In the pinelands of eighteenth-century New Jersey, as the story goes, nothing grew—except children. After one Mother Leeds had given birth twelve times, she found herself pregnant yet again and beseeched God, “If I have a thirteenth child, let it be the devil.” Lo and behold, she delivered a healthy baby and laid it in a cradle near the fireplace. As the clock struck midnight, the newborn sprouted a forked tail, cloven hooves, and wings and flew up and out of the chimney. The Jersey Devil has haunted the pines ever since, or so legend tells us.
Like most Jersey children, I often heard this folktale as a kid, usually around campfires at Halloween. Today I understand it as what the film and media scholar Erin Harrington calls “gynaehorror.” Much like the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, it presents the vagina as “site of terror,” dramatizing and criticizing forced birth. Today, New Jersey has some of the most progressive abortion laws in the country. Across the nation, however, access to reproductive healthcare is rapidly eroding as states reinstate antique bans and punish women for miscarriages. With the ever-present possibility of a federal ban, the Jersey Devil is a haunting reminder that when reproductive rights disappear, horror ensues.
The events in the story supposedly took place in the 1700s, but the myth of the Jersey Devil began to circulate in earnest in the nineteenth century, during a period when American reproductive rights were under acute attack by the legal system and the medical establishment and abortion was in the public eye. It first appeared in print in The Atlantic in May 1859, when New York City-based writer W. F. Mayer described the “uncivilized” communities of the Pinelands. (What can I say—Jersey has always had its haters.) One of the destitute locals in the essay, Hannah Butler, mentions a “personal interview” she had with the Jersey Devil while strolling in the woods during a lightning storm. She was not the first to notice him. He had, apparently, been heard “howling and screaming” at night since 1835. One version of the story, recorded in James McCloy and Ray Miller Jr.’s 1976 book The Jersey Devil, posits that this monstrous creature haunted the pinelands after its birth until the 1740s, when an exorcism banished it for one hundred years. In 1840, “he did reappear,” right “on schedule.”