I’ve learned to trust our friends at MonsterQuest to take a good, hard look at the cryptid of the hour. They’ll examine it with care, test a range of theories, and come up with a new or unusual suggestion as to the nature of the beast. Their episode on the Jersey Devil, first aired in 2009, does not disappoint.
They don’t spend a great deal of time on the history, but we get a quick summary of the Mother Leeds story, along with Joseph Bonaparte’s hunt for the beast, and the week-long panic of 1909. A professor of American History from Rutgers points out that the story’s longevity indicates that there must be something in it, as does the identity of many of the eyewitnesses: professionals, politicians, clergy of multiple denominations. People whose occupations and positions in life indicate that they’re honorable and truthful.
The investigation focuses on a single sighting in February of 2004, with actual photographic evidence—a rarity in the annals of the Jersey Devil. One night during a winter storm, the Winkelmann family encounters a large, dark creature in the trees around their yard. It flies over them and lands noisily on the roof. In the morning, they find strange tracks in the snow: three-toed, about nine inches by five inches in size, and apparently bipedal; the tracks are spaced four feet apart, as if the creature had hopped along the roof.
The family called the Parks and Recreation Department, but neither they nor the police were able to identify the animal that left the tracks. There are photos on file, and a police report. MonsterQuest brings in investigators of its own, retired NYPD detectives and a polygraph expert, along with a sketch artist and a sculptor.
They also mount an epic hunt in the Pine Barrens, in the Wharton State Forest. Sixty men form a cordon to drive whatever game they can find toward a smaller line of hunters, accompanied by a small army of cameramen. If there is a cryptid lurking in those woods, they believe they’ll flush it out.
They’re looking for either a hooved biped with a head like a horse, batwings, and a serpentine tail, or a quadruped that looks like a cross between a dog and a monkey. Meanwhile, what the Winkelmanns saw was large—over six feet tall—and dark, with a bulbous forehead, glowing red eyes, a long dark neck, and dark wings. It terrified them; it still terrifies them, years later.
The investigators call in a polygraph expert who determines that they are telling the truth about what they saw. There’s also a sketch artist whose drawing serves as a basis for a life-sized, presumably lifelike sculpture. That, at the end, is the focus of a reveal to the eyewitnesses. Both are suitably shocked, and their response is definitive: that’s what they saw. Pretty much exactly.
So what did they see? The artist produces a creature with batlike wings, red eyes, and a head somewhat like a bird and somewhat like a carcass that washed up on Long Island in 2008, almost two hundred miles north of the Pine Barrens. The Montauk Monster was the subject of much rumor and speculation. Was it a cryptid, or was it a mutant, the product of secret government experiments?
MonsterQuest debunks it fairly handily by going to the place called Monster Island—actually the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. The center studies diseases in livestock. There are no classified experiments there, and they do not experiment on small animals. The carcass, says the biologist they consult, is that of a dog, probably a bulldog based on the shape of its head and jaw.
The investigators do not try to argue that the Jersey Devil is a dog that somehow got into a tree and ended up on the Winkelmanns’ roof. They call in biologists and wildlife experts from the area, who present a couple of theories. One is that the Winkelmanns saw a great horned owl.
These owls are huge. They do not weigh 200 to 400 pounds, which is what the police estimated the animal on the roof must have weighed. But the trees in the yard could not have supported the weight of such an animal, and the tracks are not as definitive as they initially seemed to be. The photos were taken from an angle rather than from directly above, which made it impossible to really determine what made them.
They do show something big with three toes and a four-foot stride. Laurie Winkelmann heard it scraping and rattling across the roof. A large owl might have moved like that, and also been able to perch in the trees, then fly soundlessly over her head. Its eyes would glow red in the ambient light.
That’s one possibility, and might answer the question of what the Winkelmanns saw. During the reveal I remembered another, similar experiment the MonsterQuest team set up, with eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the Mothman. The point of that episode was that eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable when it comes to estimating size. They usually overestimate, sometimes by a significant margin.
When Laurie Winkelmann says that she saw a creature larger than a human, at least six feet tall, she may actually have seen something closer to the size of a large owl. It was dark; she notes that the area has an eerie vibe at night. If a bird with a three-foot wingspan flew close overhead, she might have thought that it was much larger than it was.
Another possibility wouldn’t work for the Winkelmanns, but it might explain some of the earliest sightings. A wildlife biologist proposes that the Jersey Devil as described—batwings, horse’s head—rather closely resembles the African hammer-headed bat. This large bat is native to Africa; it may have either stowed away on a ship or been imported as a pet. It eats fruit in large quantities, but it has been known to go after chickens—which might explain the stories of attacks on livestock.
It’s a creature of the tropics and would not survive a New Jersey winter, which means it can’t have been what the Winkelmanns saw during a snowstorm, or what people all over the region claimed to have seen in January of 1909. But it might have been the original devil, the one that shocked and horrified people in the eighteenth century. Maybe, once they were primed to see it, they would misidentify other, native fauna, and see a devil instead of a large night-flying bird.
Whatever the truth is, the great hunt turned up nothing relevant. It flushed out a number of deer and small birds. No owls; no bats. No Jersey Devil.
Because cryptid hunters never give up hope, one of the investigators, retired NYPD Detective Mitch Parker, sums it up for all of us: “I don’t know that they saw the Jersey Devil, but they saw something out there.” That much I think is true. That’s what the polygraph test proves: not that they saw an actual devil, but that they believe they did.
