I DROVE DOWN WASHINGTON TURNPIKE, a straight sandy road cutting through the pine country of Wharton State Forest, the largest tract of wilderness in New Jersey. Surrounding me were trunks of slash pines, blackened by a prescribed burn. Deer and turkey browsed the huckleberry shrubs and slipped back into the trees at my approach. I turned down a side road that sprouted off the main stretch and only stopped when I reached the water. It spilled everywhere across the trail, deep enough to get someone stuck. No cottonmouths or alligators to bite me, though, like those that menaced the swamps of South Carolina’s Pee Dee region, where I grew up. I stopped to cool off and swam in a black-water creek that was stained a deep tea color by the pine tannins.

I had come to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to research a novel about a pair of amateur cryptozoologists who travel the country and investigate monsters like Bigfoot while struggling through their marital issues and the husband’s bipolar disorder. Of all the landscapes I’d visited to get the settings right—the mountains of Humboldt County for Bigfoot, Big Bend National Park for La Lechuza, Scape Ore Swamp for the Lizard Man, Ocala National Forest for skunk apes, the Northwoods for wendigos, Canyon de Chelly for skinwalkers—this was the only place that creeped me out.

The Pine Barrens are the lair of the Jersey Devil, originally called the Leeds Devil. According to a legend from the 1730s, Deborah Leeds, also known as “Mother Leeds” in the lore, said after a dozen children that if she had a thirteenth, the Devil could take it. Inevitably, she got pregnant again. But when she gave birth to the baby, it transformed into a chimerical creature with a horse’s head, bat wings, kangaroo-like body, goat legs, and a serpent’s tail. The hideous beast escaped up the chimney and began a reign of terror in the Pine Barrens, mutilating livestock and setting crops ablaze with its fiery breath.

My research trip also included a family obligation: my mother had asked me to place seven stones at the grave of my grandmother, Imogene Leeds Schuler—one for my mom and each of her brothers and sisters. My grandma Imogene had a hard life. An ugly divorce left her with five kids to tend. She had her struggles, but she was a wonderful grandmother, and I named my daughter after her.

After a swim, I made camp at a backcountry site at Godfrey Bridge and drove to Leeds Point, birthplace of the Jersey Devil. I had stolen seven pretty landscaping stones from a nearby touristy town and pulled into Leeds Point Community Church, where Leeds family headstones dated back to the 1800s. Leeds is my middle name. I couldn’t have been a mile from the birthplace of the Jersey Devil, and I was standing in a cemetery full of my ancestors. This couldn’t have been a coincidence.

How to resurrect Deborah Leeds from the lore and honor the real woman that she was?

I called my aunt Dorothy, who had recently shipped me some of her history books on New Jersey. “Hi, Aunt Dorothy. I’m in Leeds Point.”

“Your mother told me.”

I looked around again at the headstones. “I’m at the cemetery, near the birthplace of the Jersey Devil, and there are a lot of us here.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “We are the Devil family.”

Keep in mind, I’d been researching cryptids for years without this pertinent information. My mom had told me the story of the Jersey Devil when I was a kid. I never understood why she had apparently named me after it, but I still thought it was cool. When I was in my teens, I finally figured out that Leeds was a family name. But even after all that time researching a novel about cryptozoology, I never suspected that we were the actual Devil family.

After I got off the phone with my aunt, I called my mom.

“How did you not know?” she asked.

“Because nobody told me.”

“I’m sure somebody must have. We all know. And don’t worry about camping in the Barrens. You have Devil’s blood, so you’re protected.”

Family lore can be so ingrained in older generations that people actually forget to pass it on. Still, I had my doubts about the connection. I thought I had it all figured out. The mystery of the Jersey Devil could be explained by research I’d done earlier on Daniel and Titan Leeds, two of the first almanac publishers in early America. I doubted that Deborah Leeds had even existed at all.

BACK HOME, BEFORE LEAVING FOR NEW JERSEY, I’d learned that Daniel Leeds was born in Leeds, England, in 1651. According to an essay called “The Jersey Devil: The Real Story” by Brian Regal in the Skeptical Inquirer, Daniel was “a devout Quaker” who “claimed to have had ecstatic visions as a young man.” He came to America and settled in the Great Egg Harbor Township, where he was a counselor to the first royal governor of New Jersey. In the 1690s, he acquired the land that would become Leeds Point.

Daniel started publishing The American Almanack in 1687. A surveyor and farmer, Daniel drew the ire of his fellow Quakers by printing astrological data that they deemed satanic. Rejecting his meteorological predictions and occult symbols, they ordered that every copy of The American Almanack be burned.

