A RETIRED journalist has described horrifying encounters with a legendary 9-foot-tall monster who reportedly downed a plane.
Paul Evans Pedersen has spent the majority of his life searching for the Jersey Devil throughout the mysterious New Jersey Pine Barrens.
The Jersey Devil is a haunting cryptid usually described as having the head of a goat with wyvern-like wings and two hooved feet.
It stems from a terrifying tale of a woman who lived in the area of Pine Barren, near South Jersey and Philadelphia, in the early 1700s.
Known as Mother Leeds, Jane Leeds had born 12 children when she got pregnant for the 13th time.
Frustrated with her life of poverty, Jane cursed the child before it was born and said it would be the devil.
On a dark stormy night in 1735, she gave birth to the child surrounded by family and friends.
Some versions of the story say it first came out as a healthy baby but then transformed into a devil that ran up the chimney.
Others say the devil was growing inside Jane the entire pregnancy, and local clergymen tried to exorcise it, to no avail.
In the last three hundred years, many people have searched the forest for the demon, including Pedersen who investigated the monster in his book The Legendary Pine Barrens: New Tales from Old Haunts.
“People are seeing something, and that’s irrefutable,” he exclusively told The U.S. Sun.
“We’ve had mayors, cops, reputable people seeing what they describe as this creature, or most of them had heard it.”
According to Pedersen, the Jersey Devil, who can strike fear into you with a blood-curdling scream, one time brought a plane to the ground.
In 1928, Mexican hotshot pilot Emilio Carranza, known as the Lindbergh of Mexico, planned a trip to fly from Mexico City to New York and then back again.
He arrived in New York without a hitch, but his trip, and life, were cut short when he started to go home in stormy weather.
His plane crashed in the Pine Barrens, and Carranza was found dead in the wreckage.
While it’s traditionally understood that he couldn’t stay afloat due to the storms, Pedersen offered another theory.
“They found a paper that Carranza had written that he hit a creature that caused the plane to crash,” he said.
“He didn’t die right away. He jotted down on a piece of paper that he hit the serpentine creature that caused his plane to crash.”
Others have seen the creature bouncing from tree to tree right off of a highway, and one of the author’s close friends has a story about the devil descending on a herd of unsuspecting deer.
“He said this thing is big, and he is not someone who tells stories,” he said.
“They had to pry that story out of him, most people don’t want to tell you.”
There are several explanations for why the story of the Jersey Devil spread like wildfire throughout the region.
Some believe that during the prohibition era, moonshiners would tell of the devil to scare people into staying away from their stills.
Known in the 1700s as the Pineys, moonshiners were among a crew of outcasts who sparked many legends back in the day as citizens were scared of stumbling upon a criminal living in the woods.
Some believe people in the town would create rumors about the poachers, fugitives, and runaway slaves to keep women and children from straying too far away.
Today, the fear still lives in some people like Pedersen who lives dangerously close to the beast’s homeland.
“People are genuinely scared of the Jersey Devil,” he said.
“They don’t want to take the chance of even getting to where it’s supposed to live, let alone see it.
“It’ll scare you. You are afraid for your life.”