Bunkum & Bullsh*t - The Dime Museum Jersey Devil

Early American history is replete with stories of monsters, ghosts and bogeymen - a growing country spawning new folklore at an alarming rate, until no state was without its bugbears and boggarts - Florida had its Skunk Ape, West Virginia its Mothman, and North Dakota its Thunderbirds. They were born of a combination of tall tales around the campfire, moral panics, misidentification of natural phenomena, appropriation of indigenous folk stories, and a healthy amount of good old fashioned hoaxes. And, maybe, just maybe, a real creature or two.

Over the centuries, pop culture breeds with myth and superstition, with tabloid fodder, and with the ostensibly scientific, though often deeply misguided, efforts of cryptozoologists, and conspires to make flesh the monsters of their imagination - some more egregiously than others; the chupacabra has birthed an entire retroactive folk history, despite only being first reported on in 1995.

Hoaxers and hucksters had an outsized part to play in sowing confusion when it came to the natural world - we’ve surely all heard the story of how, when a duck-billed platypus specimen was first shipped from Australia to England, it was assumed to be a hoax, the bill of a duck combined with the pelt of an otter, to fool the scientific establishment. That zoologists like George Shaw, who in 1799 ultimately determined that this weird little critter was the real deal, were alert to the possibility of a hoax tells us that there was already a cottage industry in befuddling the credulous with creative taxidermy or “gaffs”, that would only grow in the coming century, with examples abounding of fur-bearing trout, Jackalopes and other unlikely combinations being sold to hopeful collectors all over the world. It wasn’t just the animal kingdom that was liable to be repackaged and mis-sold, however - archaeological hoaxes produced giants, missing links, phony footprints and fake mummies, and following the discovery of the first identified dinosaur fossils in 1824, any number of faked fossils, from fabricators either looking to make a quick buck, or to put the kibosh on an emerging scientific interpretation of the Earth’s history that risked undermining the Christian hegemony.

Perhaps most famous of all taxonomical hoaxes was an early promotional success of P.T. Barnum, the Fiji (or “Feejee”) Mermaid. Despite being promoted with stylised paintings of a traditionally attractive mermaid, this was an ugly little specimen, a dried up three-foot long amalgamation of fish scales and tail with animal fur, the skull of a monkey, and likely some wood and fabric work in the mix. It was one of many such oddities constructed by Japanese fishermen, and had been sold to an American sailor, and exhibited in London, decades before it found its way into the hands of Boston showman Moses Kimball, who passed it on to his friend P.T. Barnum in 1842. Barnum’s genius was in a blitz of publicity and humbug, sending anonymous letters to newspapers asking them to cover the shocking and unusual find apparently caught off the coast of South America, and casting a colleague to play the part of a scientist who had vouched for the authenticity of the “Mermaid”. When publicity started to die down, and the press began to put voice to their scepticism, Barnum joined in the outcry, publishing the letters of yet more fictitious scientists proclaiming the Fiji Mermaid to be an incredible facsimile, a masterful hoax - only serving to increase the number of punters prepared to pay to see it, as the public now wanted to make their own mind up, or else to smugly nod and agree that, of course, they would have known it was a fake all along. Like all true pros, P.T. got them coming and going.

Dime Museums

Barnum’s “Mermaid” was destroyed, lost in the 1865 fire that destroyed his New York Museum, though other examples can still be found in museums all over the world, including one particularly eye-catching specimen in London’s Horniman Museum, home also to its own iconic taxidermy mix-up, the Horniman Walrus, an absolute chonker stuffed almost to bursting point by ambitious taxidermists who had never actually seen a living walrus, and hadn’t realised its skin should have folds and wrinkles.

Barnum’s wasn’t the only dime museum looking to profit from oddities and outlandish spectacles, though - practically every major American city in the 19th Century had at least one. The Dime Museum was a kind of evolutionary stopgap in public entertainment, a cut above the seediness of a freak show tent, but not yet reaching the hard-earned respectability of the vaudeville theatre, though prefiguring the latter’s “something for everyone” smorgasbord of entertainments. Dime Museums combined menageries, exhibitions of genuine historical and cultural artefacts, and pseudo-educational lecture series, with theatrical performances, phony relics and creations like Barnum’s mermaid, and displays of human oddities and deeply racist representations of other cultures that only differed from the explicit exploitation of the sideshow through the Dime Museum’s dubious claims of providing an educational service.

