Most Quakers were opposed to British rule, which meant that members of the Quaker community saw Leeds' alliance with Lord Cornbury as yet another slap in the face from the traitorous almanac maker. He went on to publish other more explicitly anti-Quaker tracts, and came to work as council for Lord Cornbury, the British governor of New York and New Jersey. In 1688 he published The Temple of Wisdom, a book heavily influenced by German mysticism. Faced with criticism, Leeds only doubled down on the perceived mysticism in his work.

The emphasis placed on astronomy in Leeds' almanac was viewed askance by his Quaker brethren Leeds' attention to the stars was seen as occultism. Ten years later, Leeds worked with one of the first printers in precolonial America to publish an almanac. In 1677, a Quaker named Daniel Leeds came to America and settled in Burlington.

The story behind the story might be even stranger. RELATED: Cloven-Hoof Cryptids: Legend of the Maryland Goatman and the Pope Lick MonsterĪlthough there are different iterations of that story -some claiming the devil never appeared in human form, others claiming it spared its mother, still others saying the 13th child slaughtered his mother and the midwife, too- the gist remains the same: Mrs.

Legend claims that when her 13th child was born at last, it initially appeared to be an average human baby-but suddenly morphed into a hideous winged beast that slaughtered its mother before flying up and out of the chimney, to forever terrorize the surrounding land. When she learned she was pregnant with her 13th child (damn, Mama Leeds!), she exclaimed in regards to her unborn baby, 'let this one be a devil.'īut Mother Leeds should have been careful what she wished for. Their are numerous iterations of the Jersey Devil origin story, but in general it goes as follows: 'Mother Leeds' was a woman living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey in the 18th century.

The leeds devil