The Jersey Devil Is Ready For Its Close-Up

There are countless strange things in the air in 2025, but among the weirdest is this: the Jersey Devil appears to be having its moment in the spotlight. That isn’t to say that it hasn’t before; there’s a NHL team named for it and an X-Files episode about it, but something about a certain bat-winged creature living in the New Jersey Pine Barrens has captivated the imaginations of an aesthetically diverse group of artists. What about our present has made the Jersey Devil the It Cryptid of the moment?

Halloween 2024 marked the publication date for Kailey Tedesco’s poetry collection Motherdevil, a work that the author describes as being “[i]nspired by Mrs. Leeds, the folkloric mother of the New Jersey Devil.” The play The Devil and Daisy Dirt, written and directed by Alex Dawson, tells the story of an encounter between a hard-working diner employee and a wounded eldritch being in the southern reaches of the Garden State. And the comic book Let This One Be a Devil, from writers James Tynion IV and Steve Foxe and artist Piotr Kowalski tells the story of a young academic immersing himself in Jersey Devil lore and familial strife in early-20th century New Jersey.

These three stories are told in different mediums using very different voices. That’s in keeping with the way that perceptions of the Jersey Devil itself have changed over the centuries, from the demonic son of the aforementioned Mrs. Leeds to a more traditional uncanny creature lurking in the woods.

“[W]e chose to set the primary fictional framing story during the 1909 rash of sightings because that’s one of the most infamously condensed periods of activity for the Jersey Devil, and it’s really when the modern conception of the Jersey Devil as a possible ‘animal’ cryptid and not a purely supernatural beast cohered,” Foxe said of the setting of Let This One Be a Devil. 

The focus on Mrs. Leeds, who—according to legend—had a 13th child who transformed into the monstrous figure that still haunts the Pine Barrens, is one of the ways in which Motherdevil breaks from traditional tales of the Jersey Devil. In “baby fever,“ Tedesco juxtaposes familiar and uncanny elements: “so many prams pass/ in them i imagine/ a bundle/ cloven & feather-wet.” Long sections from the mother’s perspective are occasionally interspersed with poems detailing the lives of the other Leeds children. In the title poem, Tedesco moves beyond the boundaries of life to find Mrs. Leeds pondering her own legacy from beyond the grave: “& i am the one who had made the wings/ that keep the world beating.”

In reading these myths and legends, Tedesco saw an opportunity to fill in the gaps in a very old story. “In all tellings I’ve engaged with, Mrs. Leeds is given no backstory, no developed motives, and in most tellings, not even a first name,” Tedesco said in a 2024 conversation with The Madhouse Review. “She’s a figure that was in need of her own legend, and that kind of revisionist exploration tends to be one of my big writing jams.”

Reimagining a legend wasn’t the only goal Tedesco had for her own take on Jersey Devil mythology. In an interview with Jersey Collective, Tedesco drew parallels between the story of Mother Leeds and motherhood in the present moment. “I hope readers are reminded that humans—mothers—are often lacking support,” Tedesco said. “I hope next time someone curses their child to be born a devil, society might take the time to ask why and offer things like abortion access, warm casseroles, and/or childcare.” That’s one of several aspects of Motherdevil that blends the familiar and the mythic in a way that recalls Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. 

If Foxe and Tynion’s comic is a meta retelling of the divergent legends around the Jersey Devil and Tedesco’s poetry collection is a corrective to those legends, what about the entry for the stage? “We weren’t going to tell an origin story,” Dawson said in an interview with the podcast New Jersey Is the World. The Devil and Daisy Dirt sits on the border of legends and tall tales, with Dawson in his capacity as narrator making an outright comparison between the story he’s telling and the fish stories and exaggerated anecdotes he heard as a child. Accompanied by a bluegrass musician, Dawson tells the story of how Daisy encountered a wounded creature behind a diner holding an eating contest. The narrator embodies a few other characters over the course of the play, from a wise old woman who advises Daisy to a vengeful hunter with designs on shooting the Devil as it tries to make its way home.

The overall effect is somewhere between a DIY show and Kneehigh’s production of The Wild Bride. (Of note: Dan Diana, who plays the titular Devil, also designed the costume, has done a lot of high-profile prop creation work in the film industry; the result is absolutely stunning.) It didn’t hurt that the production I saw was in a converted barn in the Pine Barrens—or that the players had a merch booth set up in the back of the room. In an interview with Weird NJ, Dawson described the ethos of playing “[a]ll the places I think Tom Waits would play, if Tom Waits was nobody.”

The Devil that appears in The Devil and Daisy Dirt is more of a mysterious figure.  It’s implied that it hails from some other world and that it isn’t the only one of its kind, but if you’re seeking exposition and a deep dive into its origins, you won’t find that in Dawson’s play—something that might help explain why the Jersey Devil is at the heart of a growing number of works right now. 

On the spectrum of Jersey Devil tales, then, The Devil and Daisy Dirt sits at the opposite end from Let This One Be a Devil, which is both a story of the Jersey Devil being seen in a small town in 1909 and an examination of the legend’s history. It begins with one Henry Naughton discovering a horned, winged creature behind his family home in southern New Jersey and sends him on two parallel quests: to understand what he’s just seen and to research the creature’s complex history, in which Benjamin Franklin plays a part.

“[F]rom the start, you’ve got a legend that has evolved from a piece of religious folklore to something more sideshow-ready,” Foxe explained. (Full disclosure: Foxe has edited my work during the time when I reviewed comics for Paste.) “But even if we take the 1909 iteration on its own, it was described most commonly as a bipedal winged creature with hooves for its back feet, clawed front feet, and horns.”

And in his interview with New Jersey Is the World, Dawson pointed out that tales of monsters can often feel like underdog stories, including The Devil and Daisy Dirt. “We always feel sympathy for the monster,” he said. “The thing, in a way, is monstrous—but it’s also like the title character from your favorite boy-and-dog book.”

At a moment when horror is having a big cultural moment, the variety of stories that can be told with the Jersey Devil might explain why it’s turning up more and more. There aren’t too many varieties of stories that one can put the Loch Ness Monster into; with the Jersey Devil, there’s far more on the table.

“I think the Jersey Devil lends itself to such a wide range of stories because it has strong roots in religious folkloric horror as far back as the 1700s and more creature-feature terror sensationalism in the 20th century, which gives you a broad range to play with,” Foxe said. Tedesco’s book, meanwhile, turns the gaps in the original legend into a compelling work all its own. And as for The Devil and Daisy Dirt, its playwright described it as “way more E.T. It’s not a horror story.”

To my mind, it’s a combination of the Jersey Devil’s unique qualities and vague history that make it so appealing to writers and storytellers right now. The fact that there’s only one Jersey Devil means that it’s unique; the legends around its origin mean that you can invoke the demonic or supernatural with your story if you so desire. If you’re looking to tell a revisionist take on older stories of this being, that’s also on the table. And if you want to plug the Jersey Devil into a variety of stories—from that of a lost soul far from home to a home-under-siege tale—there’s also room for that.

In other words, the Jersey Devil sits at the threshold of the very specific and the very vague. It isn’t hard to envision the Jersey Devil at the center of a slasher film, a work of cosmic horror, a postmodern deconstruction of the genre, a haunted house tale, and something much more ambiguous. Perhaps the Jersey Devil is having its moment in the spotlight because of that variation: there’s enough history there for a decades-spanning horror epic and enough weirdness present for a much more surreal story to be told. A winged, horned creature haunting the pines is a terrifying image all its own, but there’s plenty of room for that image to be recast in a storyteller’s preferred image.