It’s one such museum, Philadelphia’s 9th and Arch Museum, where our story will take us. For the price of a dime, a visitor to the 9th and Arch in the dying days of the nineteenth century could see everything from caged monkeys or a Punch & Judy show to the usual human freak show array of living skeletons and dog-faced boys, alongside “Zulus”, “Aztecs”, “Cannibals”, and Che Mah, the 71cm tall Chinese dwarf, veteran of multiple tours for both Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Other acts to have graced the stage of the 9th and Arch included the hefty boxer “Fatty” Langtry - a veritable absolute unit of a man - in an 1893 intergender bout with New Jersey’s self-proclaimed women’s boxing champion, Lily Langtry; a name borrowed from the starlet from the original Jersey, and future paramour of Edward VII (and, if tabloid rumours are to be believed, of wrestling champion William Muldoon), which now renders her utterly impossible to Google, a shocking lack of foresight into the peculiarities of SEO on the part of a minor sideshow attraction from the nineteenth century. It may even be that the boxing Lily’s name was a coincidence, and given that she was appearing alongside a male Langtry, that they had been a husband-and-wife act, as many intergender double acts were in those days.

By 1909, though, the 9th and Arch was on its fourth owner, T.F. Hopkins, and its last legs. America’s entertainment landscape was changing, vaudeville was entering its peak, and dime museums were increasingly becoming yesterday’s news. Variety magazine had long since stopped reporting on the fare offered, last deigning to provide a listing in March of 1907. Typical attractions advertised at that time included performing lions, contortionists, musicians, sword swallowers, a one-man band, “John Thompson, the blind checker player”, the armless and legless Prince Randian - a “discovery” of Barnum with a long career in circuses, carnivals and at Coney Island, and with lasting fame courtesy of an appearance in Tod Browning’s infamous 1932 film Freaks - and, somewhat mysteriously, “Nora Gibson, with snakes”, and “Iva Donette and her dog”.

Evidently, audiences grew tired of blind checker players and Nora Gibson’s snakes, and were turning away from the dime museum in droves. T.F. Hopkins was in dire need of a new attraction, and his press agent, Norman Jeffries, thought he knew just the thing…

The Fabulous Leeds Devil

In 1736, a poor woman named “Mother Leeds” in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, found herself pregnant with her thirteenth child. As she gave birth one dark and stormy night, the child transformed before the eyes of her gathered friends and family, changing from a healthy human baby into a ghastly beast with the head of a goat, the wings of a bat, and forked tail. It screamed and growled at the gathered onlookers, and then flew up out of the chimney, much, one assumes, to everyone’s surprise.

It’s an outlandish story, of course, but it hasn’t stopped historians attempted to determine the identity of the “real” Mother Leeds, as if it were possible to verify eye-witness accounts of a screaming, be-winged goat-child. If there is any truth to it, it’s a story that screams of the witchcraft panic of the times - if we agree on the stated date of 1736, this was only eight years after the death of Puritan America’s self-appointed witch-finder, Cotton Mather - and if there were a genuine Mother Leeds, one has to look back with sympathy and regret on a culture that so gladly invented Satanic libels about her.

Another theory connects the story not to “Mother Leeds”, but to almanac writer Daniel Leeds, a political rival of Benjamin Franklin who found himself ostracised by the Quaker community for the sin of dabbling in arcane and occult arts - Leeds published works on astrology, occultism and magic, a reputation for fascination with the dark arts that made him almost as unpopular in those pre-revolutionary times as his steadfast sympathy for the British Crown. The Leeds family crest, as used prolifically by Daniel’s excellently named son Titan Leeds, depicted a wyvern, a magical dragon-like beast with two legs, a forked tail, and the leathery wings of a bat. Could the story of the Leeds family birthing a winged monster have originally served as allegory, a metaphorical othering of a family shunned for delving too greedily and too deep into knowledge not meant for them? It’s all a shade Lovecraftian.

