Speaker 1: You're listening to an air Wave Media podcast. In seventeen
Speaker 1: thirty five, my ancestor, mother Leaves, was pregnant with her
Speaker 1: thirteenth child, and it said under the pain of birth
Speaker 1: of labor, she cried out, let it be the devil,
Speaker 1: And so it was the creature. The baby was born
Speaker 1: normally at first, but then metamorphosed into this dragon like creature.
Speaker 1: In some accounts, you know, the creature sort of thrashes
Speaker 1: everyone in the room, and other accounts it kills the
Speaker 1: women who are attending the birth and then it flies
Speaker 1: around the room and output chimney into the night. It's
Speaker 1: actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 2: A giant, hairy creature party part of mass in Luckness,
Speaker 2: a twenty four mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands
Speaker 2: of Scotland, gets a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 3: Monster Talk.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 4: your host, Blake Smith. As you can probably tell by
Speaker 4: that teaser from the television show Lost Tapes, today's topic
Speaker 4: is the Jersey Devil and we have a great interview
Speaker 4: for you with a scholarly fellow who, with memory serves
Speaker 4: as our first three peat guest from the History Department
Speaker 4: of Keen University in New Jersey. We once again welcome
Speaker 4: doctor Brian Riegel, who previously joined us on Monster Talk
Speaker 4: to discuss the demise of the Wherewolf at the hands
Speaker 4: of Charles Darwin and the history of cryptozoology and the
Speaker 4: relationships of credentialed scientists and amateur enthusiasts. Brian is an
Speaker 4: historian of science with a specialty in human evolution and
Speaker 4: his relationship to religion in politics and American national origin theories.
Speaker 4: He is the author of Searching for Sasquatch, Crackpots, Eggheads,
Speaker 4: and Cryptozoology, which just came out in a much more
Speaker 4: affordable paperback edition. Check the show notes for a link
Speaker 4: Moremsttle Welcome back, Brian.
Speaker 5: Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 4: It's a pleasures. It's great to have you back. You've
Speaker 4: I think you are a fifth guest. I mean when
Speaker 4: we've very first, very first got started, and then you've
Speaker 4: been back to talk about your book, and I've kind
Speaker 4: of followed your work and you just out of the
Speaker 4: blue surprised me with this work you've done on the
Speaker 4: Jersey Devil. So when did you become interested in the
Speaker 4: Jersey Devil?
Speaker 5: Well, I guess I always was. You know, as growing
Speaker 5: up in New Jersey, you hear the story early on
Speaker 5: and it's you know, it's very fun and but about oh,
Speaker 5: I guess back in the winter, right after Hurricane Sandy
Speaker 5: came through and laid waste to most of the Garden
Speaker 5: State and we were we were out of out of
Speaker 5: power for over a week. And when it fun I
Speaker 5: came back on, I had a lot of TV watching
Speaker 5: to catch up on, and there was I think it
Speaker 5: was Monster Quest or one of those shows. They were
Speaker 5: doing an episode on the Jersey Devil. So if you
Speaker 5: were all sit and watch this, And as I watched it,
Speaker 5: it just made me angry because they were putting forward
Speaker 5: such such crap, you know, not research, just you know,
Speaker 5: like a like a televised version of Wikipedia. And I
Speaker 5: yelled at my TV a lot. And I started yelling
Speaker 5: at my TV, and I said, you know, I'm gonna
Speaker 5: have to look into this. And so I decided to
Speaker 5: what I needed to do was to do a complete
Speaker 5: reassessment of the entire Jersey Devil legend. And so as
Speaker 5: a historian, your first instinct always and this is how
Speaker 5: you get trained in graduate school, where are the documents.
Speaker 5: Look for the documents, look for the correspondence, Look for
Speaker 5: the lost papers, you know, look for the notebooks, look
Speaker 5: for the lost publications. And so I just started digging
Speaker 5: and doing what historians do, and very easily, very quickly,
Speaker 5: I came up with all those material and I said, no,
Speaker 5: why hasn't anybody done this? Why are there people running
Speaker 5: around the Pine Barrens thinking they're going to find this thing?
Speaker 5: There's nothing after to find?
Speaker 4: Hey, hey, hey, you can't just jump into conclusions like that.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, I've already gotten some interesting correspondence over this,
Speaker 5: which is which is what I expected.
Speaker 4: Well, do you know, listen, I sometimes make the assumption
Speaker 4: that with some of the more well known monsters that
Speaker 4: everyone who listens to the show knows what these creatures are. Right,
Speaker 4: But let's talk about the monster legend for a minute
Speaker 4: before we go into the actual history. What is the
Speaker 4: legend of the Jersey Devil?
Speaker 5: Okay, the accepted standard legend is this. In seventeen thirty five,
Speaker 5: outside of Burlington, New Jersey, in a huge forest that
Speaker 5: is known as the Pine Barrens, a witch named Mother
Speaker 5: Leads gave birth to her thirteenth child, and as the
Speaker 5: child was breaching. She screams out, Oh, let this one
Speaker 5: be a devil. And what comes out is not a baby,
Speaker 5: but a sing with a horse like head, a bat
Speaker 5: like wings, a long tail, cloven hoofs, and claws. It
Speaker 5: yelps menacingly at the astonished, dim witted, dull witted family
Speaker 5: who's standing there watching, and then flies up the chimney
Speaker 5: and out and disappears, often to the forest, spending the
Speaker 5: next several centuries accosting any passers by that happened to
Speaker 5: encounter it. Just a basic story, right, and variations on it,
Speaker 5: But that's the basic story.
Speaker 4: It's a It's not like Bigfoot or a lot of
Speaker 4: the other cryptozoological creatures in that there's no population of
Speaker 4: these things. It's just one, right, right.
Speaker 5: It's it's not really it doesn't conform to the generally
Speaker 5: accepted definition of a cryptid.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. So. So who is this Leeds family that
Speaker 4: that they're talking about.
