IF YOU WERE TO CRACK a phone book in South Jersey and drag your finger along the pages in the "L" section, you'd find rows and rows of people named Leeds. And if you were to ring them up -- one by one -- and ask, sheepishly, if the person on the other end of the line knew anything about the Jersey Devil, you might hear claims of direct lineage, the kind of boasts made by folks with ancestors off the Mayflower or descended from European royalty.
Bill Sprouse, 39, has made that phone call and also has his own claim to stake. When he was 10 years old, the South Jersey native and author of "The Domestic Life of the Jersey Devil," was visiting his grandmother -- his "BeBop," Helen Leeds -- at her tiny house in Absecon when she told him, quite plainly, that he was related to the Jersey Devil.
Bill Sprouse, author of "The Domestic Life of the Jersey Devil: or, BeBop's Miscellany," outside Cheshire Cat At Buzby's in Chatsworth, NJ
The news did not immediately impress him.
"I kind of forgot about it for 10 or 15 years," he tells me as we drive down suburban backroads at the edge of the Pine Barrens, the Jersey Devil's backyard. "I think it's one of the weirdest things about growing up in this part of New Jersey. Somebody can tell you you're related to a monster and it won't seem like a very big deal."
Eventually, the story became Sprouse's back-pocket anecdote, the thing he'd pull out at parties and job interviews. "It wasn't until I left New Jersey -- until I went to college and started mentioning that fact outside the local context," he says, "that I realized how crazy it is."
But there was something to it, this story. BeBop had some evidence.
THE LEGEND OF THE JERSEY DEVIL bears repeating, if only because it has never reached the iconic status of contemporaries such as Bigfoot. (Sprouse, himself, calls the devil a "resolutely C-list cryptid.")
The story goes that Mother Leeds, old and destitute, was pregnant with her 13th child when she cursed her own misfortune. "Let it be the devil's child," she declared, and so it was -- a monster with a horse's head, cloven hooves, bat wings and a pointed tail. It flew up and out the chimney, and has haunted the Pine Barrens ever since.
Sprouse's grandmother told him they were directly descended from Deborah Leeds, a woman who lived in Leeds Point and had 12 children.
"My grandmother didn't actually think that Deborah Leeds had given birth to a monster, of course, but she did think maybe there was some reason why the neighbors told this story about her," Sprouse says. "So a lot of my book started out as a kind of investigation into what can be discovered about Deborah Smith and her husband, Japheth Leeds."
Ostensibly a history of the Jersey Devil legend, the book, he confesses, is "really an excuse for me to write about myself, my family and the place where I grew up." The result, at turns informative and funny, is part memoir and part historiography -- a history of the history of the legend.
"What I really like about Bill's story is that it is struggling with, 'What does the Jersey Devil mean to us as people in New Jersey -- or a wider culture? What does it mean to me?'" says Tom Kinsella, a professor of literature at Stockton University in Galloway Township and director of the school's South Jersey Culture and History Center. "Half the book's Bill, the other half's the devil."
I MEET SPROUSE IN CHATSWORTH
, which John McPhee dubbed "Capital of the Pines" in his 1968 book, "
."
Sprouse's book came out on Halloween in 2013 and the author laments he hasn't done a good enough job of marketing the thing, so on this day, he's signing copies on display inside the Cheshire Cat at Buzby's, a gift shop in the space that once held the area's only general store.
It's been raining, and as a dense fog settles on the pines, I promise him not to use it as a prop in another spooky ghost story about the Jersey Devil.
The pines are a constant backdrop in the traditional lore of the Leeds devil, but they play a muted role in Sprouse's story. In their place are the "casino buses" that ferry visitors from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York to Atlantic City (Sprouse's primary mode of transportation during the reporting of the book); JD's Pub & Grille in Smithville, where he spent an evening with a group of devil-hunters; and the Wawa convenience stores, at which he'd interrogate patrons and cashiers on their knowledge of the legend (a not-statistically-insignificant sample of Wawa cashiers say they have seen the devil itself).
Born in Atlantic City and raised in Egg Harbor Township, Sprouse did not venture deep into the pines growing up in the '80s and '90s. You won't likely find the devil there, anyway.
