Interestingly enough, a reader sent in this comment in regards to our article, “Is the Jersey Devils Range Increasing?”

“Heyy,

My name is Victoria and i am starting a report on the JD (Jersey Devil) also known as the MLD (The Mother Leeds Devil)…People say when you make the Jersey Devil Cake and put it in your yard the Jersey Devil might come..

Here is the recipe: THE JERSEY DEVIL CAKE

Cake
3/4 cup boiling water
3 ounces unsweetened chocolate
2 1/4 cups sifted cake flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup margarine
3 eggs, well beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
3/4 cup buttermilk
2 cups brown sugar

Icing
1/4 pound margarine
3 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar
3 squares unsweetened chocolate, melted
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 to 1/2 cup evaporated milk

To make cake: Pour boiling water over chocolate. Stir over low heat until smooth and thick. Cool. Sift together flour, soda, baking powder and salt. Cream shortening with sugar until fluffy. Add eggs and beat well. Blend in chocolate and vanilla. Add dry ingredients and milk alternately, beating after each addition. Pour into well-greased 9-inch pans. Bake in 350-degree oven 30 minutes.

To make icing: Blend butter, chocolate and vanilla. Add sugar alternately with evaporated milk until smooth. Add milk until spreadable.

New Jersey’s pine barrens might qualify as the strangest stretch of woods in the world. It is completely out of place, a huge thick pine forest with only a sparse rural population situated among developed and largely urban New Jersey. The Pine Barrens is just the type of place for a cryptid, and boy does it have one. Of course, I speak of the Jersey Devil.

The most famous tale of the origins of this cryptid is of Mother Leeds. In 1735, the story goes, the good mother had given birth to twelve children. Said to be a witch, Leeds said that if she had child number 13, it would be the devil himself. Variations of the story say that the Devil was the father, but in any case, the child was born completely normal. Within minutes, it killed the midwife, grew a horse’s head, forked tail, wings and hooves and escaped through the chimney and went directly toward the Pine Barrens.

But this may not be entirely true. The Native American Lenni Lenape tribes called the Pine Barrens “The place of the dragon”, and other name places and accounts may suggest an origin that predates Mother Leeds. The first well documented sighting dates from the early 19th century when the famous early American naval commodore Stephen Decatur visited a foundry in the barrens searching for a source for decent cannon balls. He related a story of seeing a white creature with huge wings flying overhead, and directed cannon fire at it. The story goes that the creature was entirely oblivious to the hole Decatur made in its wing.

Perhaps the most famous person to see the Devil was Joseph Bonaparte. Most people aren’t aware that this older brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, and former King of Spain, called Bordentown, New Jersey home for some years. Unwelcome – and perhaps wanted – in Europe he fled France before the capture of Napoleon and bought a lovely rural estate, not far as monster flies from the Pine Barrens. He is said to have seen the Jersey Devil in 1820.

In the 1840′s the Devil was blamed for numerous livestock killings (though one wonders how many of those were actually related to the UFO phenomena). But, unlike many cryptids and paranormal phenomena, the sightings of the devil increased. By 1909 thousands had claimed to see the Jersey Devil, most of them between the dates of January 16-23. Newspapers went wild with the story, Numerous accounts of the horse-faced, winged devil surfaced, and mass hysteria set in. The devil was said to attack a trolley car, schools closed, a local fire department claimed to stave off the monster with a hose, and the local economy screeched to a halt when business owners were too fearful to open their doors.

Sightings continued with regularity throughout the 20th century. But the range of the Devil seems to be increasing. 2008 has already seen two sightings, both well out of the Pine Barrens area, and well out of New Jersey in fact. The first was January in in Litchfield, Pennsylvania, where a farmer saw the creature in his barn. The second was in Rising Sun, Maryland just a few weeks ago on August 18th, where three people observed the creature flying past their car, landing in a field a short distance away. The Jersey Devil is still with us, unlike many cryptids, and seems to be increasing its range….

Due to the breakout success of our first article, The Himuro Mansion Haunting, we’re going back to Asia for the wild tale of a red haired, human like animal believed by the locals to be a man eating prehistoric caveman, and by scientists to be an extinct primate. The story is a familiar one (Bigfoot or the local Yeti come to mind) but with some “all too human” peculiarities. So without further ado, here is the Tale of The Chinese Wildman:

Deep in the mountains of southern and central China there is said to exist a hairy humanoid creature known as the Yeren. Sightings of the Yeren, or Chinese Wildman, date back more than 2,000 years and are still reported today. Described as being a red haired bipedal animal, rising over six feet tall with a peculiarly fat belly and similarly strange pronounced buttocks, the Yeren bears a striking resemblance to many humans found in modern developed countries.

