There have been more than 2,000 recorded sightings over 250 years, it featured in an early episode of The X Files and it's so famous there's an ice hockey team named after it.
Folkloric stories tend to explain something that is already there, rather than being the reason for its existence
But here in Britain, hardly anyone has heard of one of America's most famous cryptids - or undiscovered species - the Jersey Devil.
Most of the sightings of the Devil - one of them reportedly by Napoleon's brother, Joseph Bonaparte - have been in the Pine Barrens, a huge span of dark, desolate woods in the south of New Jersey.
Many describe it as a winged goat-like creature with blood red eyes and standing anywhere between three and six feet tall.
Charred remains
Yet, despite having been spotted as many times as Bigfoot, no one has ever photographed the Jersey Devil and the closest anyone has come to proving its existence was the finding of the charred remains of an unidentifiable creature in the 1950s.
The myth of the Devil has its origins deep in American folklore. According to legend, in 1735, a woman called Mother Leeds was pregnant with her 13th child.
So painful was the birth that she said it may have been the Devil's spawn and promptly gave birth to a hugely deformed child that disappeared up the chimney and went on to haunt the woods.
While the existence of a local healer called Deborah Leeds who had a disabled child has been proven, any rational person would put the rest of the story down to salacious gossip.
Russell Juelg of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance has been leading Devil Hunts in the area twice a month for the past eight years but has still to come across the beast.
He says: 'I have not had the classic Jersey Devil encounter. You do get lots of sounds that you cannot figure out but I prefer to attribute those to the abundant wildlife.
'The closest I have ever come is when I met three high-school boys who had just had an encounter and I have never seen anyone more terrified.'
People's opinions in the state are divided over the Jersey Devil.
Juelg says: 'Some people shrug it off as being the product of fertile imaginations. But there are also people who would be extremely angry if you doubted their word about a sighting.'
Rational explanations for the myriad sightings range from it being a sandhill crane to a species of rare African bat, hypsignathus monstrosus.
Sightings of the Jersey Devil reached a climax in 1909 when hundreds of people claimed to see it from January 16 to 23, yet many of these are now believed to be part of an elaborate real estate hoax.
Richard Freeman of Britain's Centre For Fortean Zoology has a different take on the myth.
He says: 'The term Jersey Devil has been applied to any weird sighting in the Pine Barrens, from the classic description to Bigfoot. The talk of it being the spawn of the devil is a case of chicken and the egg. Folkloric stories tend to explain something that is already there, rather than being the reason for its existence.
'There have been sightings since way before the Leeds myth, even by Native Americans. The name given to the Pine Barrens by the Lenni Lenape tribe is Popuessing, or Place Of The Dragon, so it could well be some unknown reptile.'
the above is in the METRO newspaper's ( london ) website.
