The story goes that, in 1735, Deborah Leeds, exhausted mother of twelve and wife of a drunken roustabout, discovered that she was pregnant with her thirteenth child. In a fit of a despaired frustration, she cried out to the heavens, “Let this one be a devil!” Devil or not, the child was supposedly born sporting the head of a horse, the wings of a bat, the legs of a goat and a serpent’s tail (some folks even ascribe antlers to the pitiable beast). After rampaging through the Leeds’ home, the creature flew out the chimney and into the New Jersey Pine Barrens, where it has loitered and skulked ever since.

As much as the story of a cursed demon rounding out a procreation-happy pauper’s unholy baker’s dozen bears all the hallmarks of classic European superstition, including fear of the number 13 and a hint of the kind of supernatural admonishments whispered through ghettos by the ruling class in the name controlling the urban lower-class population, the creature is a child not just of his colonial parentage, but also of the harsh and unfamiliar Pine Barrens. The “barren” in the name ought to give some indication of how the surroundings were perceived – the sand in which the pine forest grows is completely unfit for any kind of commercial farming, what few mineral resources lay buried beneath the ground are too sparse to warrant mining, and the trees are all softwood pines, making even logging pointless, given the number of hardwood oak-hickory forests that blanket the northeastern United States.

Colonists had never encountered such a landscape, and were both frightened by the land’s uncanny geology and frustrated by its lack of utility. The devil, a monster born from a curse on human fertility and destined to forever stalk a blighted wasteland, was created to provide people with a shambling, winged reason to fear venturing out into the eerie pine forest. It came to pass that hard-working families confined themselves to the regions beyond the borders of the woods, while the rough-hewn and bizarre fringes of society openly embraced the Pine Barrens as an unmonitored, lawless playground, complete with a vicious demon sentry.

Wednesday: Bootleggers and bandits – friends of the devil

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