Speaker 5: Well, in the legend, they are a kind of backwoods
Speaker 5: hillbilly family living a kind of detached life from the
Speaker 5: rest of civilization. When people think of New Jersey, they
Speaker 5: think of Bruce brings Me, they think of the sopranos.
Speaker 5: They think of the sort of last twenty miles of
Speaker 5: the Turnpike in the northeastern part of the state, which
Speaker 5: is very urban, very industrial, but the lower half of
Speaker 5: the state, it's essentially a separate state. South Jersey, it's
Speaker 5: very agrarian, very forested, very bucolic, and there's a huge
Speaker 5: swath of pine forest that extends from the Atlantic coast
Speaker 5: of from Atlantic City all the way over to Philadelphia.
Speaker 5: And it's quite an enormous tract of land and rather
Speaker 5: sick and as it's called the pine barrens, and it's
Speaker 5: not heavily populated. And so the Leeds family were denizens
Speaker 5: of the pine barrens, and the Pineys, as they're sometimes
Speaker 5: rather unfortunately referred to even to this day, are supposedly
Speaker 5: like backward people who live in kind of hovels and
Speaker 5: you know, not part of the mainstream. And this legend
Speaker 5: builds upon this kind of stereotype, and the Leads family
Speaker 5: was one of these of these backwards families who were
Speaker 5: vaguely thought of to be into the occult and father
Speaker 5: Leads or sometimes depicted as a drunk, sometimes as a
Speaker 5: ship a disgraced ship captain, and so they sort of
Speaker 5: in the legend, they conformed to every stereotype of kind
Speaker 5: of dull witted backwards people.
Speaker 4: But they're not. They're not as sophisticated as like your snookies.
Speaker 5: Well, because we could probably do a whole other thingment
Speaker 5: just on that that they might be the modern equivalent.
Speaker 5: But the reality is that when this whole story begins,
Speaker 5: the actually there really is a Leads family. There are
Speaker 5: still people in New Jersey, still people who live in
Speaker 5: the pine barrens who are descendants of the Leads family,
Speaker 5: So they never really went away. But what I found
Speaker 5: was that there's this transformation that takes place which is
Speaker 5: fairly common in folklore. Not only does the Jersey Devil
Speaker 5: itself transform from a normal child into the sort of
Speaker 5: hideous monster, but the legend transformed the Leads family from
Speaker 5: one form into another. The form they get transformed into again,
Speaker 5: like I said, this kind of dill witted backwoods people.
Speaker 5: But the really fascinating reality is that the Leeds family
Speaker 5: in the colonial era were civic leaders. They were aerodyite educated,
Speaker 5: They participants of the scientific revolution. They thought they were
Speaker 5: bringing astronomy and mathematics to the new world, and they
Speaker 5: were the complete opposite of the stereotype that they're that
Speaker 5: they're portrayed of as in the in the legend, and
Speaker 5: far from being sort of dark occultists, they're actually quite
Speaker 5: uh active Christians. They start off as Quakers and then
Speaker 5: they become Anglicans.
Speaker 4: Okay, So so here, so again wanting to kind of
Speaker 4: set the framework. I love the way you did this
Speaker 4: research is really good. So and it's going to be
Speaker 4: published very soon in Skeptical Choir.
Speaker 5: Looks like, Yeah, there's there's a kind of short popular
Speaker 5: version coming out in the next issue of Skeptical in Choir.
Speaker 5: That's what they tell me, the September October issue.
Speaker 4: Yeah, quite a good story.
Speaker 5: And then there's a much longer the peer review version
Speaker 5: will be coming out in a journal called New Jersey History,
Speaker 5: and that's supposed to be the October November issue.
Speaker 4: And I have to say, as peer review articles go,
Speaker 4: that was really an excellent read. I mean, it was
Speaker 4: it was completely accessible to someone as a d and
Speaker 4: as I am. So let's talk about the culture at
Speaker 4: the time. So, first of all, what time of American
Speaker 4: history are we talking about? Roughly when the real Leeds
Speaker 4: family lived there.
Speaker 5: We're talking about the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.
Speaker 4: So that's the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. See I got
Speaker 4: it all right, It's always one ahead exactly. So who
Speaker 4: were the Quakers? Besides their delicious oatmeal? What else did
Speaker 4: they do well?
Speaker 5: The Quakers were They start off as British nonconformist religionists
Speaker 5: in the midst of the British Civil War. They sort
Speaker 5: of reject organized religion and organized authority and decides that Christianity,
Speaker 5: to their mind, as it was being practiced by the
Speaker 5: Anglican Church in England really wasn't doing justice to God
Speaker 5: and to Jesus, and so they just to break away
Speaker 5: and form their own sect. They're originally called the Friends,
Speaker 5: but because part of their theology is that each individual
Speaker 5: burns with an inner light the interlay of God, and
Speaker 5: this interlay causes people to behave in certain ecstatic ways,
Speaker 5: and they shake and they move around the meetinghouse, and
Speaker 5: detractors said, well, they're quaking with the Lord, and that
Speaker 5: was meant as an insult. But as often happens in
Speaker 5: these situations, people who are called something as an insult
Speaker 5: will adopt that phrase to take the insult out of it.
Speaker 5: So even they start to refer to themselves as Quakers,
Speaker 5: but they were always originally known as the Society of Friends,
Speaker 5: and so they were basically a Christian offshoot.
Speaker 4: And within that Quaker group there were other sects or
Speaker 4: groups that also practice mysticism.
Speaker 5: Not really the sort of star or the central character
Speaker 5: of this whole story is Daniel Leeds. He's the he'll
Speaker 5: become the patriarch of the Leeds family in America, and
Speaker 5: he's a bit of a mystic. He's very influenced by
Speaker 5: German Pietism, which was somebody which comes out around the
Speaker 5: same time that Quakerism begins to form, but it begins
Speaker 5: to form in Germany in Austria, and again these are
Speaker 5: people who are sort of breakaway, a breakaway group who
Speaker 5: wants to break with mainstream Lutheranism because they thought Lutheranism
Speaker 5: had become too corporate and too sort of formulaic and
Speaker 5: not emotional and mystical enough. And one of their one
Speaker 5: of their great philosophers, is this guy, Jakaboem, who writes
Speaker 5: a series of books, and Daniel Leeds gets a hold
Speaker 5: of this and reads his work and is very influenced
Speaker 5: by it and tries to bring a kind of a
Speaker 5: German Pietists religious flavor to southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania,
Speaker 5: and we'll run into all sorts of resistance from it.
