In 1735, in a one-room cabin in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, Mother Leeds went into labor with her thirteenth child. She had twelve already. She had buried two of them. Her husband was at the tavern with the last of their coin. The midwife rode through an ice storm to get there. And Mother Leeds, in the pain of the labor, said three times: let this one be the devil.

The child came pink and crying like any of the others. For seven breaths he was a normal baby. Then his bones changed. He grew wings, hooves, and a horse's head, and he flew up the chimney into the Pine Barrens where he has been seen ever since.

This song is told by the midwife who was in the room. She is an old woman now, decades after the night, the only person alive who saw what Mother Leeds did and what came of it. She has carried the story her whole working life. Two hundred children she has pulled from their mothers since, and she has never cursed a single one.

A different kind of horror than the first two songs of the album. Patasola was the jungle stalking you. La Llorona was the river that would not stop weeping. The Jersey Devil is closer to home — a child cursed by his mother in the hour of his birth, and the woman who watched it happen and has not stopped listening for him in forty years.