Leeds’ devil has reappeared in New Jersey for the first time since it warned the pioneers of the approach of the civil war. Back in the middle colonial days, says the New York Herald, there lived in Burlington, on the Delaware, the pioneer Quaker settlement of the county, a woman known as “Mother Leeds,” accused of amateur witchcraft, and witchcraft was at its height thereabouts at that time. In 1733 Mother Leeds gave birth to a male child, whose father was later said to have been none other than the prince of darkness.
    The child was normal at birth, but before the termination of the tempestuous night of its arrival horrified several old crones gathered about the bedside of Mother Leeds by assuming an elongated, serpentlike body, cloven hoofs, the head of a horse, the wings of a bat and the forked tail of a dragon. The coloring of the horrible creature turned to a dusky brown, and after bepummeling its mother and her terrified companions it flew up the chimney, uttering loud, raucous cries.
    Circling about from village to village during this eventful night, the fiend devoured several babies, assaulted women and made for the forest. For some years afterward belated travelers, while crossing the pines, heard and saw it. The pine folks, whose experiences were even more terrible, attributed to it supernatural powers such as possessed by the black witches of English folklore.
    It turned the milk sour, lamed horses in their stalls, dried up the cows, made sear the Indian corn growing in the fields. Accompanied, as it usually was, by the howling of dogs and the hooting of owls, there could be no surer forerunner of disaster. Where the pines line the seashore it flitted from one desolate, grass grown dune to another, watchful upon those wild nights when merchant ships, driving their prows into the sand, burst asunder and distributed their freight of costly goods and human souls upon the relentless waves.
    Upon such occasions Leeds’ devil was seen in the companionship of a beautiful, golden haired woman in white, or yet of some fierce eyed, cutlass bearing, disembodied spirit of a pirate who two centuries ago had barn wrecked upon the shore of Cape May county as, plying from the Spanish main, his galleon had gone to destruction. Again this same son of satan shared his haunts with a headless seaman whom the Barnegat people say Captain Kidd decapitated and whose stiffened trunk that very pirate king left standing as a sentinel of his buried ill gotten gold.
    At other times Leeds’ devil, like a bird of prey, hovered over a silent, star bespangled pond in some silent recess of the cedar swamps, blasting with its foul breath the lives of hundreds of fishes, found floating, next day upon the surface, tainted and unfit for food. Again the dreaded fiend half ran, half flew through the shadowy vistas of the pines, while before it to their coverts hurried panther and deer, rabbits, squirrels and wild song birds.
    The habitat of Leeds’ devil included the entire pine forest which extends from Freehold, in Monmouth county, through Burlington, Ocean and Atlantic to the upper part of Cape May county, preferring the lonely roads through the cedar swamp region, but frequently it made nocturnal onslaughts upon the frontier villages, playing havoc with the stock and farm crops as it went. One tradition has it that it was particularly active during the Revolutionary period, but one more distinct is that it was banished for a century and did not reappear until about 60 years ago.

From—Akron daily Democrat. (Akron, Ohio), 05 Aug. 1899. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.