Speaker 5: If you want to know the source of Jersey Devil legend,
Speaker 5: that's where That's where it is, this sort of clashing
Speaker 5: of German Pietism and Quakerism and Anglicanism in the New World.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I know that sounds really odd that somehow
Speaker 4: that could lead to the Monster, but yeah, you make
Speaker 4: the case very well. So let's let's move the story
Speaker 4: forward a little bit. So the first generation of leads
Speaker 4: Uh is basically at not war, but they're in conflict
Speaker 4: with the Quakers, so.
Speaker 5: Right, right, Well, Daniel Leeds is actually born in England
Speaker 5: in Leeds, England and his family around the mid sixteen
Speaker 5: seventies decide to leave England and they convert to becoming Quakers,
Speaker 5: and they decide to leave England come to America to
Speaker 5: sort of seek their fortune and find their futures, and
Speaker 5: they arrive in around sixteen seventy six seventy seven. They
Speaker 5: go first to New York, which was a fairly common
Speaker 5: thing people coming from England and Europe would wind up
Speaker 5: in New York for a little while and then sort
Speaker 5: of head off to wherever they were going. And so,
Speaker 5: because it's already an established Quaker community in southern New
Speaker 5: Jersey and the Pine Barns, the Leeds family decides, well,
Speaker 5: that's where we'll go because we'll be amongst friends, both
Speaker 5: figuratively and literally. And so daniel Leed's like twenty five
Speaker 5: when they come over, and so he wants to he's
Speaker 5: a devout Quaker and he wants to part of the
Speaker 5: religious life. And he does what everyone does, is you
Speaker 5: join the local meeting and you donate some money, and
Speaker 5: you become part of your society, and you buy some land,
Speaker 5: and you know, you become part of the world you're
Speaker 5: moving into.
Speaker 4: And then things go wrong.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, Because Leeds is an interesting character, I've been
Speaker 5: desperately digging for information, biographical information on him back in England, because,
Speaker 5: like I said, he doesn't come over as a child,
Speaker 5: and he becomes over as a young man. And I've
Speaker 5: been following some some strands strands over there, but I
Speaker 5: haven't really been able to put together his early life
Speaker 5: in England just yet. But by the time he comes here,
Speaker 5: he's already filled with this kind of ecstatic notion. He's
Speaker 5: already had several visions of Jesus, uh, you know, he's
Speaker 5: seen these kind of missedical images, and he's taking on
Speaker 5: this kind of mystical flavor of Quakerism, and that really
Speaker 5: doesn't sit well with his Quaker neighbors, who are very
Speaker 5: sort of black and white and right down the middle.
Speaker 5: And despite the fact that they're breaking away from the
Speaker 5: Anglican world, they're still fairly conservative. There's still fairly no
Speaker 5: nonsense in their Christianity. And along comes this guy Leads,
Speaker 5: who's talking about visions and Pietism, and Leads is a
Speaker 5: guy who is very interested in the mystical aspect of
Speaker 5: Christianity and coupling with that this kind of urge as
Speaker 5: people like this often have to tell people to tell
Speaker 5: others what he's up to. And so in sixteen eighty
Speaker 5: seven he decides to start publishing an almanac, which.
Speaker 4: No almanacs were that Centuri's version of Twitter. Right, Yeah, they.
Speaker 5: Were social medias. They were they were meant and at
Speaker 5: their core, an almanac was meant to be a handbook
Speaker 5: for farmers, because what you did was you calculate using
Speaker 5: astronomy and mathematics, you would calculate in astrology, you would
Speaker 5: calculate for a whole year, when the sun was going
Speaker 5: to come up, when the sun was going to go down,
Speaker 5: when winter would start, you know, all the sort of thing,
Speaker 5: because in the grarian community you need to know this
Speaker 5: stuff for sure survival. And when the almanacs start being
Speaker 5: published in England, very quickly they become more than just
Speaker 5: these lists of when the sun's going to go up
Speaker 5: and come down, and almanac publishers start including little stories
Speaker 5: and jokes and all sorts of information, and so Leeds
Speaker 5: builds his almanac around that model, and he starts putting
Speaker 5: into their things about medical astrology. And you know, it
Speaker 5: really quite came in the in the in the one
Speaker 5: article that that I that I said to the copy
Speaker 5: of I referred to him as a as a Christian occultist.
Speaker 5: And that's because he's not. But he's not a dark magician.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 5: There were quite a few people then and still to
Speaker 5: this day who see the occult as a way of
Speaker 5: gaining greater insight into Christianity. They don't see it as
Speaker 5: a kind of dark art at all. But if you
Speaker 5: if you are a straight forward, mainstream Christian. You hear
Speaker 5: the word of cult, you go crazy because you think,
Speaker 5: oh my god, they're devil worshipers are doing this or
Speaker 5: doing that. And so he gets into quite a bit
Speaker 5: of trouble with his neighbors over publishing this almanac because
Speaker 5: they think it's to a cult and astrological.
Speaker 4: And and and I believe you wrote that they actually
Speaker 4: had a problem with him trying to predict the weather.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because the prediction is thought of as this kind
Speaker 5: of negative thing to do that you shouldn't be doing this.
Speaker 4: It's like a prophet or right, gotcha.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the Quaker's had some issues with prophecy.
Speaker 4: But when I think about American almanacs, Leeds family Almanac's
Speaker 4: not the one that comes to mind.
Speaker 5: No, it does not.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so tell us about that, because the whole story
Speaker 4: of his son and the relationship we had with Ben
Speaker 4: Franklin I found fascinating.
Speaker 5: Right, Well, there's there's a whole thing that goes on.