It would be absurd to look for anything more than a crumb of reality in these old horror stories, and it can feel like tearing away some small part of what magic is left in the world when you have to reveal that the Yeti is likely just a bear, Bigfoot a man in a cheap fancy-dress costume, and England’s Alien Big Cats are just regular-sized ordinary cats. Sceptics and debunkers often feel the need to impose mundane explanations on supernatural and impossible events, and those explanations can often end sounding even more unlikely than the initial story - weather balloons and swamp gas have never made for the most convincing explanation for UFO sightings, and in the case of the Leeds Devil, some efforts to explain sightings as being a misidentified sandhill crane barely pass muster. The monsters and bugbears of our imagination defy such easy categorisation.

But let’s dial that back a moment - I did mention sightings. The Leeds Devil, as it continued to be known, started to make a regular nuisance of itself as the 18th Century ticked over into the 19th, presumably having laid low in the decades since its Satanic birth in 1736, growing from folk phantom to tabloid terror. The Devil was said to stalk the Pine Barrens - a useful warning sign to stay clear of an area long associated with bandits, robbers, and highwaymen, as well as fugitives from justice, moonshiners and runaway slaves, all of whom had a vested interest in scaring away the curious, and convincing prying eyes to look elsewhere. I’m not necessarily saying that they were dressing up in fake wings and goat masks like a proto-Scooby Doo villain, but we can’t rule it out. Even the innocent people of Pine Barrens were tarred as innately criminal, immoral, and unintelligent - they would have done well to enact a Scooby Doo ruse of their own to scare away meddling psychologists, as one such family, given the false surname Kallikak, were depicted by Henry H. Goddard as evidence for a hereditary connection between low intelligence, “low” morality, drunkenness, and criminality. Despite his heavily manipulated results, misrepresentation of basic facts, and ignorance to many medical explanations for conditions he blamed on hereditary flaws, Goddard’s book became a foundational text in the American craze for eugenics.

There were sightings that can’t be explained as either a large bird, or a Pine Barren prankster (particularly because I just made the Scooby Doo explanation up as a joke), but many of them perhaps don’t need explaining at all. An oft-repeated story is that Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, spotted the Leeds Devil while hunting on his New Jersey estate one snowy day. The story seems to have no source prior to appearing in Spooky New Jersey, one of a series of “local ghost stories” style books by S.E. Schlosser. Wikipedia dates the supposed hunting expedition to “about 1820”, or at least three years before Bonaparte purchased the Bordentown estate. There’s a peculiar kind of game among the propagators of local myth and ghost story to attempt to acquire credibility for their stories through association with a historical figure - another unsourced account claims that American Naval hero Stephen Decatur shot the creature with a cannonball, yet it survived to fly away. I’m no expert in historic ballistics, but the likelihood of hitting a reasonably small, airborne target with such an unwieldy weapon seems beyond the realms of credibility.

In the 1840s, the Leeds Devil was blamed for a series of attacks on livestock, just as in the 1970s both UFOs and Satanic cults - two of the obsessions of the decade - would be blamed for a series of livestock deaths and cattle mutilations. There were scattered accounts of sightings by hunters and hikers, and then, for the next few decades, the Devil seemed to lie low, and largely fade from memory.

The Devil Spreads Its Wings

What, I hear you ask, did all this have to do with a dime museum in Philadelphia?

Well, that brings us right back to T.F. Hopkins, and to 1909.

After decades in the proverbial wilderness, the Leeds Devil began making headlines again, not just in New Jersey, but as far afield as Philadelphia and New York. Clearly, in the shining lights of the 20th Century, this once rural menace had developed a taste for big city life.

