Jersey Devil + 40

Over at TV Squad on July 9th, Anna Johns writes of her interest in The X-Files season one’s episode "The Jersey Devil." She reminded me that an incident that happened 40 years ago, a significant close encounter of the Jersey Devil-Bigfoot kind, is still remembered, in a roundabout way, via the popular television series and its fans.

…that season one of The X-Files is phenomenal. I had forgotten how many terrific episodes were packed into the first season. Chris Carter really seemed to have this show down solid right out of the gate. He set up the series with aliens, government cover-ups and monsters; and episode five of season one introduced us to the agents.

We learn that [FBI Agent Fox] Mulder lives and breathes his work. He and [FBI Agent Dana] Scully travel up to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where Mulder butts heads with the local PD, who have jurisdiction over the case of a Bigfoot-looking creature that is killing homeless people. Mulder thinks it’s the famous Jersey Devil, which chewed a man’s arm off in the 1960s.

Johns mentions the side trips taken by agents Mulder and Scully, but then comes back to the Jersey Devil. Anna Johns concludes her overview:

Mulder ends up coming face-to-face with The Jersey Devil, a woman who was evidently raised in the forest just outside of Atlantic City. Scully just misses seeing the missing link when Mulder is attacked. But, for once, Mulder is vindicated when he and Scully catch up to the naked, hairy woman. Unfortunately, they don’t get any answers from the woman because the trigger-happy sheriff’s department kills her (and tastefully covers up her private parts with leaves).

I devoted an entire chapter to the Jersey Devil in Mysterious America, a 1983 first edition of which The X-Files creator Chris Carter did own. "Jersey Devil" is one of those localized names that residents and written histories have applied to any supposed strange beast, entity, or phantom seen in the state of New Jersey. The legendary creature, in fact, is the state’s “official demon,” an unofficial regional mascot, and now the name of the state’s National Hockey League team. Therefore, I was not surprised to see the Jersey Devil, as a feral human initially identified as a Bigfoot, featured in The X-Files as that series’ first ever “monster of the week.”

Bigfoot-like creatures have been seen and called the Jersey Devil in New Jersey for a long time.

Toward dusk on May 21, 1966, a creature “at least seven feet tall” ambled through the Morristown, New Jersey, National Historical Park and left in its wake four hysterical witnesses who had viewed it from a parked car. They said the creature was “faceless,” covered with long black hair, and had scaly skin. It had broad shoulders and walked on two legs with a stiff, rocking movement.

Morristown’s Monster of 40 years ago may have looked a lot like the creature drawn above, Momo, the Missouri Monster.

The four drove to the park entrance and stopped approaching cars to warn people that a “monster” lurked inside. Raymond Todd, one of the witnesses, caught a ride with a young lady who took him to the Municipal Hall in Morristown, where he blurted out his story to the police. Oddly enough, the girl had seen a similar entity a year before. She told police that she and several friends were in the park one night when a huge, broad-shouldered something had loomed up in their rear window and thumped on the back of the car. Her mother had asked her not to report the incident, she said.

The Morristown creature might be more closely related (whatever that means) to Bigfoot than to the Jersey Devil, but its scaly skin is not characteristic of Bigfoot creatures sighted in other parts of the country. However, the "scaly skin" sounds vaguely similar to the Native Americans’ description of the coverings of the "Stone Giants" seen in New York State over 350 years ago, and related to the Windigo folklore from the East. Bigfoot-type Windigo were said to first roll in sticky evergreen pitch (resin derived from the sap of various coniferous trees, such as pine). Then the creatures were said to wallow in pebbles and rocks, until they naturally looked like something that has come down to us as Stone Giants.

Therefore, not surprisingly, in the modern era, as I noted in talking to Ivan Sanderson in the 1960s, Bigfoot were being called Jersey Devils forty years ago. When Sasquatch researcher John Green came to New Jersey in the 1970s, he was struck by how Bigfoot-type reports were being called "Jersey Devil" sightings, something he mentions in his newly 2006 reprinted Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us.

In the mind of hockey fans and others, the Jersey Devil will always be a winged demonic entity, but thanks to Chris Carter’s grounded genius, shown via The X-Files, the newer image of a Bigfoot as eyewitnessed by New Jersey residents has been captured, at least, as part of the popular cultural memory through the famed television series.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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