Speaker 5: The Quakers actually buy up all the copies of his almanac,
Speaker 5: first issue of it and burn it because they think
Speaker 5: it's so bad. And he will not be deterred, and
Speaker 5: he just keeps on going. Leeds is very lucky because
Speaker 5: the sort of the cosmic gears turn in just the
Speaker 5: right way, because a few years after he arrives, William
Speaker 5: Bradford shows up, and William Bradford goes down in American
Speaker 5: history as one of the first major printers that comes
Speaker 5: to the New World. He brings a printing press with
Speaker 5: him from England and they hit it off, come friends,
Speaker 5: and so Bradford's like, well, I'll just I'll keep publishing this.
Speaker 5: I'm not going to stop. And so the Leads Almanac
Speaker 5: becomes rather popular despite the Quaker father's being upset with it.
Speaker 5: And then in sixty eighty eight, Leads publishes a book,
Speaker 5: in fact, the first book ever published in New Jersey.
Speaker 5: Now that's one of the things that is really so
Speaker 5: interesting about this that the Leads family are pioneers, not
Speaker 5: just in New Jersey history, but in colonial American history,
Speaker 5: pioneers as religious activists, as writers, as publishers. The Leeds
Speaker 5: Almanac is the first almanac ever published in New Jersey,
Speaker 5: not the first in America, but the first in New Jersey.
Speaker 5: And in sixty eighty eight he writes a book called
Speaker 5: The Temple of Wisdom, where he tries to explain all
Speaker 5: this Pietists and mystical thought to his neighbors, and that
Speaker 5: goes down even worse than the Almanac did. They banned
Speaker 5: his book. The Quaker fathers of New Jersey banned his book.
Speaker 5: They publicly refer to day Leads as evil for what
Speaker 5: he's doing, and this causes Leads to quit Quakerism and disgust,
Speaker 5: and rather than just walk away from them, he decides
Speaker 5: to become a Quaker critic and he starts publishing books
Speaker 5: sort of attack what we would say called attack literature,
Speaker 5: claiming that the Quakers are bad people, and they steal
Speaker 5: from merchants, and they're adulters and all these horrible things.
Speaker 5: And this goes on for some years, and it's it's
Speaker 5: so the first scandal mongering in American history to rival
Speaker 5: any of the stuff that goes on today in the media.
Speaker 5: And what happens this years go by and round, oh
Speaker 5: seventeen fourteen, Daniel Les decides to retire and he turns
Speaker 5: the Almanac over to his son, Titan Leeds. He's got
Speaker 5: a bunch of kids, Daniel Leeds does. His wives don't well.
Speaker 5: All of his wives die early except for one, Jane.
Speaker 5: She has like eight kids, and then drops dead after
Speaker 5: the After that, Vanie Leeds turns the almanac over to
Speaker 5: his youngest son, Titan Leads. This is around seventeen to fourteen,
Speaker 5: and Titan isn't quite the anti Quaker that his father is.
Speaker 5: He's just happy to keep publishing the almanac. Titan Leeds
Speaker 5: is an astronomer, he's a mathematician, and around about oh
Speaker 5: seventeen thirty three he gets into an almanac feud, and
Speaker 5: he gets into an almanac feud with none other than
Speaker 5: Ben Franklin. Because this is early on in Franklin's career,
Speaker 5: and the Leeds Almanac is the most popular one in
Speaker 5: New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, and Franklin wants to start
Speaker 5: an almanac of his own because he knows it's lucrative.
Speaker 5: He can make money off of these things. They're very popular.
Speaker 5: They say they're they're cheap to me, and they sell
Speaker 5: very well. And so he is going to do Poor
Speaker 5: Richard's Almanac. He creates his character, which he actually steals
Speaker 5: from a from a London almanac, Richard Saunders, Poor Richard Saunders,
Speaker 5: and in the very first issue, Franklin says, in speaking
Speaker 5: through the voice of Richard Saunders, Poor Richard. He says,
Speaker 5: my friend Titan Leads, I have calculated according to astrology,
Speaker 5: and Titan Lee is going to die within the year,
Speaker 5: and he even gives a date. And of course the
Speaker 5: date comes and goes, and titanle doesn't die. And so
Speaker 5: Titan Leeds says, oh, this Franklin, he's a fool, he's
Speaker 5: a liar. And Franklin never misses a beat. He keeps
Speaker 5: straight face, and he says, no, Titan Leaves did die.
Speaker 5: And this person who is calling me all these horrible
Speaker 5: names is the ghost of Titan Leads. And this just
Speaker 5: makes Titan he's crazy, but there's nothing he can do
Speaker 5: about it. You know. He's fumes in public about this
Speaker 5: crazy Franklin, and Franklin just keeps a straight face and says, well,
Speaker 5: you know, my old friend Titan he's gone. But this
Speaker 5: this person running around isn't really a person. He's he's
Speaker 5: a sorcerer risen from the dead. And all Titan Leads
Speaker 5: can do is kind of fume and not react. Well,
Speaker 5: everybody gets a joke, he doesn't. But what happens is
Speaker 5: that Franklin's ploy works. Poor Richard's Olman act becomes the
Speaker 5: most famous in American history, and the Titan and the
Speaker 5: leads Omanact is completely forgotten.
Speaker 4: I think the story amuses me on a couple of levels.
Speaker 4: You know. Obviously, Franklin's reputation is one that you know,
Speaker 4: you learn about in elementary school, and then as you
Speaker 4: get older you learn whoa This was quite an interesting
Speaker 4: person on a lot of levels.
Speaker 5: And far more complex than most people give him credit for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll say so. I've read a lot of his writing,
Speaker 4: and some of it's quite body. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So, you know, if you were I always tell my students,
Speaker 5: I said, you know, if I couldn't meet any of
Speaker 5: the family fathers, it's got to be Franklin.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he would be great to me.
Speaker 5: First, you love to drink. He loved to, you know,
Speaker 5: pinch women's behind. He loved a good meal. You know,
Speaker 5: at a party, he'd be the first guy with a
Speaker 5: lamb sheet on his head saying I love you guys.