After a rash of sightings across Pennsylvania, the stories of devil-hunts are familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a “searching for Bigfoot”-style documentary - good old boys tooled up with traps, dogs and guns, and everybody and their mother had a story; if they hadn’t seen it, their neighbour or their cousin had, yet no “Devil” was ever captured. Stories grew and grew, as stories are wont to do, until hundreds of men were out on the streets attempting to track down the winged monster.

Incredibly, the threat was taken so seriously - remember, this is 1909, the same year that the first military aeroplane was developed, not the dark and ancient past - that schools, factories and theatres closed their doors, armed guards rode the rails, and church attendance apparently skyrocketed as the panicked masses turned to religion in hope of salvation from a beast of centuries past. There were even reports of the Devil supposedly attacking social clubs and trolley cars, and being fired at by police. This is all reported rather credulously in accounts of the time, and I have to say that it has the feel of a War Of The Worlds panic about it - something I will surely discuss again in a future Bunkum & Bullshit.

It was a textbook example of mass hysteria, and once the newspapers got wind of it, things only got worse. It’s around this time that the Leeds Devil took on a more suitable name, in light of its growing fame and geographical range - it became The Jersey Devil.

The panic lasted for much of January 1909, and reached a fever pitch when footprints supposedly belonging to the beast were discovered in the New Jersey snow, taking routes seemingly impossible for any natural creature. It was reminiscent of an 1855 panic in Exeter, England, stories of which I vividly remember from the likes of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, and other such “unsolved mysteries” and Forteana programming that was widespread in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and birthed a generation of amateur hauntologists - the Exeter footprints were of two cloven hooves, that were alleged to have covered over a hundred miles, effortlessly passing over rooftops and hillsides without breaking stride. It’s unlikely that all of the footprints ever really existed - certainly some did, and once people got it into their head that they were seeing something mysterious, then every unexplained indentation in the snow was interpreted as another Devil’s footprint, and the story - largely unknown outside of the local area until the 1950s - had plenty of time to be elaborated upon and misremembered over the years. Reverend G.M. Musgrave, the vicar of nearby Withycombe, rather pleasingly speculated that the footprints, and the ability of whatever made them to bound up on to rooftops and over high fences, may have been the work of an escaped kangaroo.

Whatever one believes of the Devil’s Footprints of Exeter, at least some of the footprints of New Jersey’s Devil were, in fact, very real. Real, that is, but not made by any Devil, or anything remotely supernatural. Turns out it’s man.

In this instance, it was the work of an animal trainer by the name of Jacob Hope, and one Norman Jefferies, a former newspaperman turned publicity and theatrical agent, working in the employ of T.F. Hopkins, for the 9th & Arch Dime Museum. Jefferies had masterfully planted stories in the local press, through a combination of anonymous tip-offs, letters, and likely a few favours called in with former colleagues, to concoct stories of more and more sightings of the Jersey Devil. The panic likely didn’t start with him, but he wasn’t about to let the opportunity it presented pass him by. While the stories grew likely beyond even Jefferies’ wildest hopes, he turned to old friend Jacob Hope to plant the phony footprints, which were achieved with nothing more complex than a horseshoe.

Finally, the reason for Jefferies’ machinations - though for much of the nineteenth century, hoaxing and pranking was often an end in its own right - became clear, as the struggling 9th and Arch put out a bounty on the head of the Jersey Devil, offering thousands of dollars (which it almost certainly couldn’t have afforded to pay out) for a live specimen. Some months later, triumphantly, they announced that they had bagged the Devil, and that it would be put on display at the Ninth and Arch.

Step Right Up

The Jersey Devil on display at the Ninth and Arch failed to curtail the business’ declining fortunes. Procured by Jacob Hope from the collection of a travelling circus, the “Devil” turned out to be nothing more than a kangaroo, painted with green stripes, with the additional accoutrements of some false wings, claws, and haphazardly applied tufts of hair. An ignominious entry into the annals of animal hoaxes, and certainly no duck-billed platypus, it’s doubtful that any of the paying museum visitors were fooled. People could overlook an amusing or ambitious fake, but perhaps coming so soon after a genuine mass panic about this particular beast, they didn’t want the reminder, or balked at the suggestion that their fears had been unreasonable, perhaps even ridiculous.

