When the Jersey Devil Crossed the State Line: The 1909 Spring Valley Bombat
This is the first in a planned series exploring Rockland County’s surprising abundance of mythical beasts and unexplained creatures. From colonial-era monsters to twentieth-century oddities, Sleepy Hollow Country extends its reach westward across the Hudson.
Most people who know anything about the Jersey Devil assume the creature keeps to its ancestral stomping grounds in the New Jersey Pine Barrens—that vast, eerie stretch of scrubby pines and cedar swamps that has harbored the legend for more than two centuries. And most of the time, they’d be right. But in January 1909, something strange happened. The Jersey Devil—or whatever it was—went on tour.
During the third week of that month, thousands of people across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware reported seeing a bizarre winged creature or finding its distinctive hoofprints in the snow. Schools closed. Armed posses formed. A region that prided itself on hard-headed practicality descended into something resembling mass hysteria.
And then, improbably, the creature crossed the state line into New York.
The Panic of 1909
To understand what happened in Spring Valley, a village in Rockland County, we need to step back and look at the wider frenzy that preceded it. The week of January 16-23, 1909, remains the most concentrated period of Jersey Devil activity ever recorded—though “recorded” may be too generous a word for some of what appeared in the newspapers.
It began with mysterious hoofprints in the snow across South Jersey, tracks that seemed to walk through fences, climb rooftops, and vanish into thin air. Then came the sightings. Witness descriptions varied wildly: the creature was three feet tall, or it was ten feet tall. It had the head of a horse, or a collie, or something else entirely. It walked on two legs like a crane, or four like a kangaroo. It breathed fire. It killed dogs. It attacked a trolley car.
The Philadelphia Inquirer ran breathless front-page coverage under headlines like “WHAT-IS-IT VISITS ALL SOUTH JERSEY.” The creature accumulated nicknames faster than sightings: the Leeds Devil, the Flying Hoof, the Wozzlebug, the Gazook, the Jabberwock. Farmers followed its tracks for miles. Hounds put on the trail refused to follow, bristling with terror.
By January 21st, the creature had worked its way through Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester counties, crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, doubled back through Trenton, and appeared to be ranging ever farther from its Pine Barrens home. Armed men patrolled farmsteads. The Philadelphia Zoo offered a $10,000 reward for its capture.
And then, according to a report published months later in The Columbian of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, the thing showed up in Rockland County.
The Bombat Comes to Spring Valley
Spring Valley sits just ten miles from downtown Sleepy Hollow as the devil flies—fourteen if you prefer to travel by roads like a person with nothing to hide. By the time the creature reached Spring Valley, it had acquired yet another name: the Bombat. The alleged capture of a “devil bird” in Atlantic City did nothing to calm the villagers. As the newspaper account noted, the townsfolk didn’t believe the Atlantic City specimen was the genuine article. The real monster, they insisted, had made its lair in their midst.
The creature first appeared in the heart of a swamp south of the business section of Main Street. (The swamp has since been drained and dammed, forming the pond in today’s Memorial Park.) Its uncanny cries startled the villagers, prompting an exploration party armed with lanterns to venture into the muck. What they found there sent them fleeing back to the relative safety of the village streets.
Charlie Fisher, who kept the local bowling alleys, led the scouting party. He and his companions encountered gleaming eyes in the darkness and “wild gyrations” that threw terror into the hearts of even the bravest among them. Throughout the night, the creature’s cries echoed from various directions—always, it seemed, from somewhere near the swamp.
Witnesses described a beast with an immense head atop a small but muscular body covered with hair. Most disturbing were its arms, which appeared equipped with a web-like skin that served as wings, giving the creature the ability to leap immense distances while its wings flapped, lifting its body clear off the earth.
A Village Under Siege
The good citizens of Spring Valley appealed to their chief of police, one “Tommy” Walker, who comprised the entire uniformed force. Walker’s response was memorable in its bluntness: he “guessed as how” his business did not include running down Bombats or Jersey Devils, and he reckoned he’d better remain on Main Street and attend to his usual duties.
His reluctance was perhaps understandable. On their way to school the next day, children flocked together as they passed the Bombat’s supposed haunt. Women expressed equal fear. Men ventured forth only reluctantly, fearful of encountering the creature.
But it was the residents of Chicken Hill, the village’s Black community, who bore the brunt of the terror. When the awful shrieking and mournful cries of the Bombat carried into every home that night, many fled to the Methodist church, where they prayed hysterically.
Among them was Sarah Allston, wife of woodchopper Omega Allston. More hysterical than the rest, she fled from the church down Main Street and collapsed in front of the post office. Dr. Smith declared her death the result of heart disease, but the villagers knew better—or thought they did. They exclaimed that the evil hand of the Bombat had been raised against Sarah, and that anyone so marked by the monster would meet the same fate.
An hour later, the fright intensified when word arrived that the body of an unidentified man had been found on the railroad tracks. Whether the Bombat had any connection to this death went unrecorded.
The Hunting Party
After a night of vigil during which the Bombat continued to howl and shriek and moan, the men of Spring Valley gathered in Fisher’s bowling alley. Not a ball rolled that morning—not even a high ball, the newspaper noted archly. Matters were too desperate for any sort of festivity.