Speaker 4: You know, he was very modern. He was very modern.
Speaker 4: I think he'd fit right in for sure. The other
Speaker 4: thing that it means to me is Richard Saunders. The
Speaker 4: name itself is also the name of a very prominent
Speaker 4: Australian skeptic, Oh really, Yeah, he has a podcast called
Speaker 4: The Skeptic Zone. And so every time I would read
Speaker 4: that name while I was reading your work, I kept
Speaker 4: kept thinking about the Richard. I know. So that's just
Speaker 4: kind of amusing. But so that happens, and that sort
Speaker 4: of destroys leeds reputation in that time period.
Speaker 5: Right, well, by the time of the revolution, what you
Speaker 5: have is this situation. You have Daniel Lee to you know,
Speaker 5: prominent citizen publisher, was activists in the middle of lots
Speaker 5: of things being called evil and Satan's harbinger by the
Speaker 5: Quaker majority. Then his son comes along who is accused
Speaker 5: of being a ghost and a sorcerer resurrected from the grave.
Speaker 5: So by the time of the revolution, the leads devil
Speaker 5: is this figure. It's not a monster, it's a figure
Speaker 5: of political ridicule because the Lead's family has made the
Speaker 5: rather unfortunate choice of siding with the Empire. One of
Speaker 5: the political things that daniel Leed is involved with is
Speaker 5: in see up until seventeen hundred, what is today called
Speaker 5: New Jersey, originally called Novo says Areat, was actually two jerseys,
Speaker 5: East Jersey and West Jersey. And you'll still sometimes people
Speaker 5: will still refer to the Jerseys. That's because it was
Speaker 5: basically split into the East Jersey sort of centered wrapped
Speaker 5: around New York and West Jersey kind of wrapped around Philadelphia.
Speaker 5: But in seventeen oh one, the Queen of England decides
Speaker 5: to turn the Jerseys into a royal colony and to
Speaker 5: combine East and West Jersey into a single royal colony
Speaker 5: called New Jersey. And their first governor is this guy,
Speaker 5: Lord Cornberry Edward High, and he goes down in history
Speaker 5: as one of the most despised governors in New Jersey history. Now,
Speaker 5: if you know anything about New Jersey history, that's no
Speaker 5: mean feat still, and he's infamous for being a kind
Speaker 5: of spendthrift who, you know, would take raise taxes and
Speaker 5: use taxes for his own his own pleasures. And even
Speaker 5: more interesting, he was accused of being a cross dresser.
Speaker 4: That's a strange accusation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well it was, But we now know that both
Speaker 5: of those accusations of him being politically corrupt in a
Speaker 5: cross dresser were Slanders told about him by anti government
Speaker 5: pundits at the time. There's a famous portrait which still
Speaker 5: to this day hangs in the New York historical society.
Speaker 5: This very strange portrait of a person in kind of
Speaker 5: flowery blue dress colonial your address, and your first thought
Speaker 5: when you look at it is that's either a really
Speaker 5: feminine guy or a really ugly woman. And it supposedly
Speaker 5: was a portrait of Lord Cornberry in drag, but we
Speaker 5: now know that it's not. It's not of him at all.
Speaker 5: It's in fact that Peyton has no connection to to
Speaker 5: hide whatsoever. Again, these were Slanders put up against him,
Speaker 5: and Leeds was one of Cornberry's counselors, so as far
Speaker 5: as and Corbet was an anti Quaker as well. And
Speaker 5: so you have all these things stacking up against the
Speaker 5: Leads family. They're anti Quakers, they're pro British, they're pro monarchy,
Speaker 5: you know. And the Revolution comes along. So the concept
Speaker 5: of the Leads devil is meant to be like a
Speaker 5: political insult.
Speaker 4: Wow, So how does it transform from being a political
Speaker 4: insult to a winged monster? How does that happen?
Speaker 5: Right? Well, that happens very subtly. By the early nineteenth century,
Speaker 5: you know, the Revolution's over and now we enter what
Speaker 5: historians American historians refer to as the early Republic early
Speaker 5: nineteenth century early eighteen hundreds. By then, the Leads Devil
Speaker 5: legend is all but extinct. The Leeds family is still there,
Speaker 5: but they're not really movers and shakers anymore, and it
Speaker 5: just becomes as kind of local curiosity that no one
Speaker 5: believes in and nobody even talks about or even knows
Speaker 5: about for the most part. Then at the end of
Speaker 5: the nineteenth century, something interesting starts happening in and around
Speaker 5: the sort of Burlington Atlantic City area and the Leeds Point.
Speaker 5: There's still a location in New Jersey called Leeds Point,
Speaker 5: which was owned by the Leeds family. Was actually a
Speaker 5: survey by Daniel Leeds, and he handed it down to
Speaker 5: his sons, his kind of family seat, and it's still
Speaker 5: called Leeds Point, and that's the spot that most people
Speaker 5: associate with the Jersey Devil. Most of these ghost hunter
Speaker 5: types when they want to go look for the Jersey Devil,
Speaker 5: they head down to Leeds Point and then stumble around
Speaker 5: in the woods for a while and find nothing AnyWho.
Speaker 5: So by the end of the nineteenth century, reports start
Speaker 5: coming out of strange footprints in the snow. And there
Speaker 5: is a dime museum in Philadelphia called the Ninth in
Speaker 5: Arch Street, Dye Museum, which was fairly popular. It would
Speaker 5: have weird animal acts and you know, two headed babies
Speaker 5: and jars. The then proprietor, guy named Charles Bradenbaw is
Speaker 5: actually sort of a pioneer. He's one of the first
Speaker 5: people to start showing movies publicly and charging people to
Speaker 5: come in and see movies. And he hears about this,
Speaker 5: and his press agent is a guy named Norman Jeffries,
Speaker 5: who when he hears these stories about the footprints and
Speaker 5: then he starts hearing these old legends about the Leads Devil,
Speaker 5: the light bulb goes off over his head and he thinks, jackpot,
Speaker 5: and he starts planting stories about a monster that wanders
Speaker 5: around in the woods called the Leads Devil, and it's
Speaker 5: the Leads Devil which is leaving all these footprints. And
Speaker 5: he even goes so far is to mount ghost hunting expedition.
