Let this one be a devil, everyone!

After spending the morning touring the national parks of north Jersey, I headed south to where the cities turned to woods, thick and dark! Here in the depths of the Pinelands, the fearsome Jersey Devil is rumored to lurk after nearly three centuries. Legends say it was the cursed 13th child of a Deborah Leeds, which transformed into a bat-winged horse-kangaroo that flew off into the night and terrified the residents of New Jersey and Pennsylvania well into the 20th century. And I was determined to find it!

I started my expedition at Batsto Village in Wharton State Forest, partly because there would be knowledgable folks on staff, but also because it has the word “Bat” in it! Charles Read started processing iron here in 1766, thirty-one years after the rumored birth of the Jersey Devil. It was a great place to do so because the Pine Barrens, though too acidic for most farming, are super high in iron ore! Like the Long Pond Ironworks up north, Batsto was an important supplier of iron supplies to the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War!

A whole village sprang up around these ironworks with a church, a blacksmith shop, a general store, and some cozy cabins for the workers, who paid $2 a month in rent at the turn of the 20th century! For almost two hundred years, this village processed the iron-rich bog ore, surrounded on all sides by the Pine Barrens and the mystery that was present, somewhere, all along.

At the center of the village stands the towering mansion of the many generations of Batsto’s leaders. Renovated by the last owner, Mr. Joseph Wharton, this giant Italianate mansion has thirty-two rooms and six levels! By the time I arrived, though, the fourteen rooms open for touring had closed for the night.

There was no Jersey Devil to be seen here, and even the word “Batsto” had nothing to do with bats. It was a Swedish word for “bathing place,” probably because nearby Batsto Lake looked perfect for a swim! At this point, I had a couple of options. I could sit on the shore and wait for night to fall, or I could go a little deeper in the woods and try to sniff out ol’ JD. I’ve never been the sit-and-wait type!

So I headed off alone into the Pine Barrens! The forest was so dense that I wondered how any large, winged creature could get around in here! The Jersey Devil is often sighted around water, so I looked for some openings over water. One waterway, the Great Egg Harbor River, stretches for 55 miles across New Jersey! I trekked out to the river, which had dark, black water that seemed somehow dangerous from the shore, and I decided to walk along its edge instead of take a dip.

I wandered a little further. Then, just ahead, I spotted a tree, which had been snapped in half! There were no suspicious smells on it, which only heightened the mystery! I would have to keep searching.

After wandering around for half an hour, the largest winged critter I encountered there was a mosquito! I was staring so intently up into the trees that I almost tripped over a sleepy turtle, who was taking his siesta by the side of the trail. When looking for mysteries, ask a local! The turtle yawned, checked the sky, and said, “Hasn’t been around here for a while. Try Leeds Point.”

Of course! Leeds Point, a tiny community on the edge of a salt marsh about 13 miles north of Atlantic City, has long been rumored to be the birthplace of the legend! Maybe the Jersey Devil came back to visit home once in a while. Though the sun was starting to set, I was determined to visit the very site where the legend began, and then, maybe then, I would have a legendary encounter! I had some coordinates from a geocaching site to follow, and one hour to beat the sunset. I was off!

There’s something super eerie about this place, though. At the edge of Hammock Road, beyond which the birth house once stood, a modern resident had covered her front fence in crosses and signs pleading for visitors to believe in God. The forest was so thick on the other side of the road that I had to pass back and forth a few times before spotting an opening in the brambles. Then, with a hop, skip, and a jump, I was over the Jersey Devil’s threshold!

Already, I could tell that this was a bad idea! The ground was covered in nasty thorns that tangled in my fur and left me with some ugly cuts! From above, gnats by the thousands descended upon me to feast on my blood! From below, nasty ticks crawled up my legs from the undergrowth! This was a cursed place, but darn it, I was determined to press on into the woods!

At last, my blue dot met with the red dot on the GPS, and I found myself at the site of the fabled birth house. Reduced to nothing by years of rot and the sticky fingers of souvenir hunters, there’s really nothing left of the house beyond an indentation in the ground. It’s in a clearing with mysteriously uprooted trees and strangely warped branches. Like the Jersey Devil itself, it was hard for me to tell how much was real and how much was myth!

It was so quiet here, and as the sun dipped closer to the horizon, I had to ask myself, did I really want to wait until dark for the Jersey Devil to appear? I swatted away another tick and twelve more gnats before deciding I did not. So I started picking my way back through the thorns and brambles, when I came across the strangest fallen branch, shaped just like a devil’s backbone! How did it get here? What kind of tree had it come from? Did it naturally look this way? I didn’t stay long enough to find out!

I made it out of the trees and back to the fence covered in crosses, mostly unscathed but crawling with both bugs and heebie jeebies! To soothe my nerves, I made my way over to JD’s Pub & Grille in Smithville for a cider and slice of chocolate cake, wondering what mysteries still lurked in the dark forest outside, a forest that still covers a fifth of the most densely populated state in the country. It was a wonder that bedeviled me for the rest of the night.

Sleep tight!

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