Twice Told“Burlington Under Arms”, Perth Amboy Evening News, 21 January 1909
- Language
- English
- Read from
- page 3, fifth column
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Retrieved
- 24 September 2026
A short dispatch from Burlington, New Jersey, on page 3 of the Perth Amboy Evening News, a daily of Middlesex County, in its round-up “News of the South Shore and Throughout the State”. It is one of the reports of the week of tracks in the snow, and it names the “Leeds Devil” as the old residents’ explanation. The page is in Chronicling America (Library of Congress), LCCN sn85035720.
BURLINGTON UNDER ARMS
Men and Boys Watching With Guns for Mysterious Maker of Tracks.
FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW
Burlington, Jan. 21: Hundreds of steel traps were set out by farmers yesterday and practically every farmer’s boy in the county and many of the men were watching with guns last night in the hope of bringing to earth and identifying the strange creature whose horse-like hoofprints plainly marked in city and county are causing a genuine scare about here. Many old residents believe the uncanny creature, one flitting glimpse of which has terrified men, is none other than the once famous “Leeds Devil.” Others declare that only a creature of lightning speed and supernatural nature could make all the tracks recorded from a thousand different localities through South Jersey, and these persons express the belief that the creature is some strange bird driven to this section in the recent storm.
There is no denying the existence of the tracks, in many places across roofs, and in the case of Philip Gallagher, of this city, upon a snow-covered window ledge. The negro section of the city is in a panic over the report that the tracks were made by a creature they call the “Flying Death,” and doors and windows were barred last night against possible intrusion everywhere in the negro sections. Only the bravest woman ventured abroad last night, even in the business section, where the creature left its hoofprints in profusion.
Notes
- Transcription conventions: spelling and punctuation as printed, except the long dash after the dateline’s colon, which is dropped here because this site prints no dashes. Words broken at line ends (“far-mers”, “hoof-prints”, “de-clare”, “light-ning”, “Gal-lagher”, “win-dows”) are joined; “snow-covered” breaks at its hyphen, which we keep. The “this city” of the second paragraph is Burlington, the dateline’s town.
- The machine OCR on Chronicling America reads the dateline as “Jan. 31”; the page image has “Jan. 21”, the paper’s own date.
- The dispatch reports belief, not sightings: “one flitting glimpse” is its only claim that anyone saw the creature. The tracks are its evidence, and it gives their spread as “a thousand different localities through South Jersey” without saying who counted them.
- “Once famous” suggests that to this writer the Leeds Devil was an old story being revived, not a new one.
- The paper’s account of the Black neighbourhood’s fear is reported secondhand and in the language of 1909; it names no one there.