Sail BackJersey Devil Sighted
Joseph Bonaparte and The New Jersey Devil:
"Commodore Stephen Decatur was an American naval hero in the early nineteenth century. According to legend, he visited the Hanover Mill Works to inspect his cannonballs being forged. While there, he visited a firing range and sighted a flying creature flapping its wings. He fired a cannonball directly upon it. It had no effect and the creature flew away.
Joseph Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte and former King of Spain, was reported to have seen the Devil. The incident took place in Bordentown, New Jersey while he was game hunting in the nearby woods.
The infamous Captain Kidd is reputed to have buried treasure in Barnegat Bay. Legend has it he beheaded one of his men to guard forever his buried treasure. Accounts claim the headless pirate and the Jersey Devil became friends and were seen in the evenings walking along the Atlantic and in nearby marshlands.
In Clayton, New Jersey, the Devil was chased by a posse to the edge of a wooded area. The Devil fled into the wood. The posse, afraid to pursue him, halted and declared ‘if you’re the Devil, rattle your chains.’
The Devil’s taste varies. He was seen cavorting at sea with a mermaid in 1870. And he is reputed to have had a ham and egg breakfast with a Republican - Judge French. But the Devil is not known to have specific political leanings.
The Devil’s sightings have covered great geographic distances. - from Bridgeton to Haddonfield in 1859; to the New York border in 1899; and from Gloucester City to Trenton in 1909. Until this time, tales of the Devil were passed by word-of-mouth. However, published police and newspaper accounts during a famous week in January of 1909 took the story of the Devil from folk belief to authentic folk legend. Thirty different sightings in a one-week period told of the Devil sailing across the Delaware River to Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Newspaper articles created a near panic in the region.
Theory and the Devil
After the 1909 appearances, the scientific community was asked for possible explanations. Reportedly, science professors from Philadelphia and experts from the Smithsonian Institution thought the Devil to be a prehistoric creature from the Jurassic period. Had the creature survived in nearby limestone caves? Was it a pterodactyl or a peleosaurus? New York scientists thought it to be a marsupial carnivore. Was it an extinct fissiped? However, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia could not locate any record of a living of dead species resembling the Jersey Devil." (2)
There is a remote ‘possibility’ that the Hapsburgs and Randolphs or other Merovingian sorcerers who live in the upper Chesapeake area have something to do with this Devil. Some of their rituals definitely involve the invocation of Asmodeus or other elementals that some call demons. They also claim to be able to shape-shift but I suspect they are involved in projecting hallucinations or what is called mind-fogging. In any event it is interesting to find Napoleon’s brother living in these parts of America.
Author of Diverse Druids and sixty other books available at World-Mysteries and elsewhere.