Speaker 5: And at one point in the side, this is about
Speaker 5: nineteen oh five nineteen oh nine, they say, well, we
Speaker 5: have to have something to show people, because we can
Speaker 5: put something in a cage. In the cage in the museum,
Speaker 5: we can charge people to come in and look at it.
Speaker 5: So they get a guy from Albany, New York, who
Speaker 5: has a kangaroo. They rent the kangaroo. They paint stripes
Speaker 5: on the kangaroo and then attach little wings to the
Speaker 5: kangaroo's back, and they stick it in a cage and
Speaker 5: put it on stage, and then they charge people coming
Speaker 5: to look at it. And they have a little kid
Speaker 5: sitting behind the curtain with a long stick with a
Speaker 5: nail in it, and every time a group of rubes
Speaker 5: comes in, the little kid jabs the poor kangaroo with
Speaker 5: the nail, and that, of course makes the kangaroos start
Speaker 5: yelping and jumping around, and that scares people. And now
Speaker 5: you have an actual Leads devil, and so this becomes
Speaker 5: kind of popular. Stories about it are reprinted as far
Speaker 5: away as Michigan and Oregon. And what also is now
Speaker 5: beginning to happen is that while most people still using
Speaker 5: the old term Leads devil, what you're now starting to
Speaker 5: see is the term Jersey devil.
Speaker 4: Interesting and and it just goes from there.
Speaker 5: Now people start to saying, oh, yes, every time someone
Speaker 5: goes out to their barn in the backyard and the
Speaker 5: lawn mower has been moved, the door has been left open,
Speaker 5: Oh my God, it's Jersey Devil's been here.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 5: From there just sort of snowballs to the point today
Speaker 5: where you know, people think it's an actual monster running
Speaker 5: around the woods.
Speaker 4: Yeah. You know, I think your background in both studying
Speaker 4: cryptozoology and evolution, you probably are aware of the number
Speaker 4: of creationists based cryptozoological research groups.
Speaker 5: They are sure fascinating area.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I find interesting is if they wanted to find
Speaker 4: a monster that was going to actually be a problem
Speaker 4: for evolution, they devil is a fantastic one because it
Speaker 4: doesn't really conform to any of the known families of
Speaker 4: animals because it has you know, four lambs plus wings.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So well, I always tell people, you know, if you
Speaker 5: if you want to know what the Jersey Devil looks like,
Speaker 5: just just imagine if Pegasus went over to the dark side.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, right, right, exactly, very skinny. There's some great
Speaker 4: pictures out there or drawings of it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But but people have have turned what is essentially, uh,
Speaker 4: I guess, a propaganda creature into a folklore creature, and
Speaker 4: now into a I guess some people actually think is
Speaker 4: a real animal. And I've seen a lot of stories
Speaker 4: about different animals that might have caused the Jersey Devil.
Speaker 4: But that's kind of trying to fit a plausible natural
Speaker 4: world expert nice for something that really doesn't need one, right, Right, So.
Speaker 5: It begins as a political scapegoat and then it turns
Speaker 5: into a monster.
Speaker 4: Yeah. In fact, I like the way in your article
Speaker 4: you talked about, well, you know what could have been
Speaker 4: the basis for this. Did the Leeds family actually have
Speaker 4: a lot of kids? Did they have a a birth
Speaker 4: that was a deformity of birth?
Speaker 5: Well, that's a that's a legitimate question to ask. And
Speaker 5: I asked the same thing because I've done work on
Speaker 5: I've researched and I've written on on human monsters in
Speaker 5: the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and a lot of
Speaker 5: these were genuine what then were being called monstrous births.
Speaker 5: That's considered politically incorrect. Now we say, you know, birth defects.
Speaker 5: So what I did was and again this is this
Speaker 5: is one of the things that to all my cryptosology
Speaker 5: friends out there and future cryptosoologists who were listening to this,
Speaker 5: or we'll listen to this in the future, you need
Speaker 5: to learn how to do research. Most of these monsters
Speaker 5: you will find in libraries, not out in the woods.
Speaker 5: And one of the things that, as I said before,
Speaker 5: when the first things a historian does when they research
Speaker 5: a topic like this is we go look for the
Speaker 5: paperworkf we go look for the documentation, we go look
Speaker 5: for the text. So I said, well, if this thing
Speaker 5: is based on some actual monstrous birth that occurred in
Speaker 5: the pine barren, there would have to be some sort
Speaker 5: of record of it somewhere. So I began skimming through
Speaker 5: the collections of doctor records, some of which go back
Speaker 5: to the colonial era, and I didn't find anything about
Speaker 5: a monstrous bird. Now that doesn't mean nothing happened. Those
Speaker 5: records may have been lost. But what I found, the
Speaker 5: more convincing evidence I found was this political angle rather
Speaker 5: than an actual biological angle.
Speaker 4: Yes, exactly. And it's one of those things where there
Speaker 4: may be a plausible natural explanation, but she actually had
Speaker 4: to go back and say, wait a minute, did it
Speaker 4: really even happen?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 4: And I think that's a really important lesson to learn
Speaker 4: when you're going to be a researcher or you know.
Speaker 4: And so, as you were researching the case, did you
Speaker 4: go through some of the paranormal and cryptozoological literature and
Speaker 4: was any of that helpful.
Speaker 5: No, it really wasn't. There's a there's tons of stuff
Speaker 5: out there online and in print about the Jersey Devil,
Speaker 5: and most of it is it's really not good. It's
Speaker 5: most of it is just rehashing stuff that's been said
Speaker 5: a million times without ever checking, including some people who
Speaker 5: should know better. I'm always disappointed by the quality of
Speaker 5: most writing on monster legends that's out there, because I
Speaker 5: think part of the problem is monster hunters, like ghost hunters.
