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Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2002
Practically everyone in southern New Jersey knows of one or more
persons who have seen the devil, but very few will acknowledge personal
acquaintance. Councilman E. P. Weeden of Trenton was aroused on a
cold January night in 1909 by the sound of someone's trying to enter the
door. Thinking that one of his seventh ward constituents might need help
in a domestic crisis, the councilman jumped from his bed. He was amazed
to hear the flapping of wings; and from the second-floor window, he
could see impressions of a cloven hoof deep in the snow on the roof of
the porch. On the same night the devil visited the State arsenal, leaving
his characteristic hoofprints around the chicken house but not disturbing
a fowl. Although the settlement at Pitman Grove was omitted
from the devil's itinerary, report of his travels was believed responsible
for a remarkable spurt in church attendance and a decline in beer drinking
that lasted for months.
A reward of $500 for the devil's capture was once offered by J. F.
Hope, a Philadelphian. Mr. Hope said that the devil was his own, and that
it was not a devil at all but a rare Australian vampire -- one of the only
two ever captured. The reward has never been claimed.
There is a tradition that each reappearance of the devil is an omen of
war. It was no surprise to residents of Atlantic County when the Italo-Ethiopian conflict broke out just a few months after William Bozarth saw
the devil in the pine country at Batsto. Another person who vouches for
a view of the devil is Philip Smith, a slaughterhouse worker in
Woodstown. Smith, whose reputation for honesty and sobriety is unimpeachable, was looking out the window just before midnight on an evening in 1935 when he saw the devil walking down the sidewalk across
the street. "Looked to me something like a giant police dog, kind of high
in the back," Smith related. "He walked past the grocery store and
disappeared."
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