A while ago, I wrote an article about spooky stories from Appalachian folklore. This led me to start wondering about the urban legends from my home state of New Jersey. Of course, I knew I had to look into it because if anyone could come up with some spooky weird stories, it’s the great people of the Garden State.
The Jersey Devil
By far, the most famous of New Jersey urban legends is the Jersey Devil. We even named our hockey team after it.
This creature is said to inhabit the Pine Barrens, a large pine forest in South Jersey. It is often described as having leathery bat wings, hooves, a barbed tail, a horse-like head, and resembling a kangaroo in stature. It is also said to have a horrific, high-pitched scream. The Jersey Devil is known to menace farmers by raiding them of their crops and animals.
There are about a million different versions of this story, but the most common one goes like this: in the early 1700s, Mrs. Leeds had had 12 kids and decided that was enough. When the poor lady found out she was pregnant again, she yelled, “Let it be the devil!” and the 13th child came out as a horrible creature. After it was born, it screeched and flew away. Some say it was born a monster and some say it was born normal, but then quickly transformed. Some versions of the tale also say it killed its mother before it left, but most reports say that it has never attacked any people, only livestock. The story was possibly based on Deborah Leeds, a real woman who had twelve children in the 1730s in the same area the legend is rumored to have taken place.
Mantis Man
This 6-8 feet tall creature is often described as a humanoid that resembles a praying mantis or grasshopper. It has only been spotted three times, all of which were along the Musconetcong River in Hackettstown. One such sighting describes the Mantis Man as brown and semi-transparent with long thin arms. All three witnesses describe the creature as having either a see-through or camouflage quality. Many people theorize that it is some sort of alien or mutant.
Hookerman
Morris County’s train tracks are supposedly haunted by this ghostly apparition. A long time ago, a railroad worker lost his arm on the job just below the elbow and replaced it with a hook. To this day, he searches the tracks with a lantern for his missing arm and the wedding ring that was on it, creating an orb of light. To us mortals, the light appears to float, mysteriously separate from any apparent source.
Big Red Eye
In the mountains of Northwest New Jersey, a Sasquatch-like creature is said to roam around the wilderness. Reports dating back to the 1970s describe encounters with a large, hairy, human-like creature with large red eyes. Many residents of the area claim to have encountered the beast. Even if you don’t see it, they say you will know it by its awful wailing cry.
Mountain Lions
Now, I know this may not seem as exciting as mythical creatures, but just stay with me here. I have a personal story for this one. When I was in middle school, my sister claimed to see a large, mangy, tan animal in our neighbor’s front yard. She said it walked like its joints dislocated every time it moved and that it was missing a lot of its fur, like it had been shaved or singed. She was pretty freaked out and said it looked “diseased.” My other sister and I assumed it was just a bobcat at the time, but the one who spotted it said it was much too big to be one.
When I asked her about it recently, she said, “I remember it looked weird, like a stray dog cat thing,” and couldn’t recall anything else.
I remembered this incident while researching cryptids for this article and decided to see if anyone else had spotted something similar. That was when I stumbled upon New Jersey mountain lion sightings. Although mountain lions are supposed to be extinct in New Jersey, many people claim to have had encounters with them in the state.
Could the thing my sister had seen have been a mountain lion? Maybe. I’m thinking that it was most likely just a poor diseased coyote, but I would also like to think that maybe it was some kind of undiscovered cryptid.
Chucky the Killer Doll
I know that Chucky is a fictional character from a movie franchise, but I also like to think of him as New Jersey cryptid. For those who are unfamiliar, Chucky, AKA the serial killer, Charles Lee Ray, possessed a doll just before he died in a shoot-out with police using a voodoo ritual. With the announcement of a new film in the franchise entering development, I just had to mention him here. The movies also exist within the franchise canon, implying that what we watch is possibly a retelling of true events. So, who knows? Maybe they’re not so fictional after all…