Speaker 5: I have a lot of respect for cryptozoologists. I know some.
Speaker 5: I know a lot of cryptosiologists. Some of them are
Speaker 5: really just fantastic, and they don't deserve the bad reputation
Speaker 5: that they're that they're less skillful peers, uh, get them
Speaker 5: to be tarred with. But most cryptos wologists don't really
Speaker 5: know how to do research. They are attracted to the
Speaker 5: notion of running around the woods, finding a biological entity
Speaker 5: and throwing a net over it. But that hasn't worked ever. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it really hasn't. These things are these things are so
Speaker 5: interesting and they should be I've said this before in
Speaker 5: my writings and otbed pieces and things that I think
Speaker 5: it's important that people do go out there looking for things,
Speaker 5: because that's how you find stuff. But they need to
Speaker 5: go out there with some kind of training, you know,
Speaker 5: learn how to do research, learn what historian does, learn
Speaker 5: what an anthropologist does, and you'll you'll get much better results.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's an excellent point. In the we talked a
Speaker 4: Munstruck a lot about going back to case zero and
Speaker 4: trying to find out where the first claims come from,
Speaker 4: and that's a part of the same process. And and
Speaker 4: again I agree with you as well. There are some
Speaker 4: really solid researchers out there working on cryptozoology, and then
Speaker 4: there's unfortunately, because of the nature of there's no certification.
Speaker 4: There's no really you don't have to have any qualifications
Speaker 4: become evolved. There's a lot of people who fancy themselves
Speaker 4: and call themselves cryptozoologists and sort of sully the name
Speaker 4: and cause it to become, you know, a pseudoscience, right
Speaker 4: which you know, any science. And I think that's probably
Speaker 4: why there are other terms that scientists like to use
Speaker 4: because they don't want to call themselves that eth nobiogy.
Speaker 5: I don't really see this is going to sound funny
Speaker 5: coming from someone like me, but I don't really see
Speaker 5: cryptusiology as a pseudoscience. Go on, well, you know you're
Speaker 5: what what is what is the at the at its core,
Speaker 5: what is the meaning of science is to pursue the unknown,
Speaker 5: is to look forth figure out how the universe works.
Speaker 4: Isn't isn't the issue of whether or not they're using
Speaker 4: plausible scientific methodology to.
Speaker 5: Pursue Yeah, well that's where it becomes a little icy.
Speaker 5: You know, a temperature gauge is absolutely no help in finding.
Speaker 4: Ghosts, I would agree.
Speaker 5: You know, all the infrared cameras in the world have
Speaker 5: not have yet to show us Bigfoot it. At this point,
Speaker 5: it just seems a useless exercise. And there is so
Speaker 5: much potential in cryptozoology, and I think that's what frustrates
Speaker 5: me about it. If you're out there in the woods
Speaker 5: running around chasing something like the Jersey devil, even if
Speaker 5: you have some scientific training, if you have some historical training,
Speaker 5: you're out there in the field. You could be learning
Speaker 5: things about the ecology of the pine barrens, for example,
Speaker 5: which could be really useful. You could learn about the
Speaker 5: the migration habits of animals in the Pacific Northwest while
Speaker 5: you're looking for big Foot, and you could actually make
Speaker 5: contributions in the in the in the book that I
Speaker 5: wrote recently, which is now this month, is out in paperback.
Speaker 4: Does that have a lower cover price, Yes, it does, fantastic.
Speaker 4: We'll put a link to the show notes.
Speaker 5: One of the things I talk about is how you
Speaker 5: know this relationship between professionals and amateurs, which has a
Speaker 5: long tradition along and healthy and revered tradition science and
Speaker 5: in history of amateurs doing things. It's being an amateur
Speaker 5: is not in and of itself the problem. A lot
Speaker 5: of a lot of the greatest discoveries in science and
Speaker 5: history have been done by amateurs. I mean, Charles Darwin
Speaker 5: was an amateur. He was not a professional scientist, you know,
Speaker 5: to show just one example, but the early biologists, early geologists,
Speaker 5: early ornithologists, while they were running around searching for various things,
Speaker 5: they created sciences, they created techniques, they created philosophies of
Speaker 5: how you do science. And the cryptosoologists really have not
Speaker 5: contributed anything to the scientific message.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's saba true.
Speaker 5: But you know which is unfortunate.
Speaker 4: Well, and I think, I mean, I think criticisology as
Speaker 4: a field can have a really positive impact, right as
Speaker 4: far as fostering a sense of wonder, But then you
Speaker 4: have to I think, and I don't want to see.
Speaker 4: This is not meant as an insult, but you need
Speaker 4: to eventually get the maturity to realize there are better
Speaker 4: methodologies for doing investigations and perhaps better topics to work on.
Speaker 5: Right and running around the woods with infrared camera saying
Speaker 5: there are squatches about every time you hear a twig snap?
Speaker 5: Is this not helping?
Speaker 4: Now? No, I would agree, Although you know there's the U.
Speaker 4: Those guys are on TV and they're stars, so that's
Speaker 4: it has some cultural place, you know, But I don't
Speaker 4: think it has a place in science.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: So well, they'll laughing all the way the banks, So
Speaker 5: who am I? Right?
Speaker 2: Exactly?
Speaker 4: So, So, now that you've killed the Jersey Devil, thanks
Speaker 4: a lot. What are you working on next?
Speaker 5: Well, the project I've been working on which I sort
Speaker 5: of put aside to do this Jersey Devil thing, because
Speaker 5: I'm working on a booklen version of it with a
Speaker 5: colleague of mine Atane, doctor Frank Chazposito. And but the
Speaker 5: but the thing I was working on before that, in
Speaker 5: which I'm hoping to get back to, is tentatively titled
Speaker 5: Darwin and the Monsters and it's a kind of wide
Speaker 5: ranging synthetic study of the engagement with monstrous creatures, both
Speaker 5: real and imagine that's been going on since Aristotle and
Speaker 5: how that you know, up until recently. You know, when
Speaker 5: we think about cryptozoology today, most people immediate think, oh,
Speaker 5: that's just fringe crackpot stuff. But up until the mid
Speaker 5: nineteenth century, monster studies was a part of mainstream science.
