MSU was beginning to put together a Folklore class when I was there, but I was fighting Guardian’s War and I never got to take it. This is my attempt. See, folklore as I know, it is an oral tradition. A tradition where the Storyteller can move and shift the story as they want. It’s a world of rumors when it is on the ground level. Facts are sprinkled through a real story and a real place. So allow me to tell you a story of the state of Jersey that I have done little research on and let’s see if it fits in the story I am trying to tell.
We are in Jersey in the 1800s, at least that is what I think we are looking at. Maybe a shade earlier. The meanest girl in town marries early, 12, 13, and she marries a mean, violent and sour man. She is made to birth child after child, and with every one, her burden grows, and with every one, her anger rises. Whispers are beginning to circulate about secret meetings with dark forms and spirits of terror in the woods at night.
Three in the morning. That is what my sister used to call the Witching Hour. The time of night when the devils and demons have the world for one hour. Things move differently in the forest during the Witching Hour, and this is when our mean, angry woman slips from the village and into the forest that devours her with its branches and vines, its brush and its beasts.
She continues to have children, and it is on the night of her fate that she lays a birthing bed, giving the world one more spawn, the thirteenth child the womb of rage has created. As the head is about to crown, she knows. She has this sensation deep in her veins, and as women pat her forehead with wet cloths, and a midwife stands with a dull knife ready to cut if she has to, the mother of the thirteenth child yells, “Make this one a devil!”
With a ripping of her body, out rises a beast the world will learn to call The Jersey Devil. It stands about three feet tall with claws fully formed and tough quills for hair. It opens its mouth to let out its first cry, and the night is shattered, not with the cry of a baby but with the screech of a newly born monster. Its head resembles a camel and a dog. Its tail slashes, knocking away the horrified midwife, who stumbles back and begs for the protection of God.
It bends to glare at its mother and she begins to laugh. It opens its maw and screams again as her laugh reaches its maniacal level. With a throwing back of its head and an opening of its throat, wings burst from its back. Two long, wickedly curved wings that resemble those of a bat. Like a baby’s first step, the wings lift into the air. It spins for a moment with the twirling of its tail and the bending of its wings, looking for escape. It craves the night. It yearns for the sickle moon and wild wind. Its eye falls on the fireplace and it soars. It screams a farewell to its mother and into the fire it goes. Up and out of the chimney, and the land has one more demon to contend with.
It rips the air with its wailing. It swoops low to claw at other animals. It scrapes its claws across roofs, tearing up shingles. And as it does, the village screams, the citizens leave their houses in terror to watch the sky for the thing that the dark forest and the powers within have given them.
The howls of laughter from the mother do not end. She is grabbed by the arms and dragged out of the midwife’s house. Soon as the monster screams through the sky, men gather, the priest shouts prayers, and the city elders decide her fate almost instantly.
As soon as it is announced that she is to burn, her precious creature drops to the ground and all can see it. Many will describe it one way, even more a different, but all agree this is a creature born of a witch who received the seed of the Devil. It drops to the ground, turns to its mother, and screams over the sound of her cackling, then it turns to hiss at the elders.
As the creature flies, blunderbusses are fired, but no man-made weapon can take down the Jersey Devil. To this day, no one knows how to kill it. The terrified town builds a pyre, a stake is raised, and torches are thrown.
As the spawn of Anger, Meanness, and Hell cuts the sky, blots out the far away moon and screams in glory, its mother burns.
Some, but not many, say that it landed on the top of her stake and held out its wings, threw back its head, and as it showed all present its demonic form, its mother laughed as she burned.
She died. And its vengeance has yet to be sated. First, livestock was wiped out. Slashed, not eaten, and left to spoil and rot. Even if the beasts it kills are not rotten by the time they are found, that meat cannot be eaten. That meat has been soured by the Devil. The only farm animals it leaves behind are night-black goats, and they are immediately killed.
The Jersey Devil will not leave, and soon the village is abandoned. The citizens do not want to remember, so they all break off in different directions, abandoning buildings and homes, barns and a church that the presence of the creature has surely defiled.
The citizens of that village scattered, they say. They say they were oft times shunned at any door they found themselves at. But sometimes a village would take them in.
Brave souls went back to the village and burned all of it to the ground, waiting for the church for last. They had spent the day traveling and burning and when they reached the church, as they opened its doors, the Devil soared out, slashing and killing two men that were burnt instead of buried. The church burned and the land was left destitute of any plank or stone upon stone.
It is said that no matter where the citizens of that village hid, the Jersey Devil would find them. When they died from a life of fear and running, their children were chased. When that child gave birth to more, the curse began to grow.
It is those family lines that know the Jersey Devil’s cry in the night. That hear it flap over their heads, and to this day, the line of those families are cursed with the sight and the horror of The Jersey Devil.
Time has forgotten the site where the Devil was birthed. And as the decades became centuries, cities flourished. No one knows for sure what metropolis was later built on that desecrated ground, but out there in Jersey somewhere, is a land cursed. And out there are by now, hundreds maybe thousands of souls, that can trace their lineage back to that night and that ground.
