Down the rabbit hole
Jersey Devil · Burlington, New Jersey · 1909
11 documents · 1 independent account
11 documents tell this story. They trace back to 1 independent account.
The route
- One encounter the reported sighting this case is about
- 11 documents that tell it, as we collected them
- 1 independent account behind those documents
- 10 copies reprints or cross-posts of the same text: not extra witnesses
Copies are not confirmations: thirty papers printing one story is still one account.
Each shape is one document; open it to go to where we found it. The same graph as a list is below.
Why these records are connected
- 10 copies: the copy detector found the same words in a later document, so it sits in the same row as the account it copies.
Every document, as a list
- Account 1 11 documents
- Earliest found Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) Newspaper · Oct 20, 1909
Image 21 of Evening star (Washington, D.C.), October 20, 1909 - Reprint New Ulm Review (New Ulm, Brown County, Minn.) Newspaper · Oct 27, 1909
- Reprint The Pascoag Herald (Pascoag, R.I.) Newspaper · Oct 29, 1909
- Reprint Rock Island Argus (Rock Island, Ill.) Newspaper · Oct 29, 1909
- Reprint Daily Press (Newport News, Va.) Newspaper · Oct 31, 1909
- Reprint Evening Times-Republican (Marshalltown, Iowa) Newspaper · Nov 1, 1909
- Reprint The Chickasha Daily Express (Chickasha, Indian Territory [Okla.]) Newspaper · Nov 1, 1909
- Reprint Aberdeen Herald (Aberdeen, Chehalis County, W.T.) Newspaper · Nov 4, 1909
- Reprint The Citizen (Honesdale, Pa.) Newspaper · Nov 10, 1909
- Reprint The Topeka State Journal (Topeka, Kansas) Newspaper · Dec 15, 1909
- Reprint The Emmett Index (Emmett, Idaho) Newspaper · Dec 16, 1909
- Earliest found Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) Newspaper · Oct 20, 1909
How to read this
- Time runs left to right by publication date. Very long empty stretches are cut short (the axis shows how many years were skipped); undated documents sit in their own column.
- One row per independent account. A reprint, re-upload or cross-post carries the same text, so it stays in its account's row and never counts as a second witness.
- Earliest found (ringed) is the earliest document we hold for that account. It is not proof of the first telling: an earlier one may exist that we haven't collected.
- Arrows run from a document to a source it names. A dashed shape is a source a document cites that we haven't found yet; its link searches a public archive for it, and a hit there is a lead, not a confirmation.
About the numbers
- Only documents we've collected are counted; retellings elsewhere on the web aren't counted yet.
- Documents are matched by shared text and by the sources they name, by plain rules with no model in the loop. A match can be wrong; tell us.
Where next
- Back to the case
its summary, sources and discussion - Back to the map
opened on this case - Jersey Devil · Roebling, New Jersey · 1908
Another trail, same creature: 3 documents · 1 independent account - Other Canine · Lewistown, Pennsylvania · 1867
The next-deepest trail: 11 documents · 1 independent account
Every rabbit hole → · How we tell copies from independent accounts