A popular seventeenth-century account from Hubei province reads:

“In the remote mountains of Fangxian County, there are rock caves, in which live hairy men as tall as three meters. They often come down to hunt dogs and chickens in the villages. They fight with whoever resists.”

Most of the sightings are in the counties of Badong, Xingshan and Fangxian, and therefore the Yeren are thought by most to originate from Shennongjia Nature Reserve in Yichang, but none have actually been discovered there.. or anywhere else for that matter.

A 1976 encounter witnessed by several local bureaucrats brought the Yeren into the international spotlight for the first time. It is reported that early in the morning of May 14, while on their way home they encountered a “strange, tailless creature with reddish fur” on a rural highway in the Hubei province. The driver pursued the creature with his car, forcing him to scramble up a hill. Roughly halfway up the hill he slipped and came to rest in front of the car, after which the passengers left the vehicle and approached the creature for a closer look.

They described the creature as being over six feet tall, covered in thick brown and purple-red wavy hair, having a fat belly and pronounced buttocks. The eyes were human-like, but the face bearing much more resemblance to that of an ape.

Artists Concept of a Yeren

Interest in the Yeren had increased and the first official inquiry was launched in 1961, but was inconclusive as the body, (reported as being slain by road workers) was unavailable to inspectors and formally declared to have been a Gibbon. Later, another formal investigation by the Chinese Academy of Sciences put 110 investigators into the forests of Fang county and the Shennongjia area. No sightings were reported but local witnesses were interviewed and alleged Yeren footprints, hair, and feces were collected.

Over the years investigators have collected dozens of alleged Yeren hairs from all around China and through laboratory examination have found that “the wild man is in the middle between bears or apes and human beings.” Physicists at Fudan University, studying samples from all over China, found that the proportion of iron to zinc was 50 times that found in human hair and seven times that in the hair of recognized primates. Other studies of note have concluded that the hair was neither human nor known primate hair but from an unrecognized primate with a morphological affinity to humans, which seems to be congruent with witness descriptions of the creature.
Zhou Guoxing, one of the expedition leaders, believed there seemed to be two types of Yeren: “a larger one of about two meters in height, and a smaller one, about one meter in height.” He also reported two types of footprints: “One is large, 30-40 cm, remarkably similar to that of man, with the four small toes held together and the largest one pointing slightly outwards. The other type is smaller, about 20 cm, and more similar to the footprint of an ape or monkey, with the largest toe evidently pointing outwards.”??Zhou, believes that both living and dead specimens of the smaller Yeren are already in scientists’ hands.

According to this source:

“One was killed on May 23, 1957, near the village of Zhuanxian in Zhejiang province. A biology teacher had the presence of mind to preserve the hands and feet. When Zhou learned of this in 1981, he went to the site and collected the specimens. After some considerable study he concluded that they “belonged to a kind of large stump-tailed monkey unknown to science.” Subsequently he identified the animal as a stumptailed macaque. Not long afterwards just such an animal was captured in the Huang Mountain region and taken to the Hefei Zoo. Zhou wrote that this specimen is mainly ground-dwelling…. The body is large, about 70-90 cm in standing height. A tall individual could reach one meter. Its extremities are strongly built. It weighs more than 20 kilograms. A large male could weigh over 33 kilograms, while females would be smaller. The back hair is brown in color. The adult male has whiskers, and has a reddish color on the face.”

Anthropologist Frank Poirier of Ohio State University has suggested that many Yeren reports are probably sightings of the rare Golden Monkey, which is believed to inhabit the same region. An ironic anecdote tells us that Poirier himself was once mistaken for a Yeren, after villagers who had never seen a Westerner encountered a near-nude Poirier napping by a river.

Even with all of the reports (some claim over 400 reports in the last 20 years), scientists haven’t definitively proven what the creature is, or even the concrete existence of the Yeren. When theorizing about what the Yeren could be, many zoologists believe the creature is a surviving Gigantopitliccus, a giant bipedal primate believed to have gone extinct roughly 300,000 years ago, and today would share the same habitat.

Another popular theory is that the Yeren are in fact, a small pack of evolved orangutans. A source points out:

“Bipedalism has evolved independently in the ape family at least two times, so it is at least slightly possible that this has happened yet again with an isolated population of orangutans.”

However plausible either of these theories may be, isn’t it likely that there’s yet another, less colorful explanation invoked by the ironic tale of Mr. Poirier? To us, the tale of an ape-man so closely resembling our friends and family coupled with the cultural ignorance of the locals greatly increases the chance of the recent sightings being an embarrassing tale of a remote vacation gone wrong.