Speaker 5: Everyone thought this was important. Everyone from Darwin back to
Speaker 5: Aristotle thought that monstrous creatures were real and that if
Speaker 5: you studied them you could learn a lot about generation,
Speaker 5: you could learn about heredity, and eventually you could learn
Speaker 5: about the mechanics of evolution. And so that's what I'm
Speaker 5: working on, the study of the story of how the
Speaker 5: search for monsters by these all these people down for
Speaker 5: the ages are contributed to modern evolution theory.
Speaker 4: Neat that sounds really interesting. I look forward to seeing
Speaker 4: whatever fruit comes from that research.
Speaker 5: Well, hopefully it'll be done sooner rise than later.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know that feels well. You know, we always
Speaker 4: like to ask what's your favorite monster? Has yours changed?
Speaker 4: Or what? These days? What is your favorite monster?
Speaker 5: I shouldn't have this. I'm gonna have to stay with werewolves.
Speaker 4: I don't blame you. I can't stop studying them. I
Speaker 4: really need to finish up my research. So after I
Speaker 4: talked to Jay Smith, I had this question, which was,
Speaker 4: why is it why is it that modern legends of
Speaker 4: the Beast or tabled on have a character hunting down
Speaker 4: the beast with a silver bullet? It doesn't really it's
Speaker 4: just unusual because there's actually nothing about that in the original, right, Yeah.
Speaker 5: That's a product of twentieth century cinema exactly.
Speaker 4: So I decided to see if I could find out
Speaker 4: because he had not actually tracked it down to its
Speaker 4: point of origin. And I believe I've nailed it, but
Speaker 4: I haven't actually written it up into an article yet.
Speaker 4: So but it was a fascinating bit of research because
Speaker 4: all the way back to you have to consider, well,
Speaker 4: if the stories of where wolves go back to Greek mythology,
Speaker 4: well then you can't really have silver bullets before you
Speaker 4: have guns, right, so, and silver really doesn't come into
Speaker 4: play until much much later. But the origin of the
Speaker 4: magic silver bullet I found to be just as fascinating
Speaker 4: as trying to track down where it came into play
Speaker 4: in the Javidon legion and.
Speaker 5: Well, within medical astrology, silver was seen as an elixir.
Speaker 5: It was, it was, it may have come from that.
Speaker 5: That may be the origins of it.
Speaker 4: Maybe I don't want to spoil it.
Speaker 5: Okay, I'll shut up.
Speaker 4: Well, you know it's that historians. Well, you know what's
Speaker 4: going to happen is is it's going to end up
Speaker 4: having to be two different articles because I found so
Speaker 4: much research on the magical properties of silver. Uh, and
Speaker 4: then I was trying to just from my personal interest
Speaker 4: that you know, there's this whole pseudoscience around silver as
Speaker 4: a medicinal agent, and people take colloidal silver, which doesn't
Speaker 4: seem to have any real medical benefits except that if
Speaker 4: you overdose on it, or a dose over time, you'll
Speaker 4: turn your skin permanently blue and look like a smurf. Right,
Speaker 4: it's toxic, it is, it is. And so you have
Speaker 4: to like differentiate between the real world antibacterial properties of
Speaker 4: silver and the sort of mystical magical properties of silver.
Speaker 4: And that's tricky stuff because silver does actually have antimicrobial
Speaker 4: properties in certain forms, if it's like if it's like
Speaker 4: they use it in nanoparticles with an ionic charge and
Speaker 4: then it can actually kill bacteria. But that's not what
Speaker 4: the mystics and new agers are saying it does, and
Speaker 4: that's not the way they're applying it, right, And so
Speaker 4: that really has enough material to be its own whole
Speaker 4: research project in its own article as well.
Speaker 5: Well, we could do a whole show on alchemy.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, I love alchemy. We did one on
Speaker 4: the homunculus and touched on that a good bit.
Speaker 5: I should teach a course on the history of alchemy. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think you may have actually helped me get in
Speaker 4: touch with the right person for the homunculus, so that
Speaker 4: that turned out to be just fantastic. And I do
Speaker 4: I'm fascinated by alchemy and the medieval ages, and I
Speaker 4: just did it finish up an interview with a guy
Speaker 4: named Asa Mittman, who is, for all practical purposes, a
Speaker 4: monster ologist. It's really fascinating. He does a lot of
Speaker 4: research on the the cultural history of he's an art historian,
Speaker 4: but he really loves monsters and has written and collected
Speaker 4: a lot of essays on the role of monsters and culture.
Speaker 4: And yeah, but this is such a fun topic and
Speaker 4: the silver in the Werewolves good stuff. Thanks for visiting
Speaker 4: with me, Brian. It was really fun to have you
Speaker 4: on monster Thanks for listening to another episode of Monster Talk.
Speaker 4: I'm your host, Blake Smith, and you've been listening to
Speaker 4: Keen University history professor Brian Regal discuss his new research
Speaker 4: on the true history of the Jersey Devil. A version
Speaker 4: of Brian's research will be in an upcoming issue of
Speaker 4: Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and the longer but very enjoyable, peer
Speaker 4: reviewed full version of his research will be appearing in
Speaker 4: an upcoming issue of the journal New Jersey History. I
Speaker 4: would encourage you to seek out both. They're both easier
Speaker 4: to find than the Jersey Devil. Monster Talk is an
Speaker 4: official podcast of Skeptic Magazine. The opinions expressed on this
Speaker 4: show are those of myself, my guests, and of course
Speaker 4: my alien overlords. These opinions are not necessarily those of
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Speaker 4: You know that. Okay, that's so funny that you said that.
Speaker 4: I was reading a book the other day and they
Speaker 4: said that the real phrase Liberaci used to say was
Speaker 4: I'm crying all the way to the bank, which makes
Speaker 4: more sense. But I always say laughing all the way
Speaker 4: to the bank too. I don't know why