They hear the cry. Their nightmares see darkened wings and flaming eyes and they all know the horror of The Jersey Devil.
The Mocking Family Devil was of flesh and blood, and they say he was human. No one will tell you he was humane. He was born in West Virginia. I’m not sure what town. He at one point lived in the town that Uncle Child lived in. He raised his boys there.
No girls. No girls are tied to that man that I know of, but we all know that is bullshit. My belief is that he slept with a woman, and if she had a boy and when it got to the perfect age, he would come and claim it. The mother never saw it again, or rarely. As far as I know, the Sons of the Devil never knew their mothers.
Sex, gambling. And I’m not sure what else was life for this man. I will not hang a murder on him, no one ever called him a thief. But the man of the folk tales I have heard was not above these crimes. There is no picture that has survived the family albums of this man. Not that I have seen or ever heard tell of. He has no mother I have heard the name of. No father that may have shaped him.
As far as I know, he sprouted from a womb a devil.
Stone went into the army, I have told you that, but he was not there long. He was in Korea as a typist. It is said of Stone that he loved to march. Rose talked often of watching as her father marched around the house to steady step. Stone moved to Hollywood with his wife, and there they lived in the station wagon they owned. My mother was five and Uncle Wrath was six when the Devil promised Stone 100 dollars if he would move to Milwaukee. The Milwaukee Braves were the Devil’s team, and he wanted to be in that town so he could watch the games when he had the money.
The Canny girls were tied to the Mocking house and the Devil married the eldest. We will call her Keen, and she was my grandmother’s sister. I remember her. She lived in a very nice house. She kicked the Devil out at some point and he wandered his sons’ homes.
They adopted Uncle Taste and his crimes are not known to the world, but whispered about among those who knew him and his appetites. The Devil left his wife, and as I talked of earlier, he haunted his sons’ homes. When the wife of one Son would throw him out, he walked to the next. He knew no real home after Keen, and she did have money, but she didn’t get it from him.
She always wore beautiful clothes I had never seen on a woman before. Jewels and her hair was perfect. But I remember as a child when Grandma called my mother begging a ride. The three of us went to Keen’s house and she was screaming. She moaned and wept and clawed. Grandma had been alerted by the neighbors, I believe, and I remember her on the floor, pounding her fists and yelling at the shade of her dead husband.
When she died, we inherited a couch. It was too beautiful to throw away, but one cushion had to be flipped over. We were not allowed to look at the other side, but when the ice came and the oil lamp burned, the couch cushion was flipped over to show a wide stain a bit wider than a foot. The official story is that wine was spilled there. But all of the family whispered about that couch. Whispered about how it could have been blood.
That was our couch when Less and I were molested by Char. That was our couch when Grasp got back from his horror of a two week trip. That was the couch that was in our living room when Rose made us aware of her heart condition and a vise grip landed on our family.
The common belief was that the Devil haunted his Sons’ homes. One story I know well is that my grandparents had a clock. It was big and green and weighed almost a ton. It hung by a stubborn nail in the living room, and one day Grandma was screaming at Stone. She said that he was a monster. She said he was like his father and she said that Stone would burn in hell just like the Devil.
That clock flew off of the wall a full five feet and struck my grandma in the back of the head. Stone hung it back on the wall because the nail had not failed. He hung it back on the wall with his wife’s blood still staining it. This artifact of the Mocking Family, I lost track of. The weapon that all know as the weapon of the Devil that night disappeared after they moved to Waynesville.
The Devil’s curse of sex and debauchery still lives in his grandchildren. I was marked with it, and I did not take up its mantle, but misfortune has found me at every step. I believe I am haunted by this man. I can feel him in this room with me now. I have been able to feel him for days now.
He wants in me, wants my mind and my body. I feel rage ripping through me at times. Nearly unbearable rage that has never been directed at my family, but fills me at the most random times and for the most random things. Slight things that should be no more than a nuisance take over my body, wipe clean my mind, and fill me with a trembling wrath that I have only ever allowed to unleash on one occasion, against four guys in a bar with a woman they were trying to rape.
All of his line have suffered or continue to. Those who marry into the family live accursed lives. The Devil haunts his kin and he still rides the air above our homes. His legacy is darkness, and the sound his wife made as she screamed his name long after he had died still haunts me.
It has always been the very sound of fear. Any time anything gets near to that sound, my body goes rigid and I can hear a laugh my living ears have never heard behind me.
I fear him not. Although I can feel him standing behind me right now, and the battle I fight as I write this book is as spiritual as it is secular, I hold no fear of him at all. I challenge him to find me and fight me. For my house is secure spiritually. My family is secure. And if he tries to find me in my dreams, I dare him to come. Come into the Unreal Mind and face what is in here. It has horrors and heroes that only I can control. I invited him to fly the skies of the Wasteland last night and he stayed away. I invite him to try again tonight.
The Mocking Family is cursed. Cursed by the one I call the Devil.
Because if you believe in God, you also have to believe in evil. And as the folklore of the family is told, this man was evil.
Jesse Teller 
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