The Mother Leeds origin tradition and its earliest printed forms

A story without a colonial paper trail

Retold today, the legend runs roughly like this. A Pine Barrens woman called Mother Leeds, already the mother of many children, cursed a new pregnancy. The baby turned into a winged monster and escaped into the woods. Historian Brian Regal looked for colonial support for this tale in a 2013 Skeptical Inquirer article. He reported that colonial New Jersey newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides contain no mention of a Leeds Devil. He also found no eighteenth-century evidence behind two later embellishments: that the creature killed children, and that a clergyman tried to exorcise it. Regal further notes that the name “Jersey Devil” does not show up in print until the twentieth century, with the big wave of reports in 1909. The older name was the Leeds Devil, and it appears in print earlier, as the 1859 sketch below shows.

The Leeds family in colonial print

Regal argues that the legend grew out of a real family with a well-documented history of public quarrels. According to his account, Daniel Leeds began publishing an almanac in 1687. Local Quakers objected to its astrology, and Leeds broke with them and wrote attacks on Quakerism, including The Trumpet Sounded Out of the Wilderness of America (1699). One Quaker reply was titled Satan’s Harbinger Encountered (1700). His son Titan Leeds (1699–1738) took over the almanac. In 1728, Regal writes, Titan added the family coat of arms to its masthead, and Regal describes the arms as bearing three wyverns, winged dragon-like figures. A 2021 Naval Historical Foundation essay adds a caution: another heraldic description gives the Leeds arms as eagles, not dragons.

Titan Leeds was also the target of Benjamin Franklin’s joke in Poor Richard’s Almanack. The 1733 edition predicted his death that October. Franklin kept up the gag afterward, treating Leeds as a ghost. Leeds actually died in 1738. Regal points out that this is close to the mid-1730s date the legend gives for the monster’s birth. The link he draws between these events and the legend is his own interpretation, not something any colonial document states.

The 1859 Atlantic Monthly sketch

The earliest printed telling found for this entry is “In the Pines,” an unsigned travel sketch in The Atlantic Monthly for May 1859 (volume 3, number 19). A 2024 JSTOR Daily essay credits it to the writer W. F. Mayer. In the sketch, the narrator’s host tells him that in 1735, “in the township of Burlington,” a woman named Leeds who was suspected of witchcraft gave birth to a son. The son became a fiend “with a horse’s head, wings of bat, and a serpent’s tail.” The host says a holy man finally banished the creature, but only for a hundred years. He adds that since 1835 it had been heard “howling and screaming” in the woods at night. The one person said to have met it face to face is an elderly local woman, Hannah Butler. The narrator also passes along skeptics’ suggestion that she may have mistaken a stump or a bear for the devil after drinking. The 1859 version says nothing about a thirteenth child.

Later tellings differ. JSTOR Daily reports that James McCloy and Ray Miller Jr.’s 1976 book The Jersey Devil gives a version in which an exorcism in the 1740s banished the creature for a century, until it returned in 1840. That timeline does not match the 1859 sketch, which puts the century’s end at 1835.

Reading the tradition

None of the sources checked here turned up an eighteenth-century document naming Mother Leeds or describing the birth. The first printed telling located comes more than a hundred years after the date the story gives. The ties to the Leeds almanac, the family crest, and Franklin’s satire are historians’ explanations for how the story might have started, not proof of where it came from. For the 1909 wave of sightings, see the site’s separate entry on the Jersey Devil’s newspaper week.