If the Jersey Devil legend was born in those woods, it has since moved to the suburbs. It's at once a symbol for fear of the unknown and the nostalgia for a past we've almost paved over, save for the sacred acres set aside in the Pinelands Preservation area. It's also the name of our professional hockey team and a story we tell to strangers.
"The people from the New York area are the ones (who) want to know where they can see the Jersey Devil," says Marilyn Schmidt, who owns the Cheshire Cat and does a good deal of business in Jersey Devil paraphernalia, though she guesses more of her customers are eco-tourists than devil hunters.
"I say, 'On a bad day, behind this counter,' " she adds, with a laugh. "Then I send them to Leeds Point."
"YOU SEE THAT HOLE RIGHT THERE?" Sprouse asks me.
We're driving around Leeds Point in a borrowed white pickup truck and we pass a large depression in a tract of woods just off the side of a road he's asked me not to name.
According to his great-Aunt Dottie, BeBop's sister, this hole once held the house in which Mother Leeds' 13th child was born.
Sprouse says there are "at least three" such holes with specious connections to the Jersey Devil in the immediate area. We visit another, a crumbled foundation surrounded by a feeble chain-link fence, covered in a tangle of weeds in nearby Galloway Township. This one's more famous.
The late Harry Leeds, former Galloway mayor and self-appointed spokesman of the Jersey Devil, would take television crews through the woods here and regale them with stories of local sightings. Sprouse's book begins with Harry Leeds as its chief antagonist, the aw-shucks "Area Man" always happy to declare on camera that, yes, he'd seen the devil and, no, "you do not go into the Pine Barrens at night alone."
Sprouse, it might be clear by now, is not a believer in the Jersey Devil, his own "kin." And while he was eventually won over by Harry Leeds, whom he credits with using his wiles to cement a unique part of South Jersey history into the wider culture, Sprouse is particularly cranky toward cable TV.
He blames television shows, such as "MonsterQuest" and "Scariest Places on Earth," for turning the Leeds devil, "a joke that's been part of the (local) culture for a long time," into a bad horror movie trope.
Media has always played a role in mythology, though.
A series of comic panels that ran in a 1909 edition of The Times of Trenton depicts the Leeds Devil terrorizing various townsfolk.
THE THING THAT TURNED the local legend Leeds devil into the Jersey Devil was a string of sightings in 1909 covered breathlessly by the press. Strange tracks found in freshly fallen snow, coupled with a few second-hand accounts of appearances of the devil, filled the pages of several young regional papers for days. It didn't take long for the story to make the jump to the national stage, with newspapers across the country picking up on this peculiar story out of this peculiar state.
There have been sightings ever since, but those early stories form the foundation of the modern myth.
Sprouse says contemporary interpretations are overly concerned with uncovering evidence of the devil's existence, however dubious. But they miss the humor in the early media coverage of the looming threat of a fire-breathing monster.
The papers called the beast a "Woozlebug" and a "Jabberwock" as it tore across the Jersey countryside. The Times of Trenton printed cartoon panels showing the devil floating over a drunk waking from a bender.
"The Domestic Life of the Jersey Devil."
"There were lots of stories in the papers," he writes in the book. "None that I read seemed exactly serious."
Sprouse says the existential question of the Jersey Devil -- "Does it exist or not?" -- is less important than the historical context that gave rise to the legend.
He thinks the germ of the Jersey Devil legend comes not from Mother Leeds, but from her father-in-law, Daniel, who played a supporting role in the Keithian controversy, a political schism in the Quaker community.
A bombastic Quaker pamphleteer and almanac publisher, Daniel Leeds relocated his family to Leeds Point from Burlington after his writings got him dubbed "Satan's harbinger" by his contemporaries.
In the centuries since, the Leedses have spread out far and wide -- Sprouse now lives in Mexico City, where he works as a freelance journalist. But they left legacies in the town names, the local landmarks and obscure holes in the ground we find ourselves gaping at awkwardly in the rain, searching for a devil neither believes actually exists.
"It was somebody's house," Sprouse says, "somebody's barn, somebody's root cellar, an ordinary structure."
"But to me, it said there were Leedses tramping around Leeds Point in the 1690s. Their descendants were still there in the 1890s and 1930s. Some of them are still there today," he says. "Somehow, that feels like a minor miracle."
Not quite a fire-breathing monster, but we'll take it.
S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter.
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Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the location from which Daniel Leeds relocated his family following the Kiethian controversy.