Strange hoofprints turned up in the South Jersey snow on Jan. 16, 1909, and within a week schools and factories across the region had temporarily closed as armed farmers combed the woods with shotguns, hunting an animal nobody could identify. By the time the panic peaked, newspapers had reported hundreds of purported sightings, and a Philadelphia huckster had turned the whole frenzy into a paying attraction.
According to nj.com, Cozzens's sighting of a creature on Jan. 16, 1909, was the first report, and sightings poured in from throughout the Delaware Valley over the following week. The Inquirer also covered the saga. The frenzy unfolded over that same week, with Philadelphia-area papers and the Trenton Times covering the story.
Newspapers at the time broadly described the creature as winged and four-legged but capable of walking on two legs, with features resembling a kangaroo, opossum, horse or collie, per the Inquirer. Legend tied the creature back to an 18th-century tale that Mother Leeds had cursed her 13th child to become a demon, and the animal was alleged to fly.
Farmers, Shotguns and Hundreds of Steel Traps
The response on the ground was not subtle. Armed farmers followed the creature's tracks for miles before the prints disappeared, and in Springfield Township a party of shotgun-toting farmers trailed the prints for almost four miles, the Inquirer reported. Other farmers set hundreds of steel traps at reported track locations, while men stood watch for the animal, armed and waiting, across the affected towns.
The Publicity Man Behind the Curtain
The Inquirer identified former Philadelphia newspaperman turned vaudeville publicist Norman Jeffries as the prime suspect behind what came next. The Inquirer's reporting, published about two decades after the panic, laid out how Jeffries, working as a Philadelphia publicity man and dime museum press agent, devised a scheme to draw visitors to the struggling Dime Museum at Ninth and Arch Streets. The publicity campaign presented the creature as an attraction at the Dime Museum.
The very next day, a hunting party reportedly captured the creature with a net in Fairmount Park, the Inquirer reported Jan. 23, 1909. After the capture, the creature went on display at the Dime Museum, which advertised it in January. The animal on exhibit, dubbed a kangowing, was kept chained in a steel cage — and was reportedly docile enough to be hand-fed.
Thousands Line Up to See a Fake
Thousands of people turned out to see the fuming, fretting creature in its cage, according to the Inquirer's account. The hysteria began to subside after the New York Times exposed the museum hoax in late January 1909, as detailed by National Geographic.
Jeffries was identified as the promoter behind the stunt. The animal behind the spectacle was a painted kangaroo with fake wings. Jersey Devil sightings have continued sporadically since 1909, per the Inquirer's own later reporting, and the creature remains part of New Jersey folklore.
Jersey Devil sightings have continued sporadically since 1909, per the Inquirer's own later reporting, and the creature remains part of New Jersey folklore. The 1909 panic fits a pattern seen elsewhere in American history — the Cardiff Giant, a supposed petrified man unearthed in New York decades earlier, drew paying crowds of its own before newspapers printed confessions from the sculptors who had carved it, as recounted by HISTORY. Interest in the Jersey Devil had already been building for years before the 1909 scare, with first-person accounts of alleged encounters appearing regularly in newspapers through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to National Geographic.