In the years to come, Jefferies admitted to the hoax in the newspapers, and took credit for much of the 1909 Jersey Devil panic. In coming decades, until his death in 1933, he was looked upon somewhat wistfully as a prankster and an occasional thorn in the side of those newspapermen he’d managed to baffle and outsmart. He could hardly have expected that his resurrection of an old folk monster would long outlive him - not only did other museums and travelling shows boast of their own “Jersey Devils”, either dead or alive, but sightings continued long after Jefferies’ death, well into the 1950s and ‘60s, with circuses and carnivals offering thousands of dollars for the capture of a real specimen. It goes without saying that not one of them had to pay out.

Today, the Jersey Devil is largely reclaimed as something of a state mascot - it lends its name to an NHL team and a rollercoaster - and part of a rich bestiary of American monsters in fiction, popping up in TV, film and video games. But there are still those who insist that the Jersey Devil is a real creature, and who dedicate their lives to tracking and hunting one. There are others who are less involved, but who still believe - they, or someone close to them, may have hit something with their car, caught an eery flash of movement in the woods at night out of the corner of their eye, or filmed a blurry, unidentifiable creature on their mobile phone or trail camera. This is the stuff of modern cryptozoology- a fringe belief supported by unreliable witnesses, grainy footage, and the persistence of belief. They point to the discovery of hitherto unknown species in the past, of how mountain gorillas and pandas were once viewed as cryptids are today, and how the Coelacanth was believed extinct for millions of years before putting in a surprise appearance in 1938.

With all due respect to the Coelacanth, it is but a fish. It is not a biologically impossible combination of disparate animal parts, and behaviour that an animal of the Jersey Devil’s supposed size could not perform. When we speak of newly discovered species today, it is generally a matter of taxonomy, and of difference by degrees, not an exercise in making literal the monsters of our myth and imagination. We look for new beetles, frogs and spiders, not for centaurs and sasquatches. Like many Fortean subjects, cryptozoology has its obvious appeal, and is somewhat close to my heart, but I cannot bring myself to side with those who wish to spend their time deep in the forests in search of Bigfoot. Real creatures leave real evidence, and despite the claims of carnival barkers, there is no Jersey Devil carcass, and never has been. There are no real footprints, no real evidence of habitation or of predation, and there is no Jersey Devil, just as there is no Bigfoot, there is no Loch Ness Monster, and there are no more Thylacines. I wish it were not so. You may ask why it matters, and if the people who choose to believe, and spend their time hunting for, Jersey Devils and Sasquatches, are really hurting anyone, but when we are losing anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 species every year, when our children or our grandchildren may end up living in a world depleted of some of its most iconic species, it feels downright perverse to devote our efforts to chasing ghosts and fantasies.

There is something in the American psyche that seems to love a tall story or a hoax, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth century - P.T. Barnum built a fortune and an entertainment empire upon that fact - and it’s tempting to look back and scoff, to wonder how anyone was ever fooled by such obvious practical jokes and ludicrous newspaper stories. But for many, the appeal wasn’t just in being fooled, but in the smug satisfaction of knowing that someone was out to fool them, the sense of superiority that comes of assuming that you can see through the tricks that nobody else can. That is still a very attractive proposition.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to mock even those unlikely few who were convinced by a painted kangaroo in papier-maché wings. When people have beliefs they want reinforced, even with unprecedented amounts of information at their fingertips, they are easily convinced and easily swayed by invented and misattributed quotes, by doctored and misrepresented footage, by fake news stories, and by what, to a non-believer, is so obviously a bad bit of Photoshop work. When we want to believe, the flimsiest of evidence can be evidence enough. When we don’t, no evidence will do.

Yesterday, it was the fake wings on a kangaroo, today, it’s the badly mangled hands betraying the artificiality of a piece of AI “art” - the methods change, but we still get fooled. Yesterday’s Fiji Mermaid is today’s Pope in a puffer jacket. Tomorrow, some of us will still believe in monsters.