Jersey Devil

The Pine Barrens cover about a million acres of sand, pitch pine, and cedar
water in southern New Jersey. Nearly every filing places the animal on the
sand roads between Leeds Point and Estell Manor. Witnesses put the animal at
about the height of a man, bipedal, with a long narrow head they compare to a
horse, membranous wings, and a tail. The accounts hold steadier on the sound
than on the shape: a scream, given as high, short, and repeated, and reported
by many people who saw nothing at all.

Between the sixteenth and the twenty-third of January 1909, accounts arrived
from more than thirty towns in the southern counties and eastern Pennsylvania.
Mills and schools in Gloucester City shut. Two Camden patrolmen fired at
something in an alley. What the company kept from that week is the track
record: hoofprints in fresh snow in yards several miles apart, in more than
one instance crossing a roof, and in more than one beginning and ending in
open ground with nothing leading either way.

A museum on Arch Street in Philadelphia exhibited a kangaroo fitted with
painted wings and charged admission; the exhibit was later admitted to be a
fabrication built to meet demand. Filings fell away inside a month and never
returned at that volume. Nothing physical survives from the January week. The
snow was gone by the twenty-fifth and nobody cast a print. The file is carried
as dormant rather than closed, because the fabricator’s own statement accounts for the crowds and not for the tracks.