd. If you are familiar with that road, I normally make my first stop in a clearing by a small, wooden bridge. There is an old foundation and beaver damn there. It was about 5:45am and the sun was just about making it's way up. I get out of my Jeep and start to rig my fishing rod. As i'm tieing the knot, I heard a twig snap in the trees beyond the opposite side of my Jeep and then this really weird screachy sound which lasted no longer than one second. Like most of us here, I'm a very outdoors type person and I never heard anything like this before. It freaked me out, so I abandoned rigging my rod, threw my gear in the Jeep and shut the doors.

I don't know what it was as I didn't see anything. I regained my composure and completed rigging my rod inside my Jeep and proceded to fish the rest of the day.

I don't know how a creature could live as long as something born during Leed's time. If there are actual real eyewitness accounts, my guess would be that it was a rare, undiscovered species of sorts. There are primates in other parts of the world the size of your thumb. Our winters aren't bad enough here to where intelligent primates couldn't exist, albeit very rare. I think the Leeds baby and the sightings of certain creatures are unrelated.
 

suresue592003

Explorer
Apr 4, 2004
372
1
Browns Mills, NJ
Maybe this all started with the story of the werewolf man. My dad used to tell me about a man who lived in an old abondon car, next to the GreenBank Inn. This man used to walk up and down the road. According to my dad, he looked just like a werewolf, he even had a hunchback. He would see this man on his way to work in the morning to the cedar swamp. No one believed him, so on occasion he would take people with him to see the werewolf man. I knew one such fella, and he swore the story was true. The werewolf man really existed.
 

Piney Boy

Explorer
Sep 19, 2005
365
1
Williamstown, NJ
The Devil; seen or unseen

Gotta go with the non-believers on this topic. The legends and lore are fantastic, but they are just that; legends and lore. While the Pines are a one million acre tract of land, thats just not that isolated in todays world, especially when you consider a good deal of the area is accessible by car. Most likely the Leeds story, as someone mentioned, was turned into this tale that survived into modern times.
 

popeofthepines

Explorer
Mar 8, 2006
206
73
Atco
I agree that there is more legend/lore than any proof. The belief that it was used to scare children from going into the woods makes sense. And how did JD live this long? Who does he/she/it reproduce with to keep the family tree going? Does the family tree have any branches in it?

The Leed's family story is believable if you look at it as the malformed child being born and having possible complications from the birth and maybe to explain the baby away the legend was born. And just as if you sit in a circle and tell a story by the time it gets back to you it has been changed/modified so along those lines the story has changed into something that is a legend. I cant believe all the times I have been in the Pine Barrens at different times of the year, day and night, that i have seen nothing to hint at his existence. I have seen some weird things in the Pine Barrens but never anything to be described as the Jersey Devil, 13th Child of mother Leed's who hangs outr near the old abandoned trailer in the woods lol.
I have seen red eyes once in the woods for a second and someone else saw them as well so I was not alone but they were gone by the time we doubled back and that is the closest encounter I think I have had.

Has anyone ever seen the X-files take on JD? Very off beat. lol

:jd:
 

mrseller

New Member
May 16, 2006
1
0
reply

it was dated back to the 1700's and 1800s
even people high up and well known reported sightings back in the day
 

Teegate

Administrator
Site Administrator
Sep 17, 2002
25,602
8,180
mrseller said:
it was dated back to the 1700's and 1800s
even people high up and well known reported sightings back in the day


They had one too many to drink.

Guy
 

grendel

Explorer
Feb 24, 2006
561
2
Fredericksburg VA
When I was 13 or 14 I was camping alone on the bogs north of hampton furnace, it was october. About an hour before dark I went for a walk along the road which borders the west side of the bogs .I was looking down at the road when something crossed the road in front of me.I never saw it only a flash of movement, but it left a lot of brush moving in its wake.It also sounded large, and the footfalls were heavy and it just did not sound like deer.Deer have that intermittent sound to their running as they bound through the brush.
I started to head back to camp , and yup you guessed it this thing is shadowing me back in the brush.It was very stealthy ,faint noises ,except when I would stop and stare for a moment there was this heavy thumping sound. I got back into my camp ( which was in the woods on the same side of the road as the sounds) it was starting to get dark.
I cooked dinner over a camp stove while my visitor circled, I did not want to go back into the brush for fire wood.After I ate I crawled in the tent and lay there listening.Then I heard something close,right behind the tent .I was trying to work up the courage to shine the flashlight out the back window when this thing started screaming,I have never to this day heard any sound in the woods that could come close to that sound.The volume was like a car horn at close range. It kept up this screaming and growling for several minutes ,I was frozen with fear. Finally I screamed "shut up!" it just stopped and walked off. After a sleepless night I got my gear together and hiked fast to Atsion. There were no tracks in the pine needles behind the tent and I was not about to look in the brush.
Well that is my story.It is hard to look at things the same after that.
some peopletell me it was a big buck in rut bellowing,well if deer can sound that loud we would need bigger guns!
 

bobpbx

Piney
Staff member
Oct 25, 2002
14,153
4,258
Pines; Bamber area
grendel said:
It is hard to look at things the same after that.
some peopletell me it was a big buck in rut bellowing,well if deer can sound that loud we would need bigger guns!

Damn good story. Scared me a bit!
 
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