It was Tom Moore who rallied the troops. Throwing out his chest, he declared: “I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll form a hunting party, arm ourselves to the teeth, and every man pledging himself to stand together, we’ll sally into the swamp tomorrow and hunt down that pesky critter.”
Some present suggested calling for outside assistance rather than tempting the devil, but when volunteers stepped forward—J.C. Gibbs, Harold Sheldon, Ross Youmans, Roswald Farrington, Walter Foley, Shep Small, and Dink Davis—the others fell into line.
What followed was a frantic overnight scramble throughout the village for firearms and cutlasses. Bright and early the next morning, the band entered the swamp to hunt the terrifying Bombat to the death.
Spring Valley waited with hushed anxiety for news of the formidable dash into the heart of the Bombat’s chosen fastness. When the brave men finally emerged, they had nothing to show for their efforts. The search was in vain. Whatever had terrorized the village had vanished as mysteriously as it had arrived.
The Skeptics Have Their Say
Not everyone in 1909 believed the Jersey Devil was real. Some newspaper writers, observing the mounting hysteria, responded with satire rather than credulity. One particularly memorable parody appeared under the headline “JERSEY’S DEVIL IS CLASSIFIED AS A ‘BOMBAT,'” purporting to offer a scientific classification of the creature.
According to this tongue-in-cheek account, the “Zoological League of West Philadelphia” had issued a bulletin declaring the creature a Bombat—not a mythical beast of the Jabberwock or Snark variety, but “a recognized, tabulated, tagged and categorized monster that occupies an important classification in abnormal zoology.”
The article quoted at length from a fictitious “Prof. Adolph Weidenstrummer’s short treatise on abnormal zoology,” which described the Bombat as a “truncated effurgium of the genus hoptoadorium” that laid red, white, and blue eggs which exploded when the moon was full. The creature was said to make its nest in extinct volcanic craters to protect its eggs from moonlight.
Darwin himself, according to this spoof, had written in “suppressed addenda” that the Bombat evolved from the hippodot—a creature of which no authentic fragment had ever been unearthed. The satire concluded by noting that the Bombat was difficult to capture and its bite was fatal.
The parody was pointed. Its target was not merely the Jersey Devil itself but the credulity of the press and public, the proliferation of absurd eyewitness accounts, and the willingness of newspapers to print nearly anything that would sell copies.
Historians have since traced much of the 1909 panic to a press agent named Norman Jeffries, who was promoting the Ninth and Arch Street Dime Museum in Philadelphia. Jeffries planted stories about an escaped “Australian vampire” and eventually arranged for the beast’s “capture”—which turned out to be a kangaroo painted with green stripes and fitted with unconvincing paper-mâché wings.
Whether Jeffries had anything to do with the Spring Valley Bombat is unknown. But the timing is suggestive, appearing as it did in June 1909—months after the January panic had subsided, and just when a reminder of the hysteria might drum up fresh interest.
The Bombat’s Legacy
Whatever visited Spring Valley in 1909, if anything visited at all, left no lasting trace. No Bombat was ever captured in Rockland County. No bones surfaced. No wings were mounted on a tavern wall.
But the incident remains a curious footnote to one of the stranger episodes of mass hysteria in American history, a reminder that even the most level-headed communities can be swept up in panic when the conditions are right: a harsh winter, mysterious tracks in the snow, sensational newspaper coverage, and the ancient human tendency to see monsters in the shadows.
It also serves as a reminder that Sleepy Hollow Country, a region already thick with ghosts and legends, has more than its share of strange creatures lurking in the historical record. From colonial unicorn sightings to nineteenth-century sea serpents, from ghostly apparitions to unexplained beasts, Rockland and Westchester counties have harbored legends that rival anything from the Pine Barrens.
This article marks the beginning of our exploration of that lesser-known tradition. In future installments, we’ll examine other cryptids and mythical creatures reported in the region over the centuries. The Headless Horseman may be our most famous supernatural resident, but he’s hardly alone.
After all, as the citizens of Spring Valley learned in 1909, you never know what might come howling out of the swamp.
Sources: “Hot Pursuit of the Jersey Bombat,” The Columbian (Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania), June 24, 1909; “Jersey’s Devil is Classified as a ‘Bombat,'” various newspapers, January 1909; “What-Is-It Visits All South Jersey,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 21, 1909; Brian Regal and Frank J. Esposito, The Secret History of the Jersey Devil (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
Jim Logan
By day, Jim Logan is superintendent of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a position that requires him to keep excellent company with the permanently quiet residents of one of America's most storied burial grounds. A fifth-generation Tarrytowner, Jim might reasonably expect this pedigree to lend him a certain air of historical gravitas—and in most towns, it would. But when your job regularly puts you in contact with families whose ancestors were already well-established here when the Dutch were still running things, five generations starts to feel like you just moved in. By night—and weekends, and probably lunch breaks—he's a historian with an unhealthy appetite for crumbling newspaper archives and forgotten local lore. After more than two decades of research, Jim has assembled a formidable collection of Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown historical resources, which he mines for the stories that appear on Sleepy Hollow Country. If there's a ghost with a tale to tell, a legend with a plot hole, or a 19th-century scandal gathering dust in the archives, he'll find it.