Maybe the Pine Barrens simply recognized me as one of its own.

In response, Daniel published The Temple of Wisdom for the Little World (1688), launching a pamphlet feud with his spiritual brethren—this one containing, writes Regal, “sections on angels, natural magic, astrology, and the behavior of devils.” As Quakers increasingly turned on Daniel, he rejected their faith and joined the Anglican Church. He declared Quakers anti-monarchist and charged their theology with denying “the divinity of Christ.” In defense, the Quaker Caleb Pusey published a pamphlet entitled Satan’s Harbinger Encountered … Being Something by Way of Answer to Daniel Leeds (1700). In it, he accused Daniel of working for the Devil.

Daniel kept quarreling with the Quakers until handing down his publishing business to his youngest son, Titan, in 1716. Titan added the Leeds family crest to the almanac: three wyverns, dragonish creatures with devilish faces, bat-like wings, and clawed feet. The crest unintentionally amplified the family’s association with the Devil.

Matters would only worsen for the Leeds. As a publicity stunt, Benjamin Franklin, then a puckish upstart publisher in Philadelphia, used meteorological signs to predict Titan’s premature death. Titan did not find the prank funny and wrote that Franklin had “manifest himself a fool and a lyar.” Undeterred, Franklin proclaimed that he had “receiv’d much abuse from the ghost of Titan Leeds,” even keeping up the ruse after Titan’s actual death: “Honest Titan, deceased, was raised and made to abuse his old friend.” Franklin’s jesting did little to help the already faltering Leeds reputation.

All the fixings are there: a political pariah family of Tories, making their home in the spooky Pine Barrens, tarred by accusations of demonology and sporting a devilish family crest. Perfect conditions for the birth of a cryptid myth.

SIX YEARS LATER, my aunt Meredith sent me a family tree that my uncle John and cousin Paul had researched and put together:

I had looked into my family history myself after returning from the Pine Barrens, but had only gotten as far back as Robert Leeds (1706–1765), one generation shy of the missing link: in the early eighteenth century, Deborah Smith married Japeth Leeds—becoming Deborah Leeds. This meant that not only did Deborah Leeds exist, but she was the daughter-in-law of Daniel Leeds, sister-in-law of Titan Leeds, and my seventh great-grandmother.

Furthermore, Deborah Leeds lost her thirteenth son, Joseph. Making me the seventh great-grandnephew of the Jersey Devil.

I think about what life must have been like for Deborah Leeds, marrying into a declining pariah family. How bearing fifteen children, nearly one baby every two years for thirty years straight, without modern medical care, must have ravaged her body. How tough she must have been. And then to have the misfortune of losing her son Joseph at or soon after birth, the unlucky thirteenth child. She would go on to lose another—a girl.

Perhaps the connotations of the number thirteen were enough to spur Quakers already hostile toward the Leeds family to spread foul rumors about the loss of her child. That meshes with the Leeds family’s demonic reputation and the Quakers’ animosity toward them. It also builds on Franklin’s public, ghastly insinuations about the family.

Media scholar Erin Harrington has coined the term “gynaehorror” to describe a subgenre of film focused on female reproductive monstrosity. The term seems apt for the story of Deborah Leeds, whose life might be interpreted as a cautionary tale about a cold, unloving mother whose resistance to having a child was grotesquely punished. (Though really, who could blame her after having twelve?) As Katherine Churchill observes, though, gynaehorror not only expresses misogyny; it can also expose it. From this perspective, Churchill writes, “Mother Leeds elicits empathy.”

How to resurrect Deborah Leeds from the lore and honor the real woman that she was? Getting up before dawn to make biscuits for a large family, mending clothes with a little one at her knees beside the fire, taking a walk at low tide to search for oysters on the creek, basket swinging by her side, just so she could have a moment to herself. Looking in a mirror at the big nose and thin face I’ve inherited. My seventh great-grandmother. Without her, I wouldn’t be here.

BACK AT CAMP AFTER visiting Leeds Point, I sat beside a fire, under a tree that held a psychotic whippoorwill that would not shut up. My nerves began to grate. I don’t generally get spooked camping, except for bears, and I wasn’t concerned about them here. I shined my flashlight through the skeletal pine trunks. Mist glimmered above the shrubs and grass. I had nothing to be worried about. Plus, I had Devil’s blood protecting me, I guess. Maybe the Pine Barrens simply recognized me as one of its own. Or maybe one of my ancestors was dropping by to say hello.

Hi, Grandma. Hope you liked the stones.

Or, hi, seventh Great-Grandma.

Or even: Hi, weird seventh Great-Granduncle.