Twice Told“In the Pines”, The Atlantic Monthly, May 1859: Leeds’s devil
- Language
- English
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Retrieved
- 24 September 2026
An unsigned travel sketch of the New Jersey Pine Barrens in the Atlantic Monthly for May 1859 (vol. 3, no. 19, pp. 560 to 569). The narrator and a friend, “B.”, ride through a thunderstorm to B.’s “Big House” in the Pines, and the talk turns to the “Pine Rats”, as the writer calls the people of the forest. Brian Regal attributes the piece to W. F. Mayer and calls it the earliest mention of the Leeds Devil in print that he could find (New Jersey Studies, 2015, pp. 80 to 81).
“And now, something about Leeds’s devil!” I said to my friend, after satisfactory definition of the Pine Rat; “what fiend may he be, if you please?”
“I will answer, I will tell you,” replies Mr. B. “There lived, in the year 1735, in the township of Burlington, a woman. Her name was Leeds, and she was shrewdly suspected of a little amateur witchcraft. Be that as it may, it is well established, that, one stormy, gusty night, when the wind was howling in turret and tree, Mother Leeds gave birth to a son, whose father could have been no other than the Prince of Darkness. No sooner did he see the light than he assumed the form of a fiend, with a horse’s head, wings of bat, and a serpent’s tail. The first thought of the newborn Caliban was to fall foul of his mother, whom he scratched and bepommelled soundly, and then flew through the window out into the village, where he played the mischief generally. Little children he devoured, maidens he abused, young men he mauled and battered; and it was many days before a holy man succeeded in repeating the enchantment of Prospero. At length, however, Leeds’s devil was laid, but only for one hundred years.
“During an entire century, the memory of that awful monster was preserved, and, as 1835 drew nigh, the denizens of Burlington and the Pines looked tremblingly for his rising. Strange to say, however, no one but Hannah Butler has had a personal interview with the fiend; though, since 1835, he has frequently been heard howling and screaming in the forest at night, to the terror of the Rats in their lonely encampments. Hannah Butler saw the devil, one stormy night, long ago; though some skeptical individuals affirm, that very possibly she may have been led, under the influence of liquid Jersey lightning, to invest a pine-stump, or, possibly, a belated bear, with diabolical attributes and a Satanic voice. However that may be, you cannot induce a Rat to leave his hut after dark, nor, indeed, will you find many Jerseymen, though of a higher order of intelligence, who will brave the supernatural terrors of the gloomy forest at night, unless secure in the strength of numbers.”
Notes
- Transcription conventions: spelling and punctuation as printed, except the printer’s three long dashes (after “I will answer,”, before “but only for one hundred years”, and after “after dark,”), which are dropped here because this site prints no dashes; no word is changed. Words broken at line ends are joined: “satis-factory”, “re-plies”, “ama-teur”, “tur-ret”, “Cali-ban”, “dev-il”, “trem-blingly”, “individ-uals”, “se-cure”. “Pine-stump” falls at a line end with its hyphen, so the hyphen may be the printer’s; we keep it.
- The page the passage opens on (p. 566) says just before it that the Pine Rats are “lineal descendants of the New Jersey Tories” who used the forest as a refuge in the Revolution, and “completely besotted and brutish in their ignorance”. The story of the devil is told as their belief, relayed by a landowner to a visitor.
- The storyteller, “Mr. B.”, gives no source. The date 1735, the township of Burlington, a woman named Leeds suspected of witchcraft, the horse’s head and bat’s wings are all here. There is no thirteenth child, no chimney, no curse spoken by the mother: the father is “the Prince of Darkness”.
- “The enchantment of Prospero” and “Caliban” are borrowings from Shakespeare’s The Tempest; “Jersey lightning” was a name for applejack.
- The same passage turns up in HathiTrust’s full-text search of the University of Michigan copy (mdp.39015030143294, seq. 581, p. 567), which we could search but whose page images we could not open.