"attacked" a trolley car in Haddon Heights and a social club in Camden. Police in Camden and Bristol, Pennsylvania supposedly fired on the creature to no effect. Other reports initially concerned unidentified footprints in the snow, but soon sightings of creatures resembling the Jersey Devil were being reported throughout South Jersey and as far away as Delaware and western Maryland. The widespread newspaper coverage created fear throughout the Delaware Valley prompting a number of schools to close and workers to stay home. Vigilante groups and groups of hunters roamed the pines and countrysides in search of the devil. During this period, it is rumored that the Philadelphia Zoo posted a $10,000 reward for the creature. The offer prompted a variety of hoaxes, including a kangaroo equipped with artificial claws and bat wings. Description and explanation Skeptics believe the Jersey Devil to partially be nothing more than a creative manifestation upon the imaginations of the early English settlers, with plausible natural explanations including: bogeyman stories created and told by bored Pine Barren residents as a form of children's entertainment; the byproduct of the historical local disdain for the Leeds family; the misidentification of known animals; and rumors based on common negative perceptions of the local rural population of the Pine Barren (known as "pineys"). The frightening reputation of the Pine Barrens may indeed have contributed to the Jersey Devil legend. Historically, the Pine Barrens was considered inhospitable land. Gangs of highwaymen, such as the politically disdained Loyalist brigands, known as the Pine Robbers, were known to rob and attack travelers passing through the Barrens. During the 1700s and 1800s, residents of the isolated Pine Barrens were deemed the dregs or outcasts of society: poor farmers, fugitives, brigands, Native Americans, poachers, moonshiners, runaway slaves, and deserting soldiers. So-called pineys have sometimes fostered certain frightening stories about themselves and the Pine Barrens to discourage outsiders or intruders from entering the Barrens. Pineys were further demonized and vilified after two eugenics studies were published during the early 20th century, which depicted pineys as congenital idiots and criminals, as seen in the research performed on "The Kallikak Family" by Henry H. Goddard, which is now considered biased or inaccurate and, most likely, falsified. Jeff Brunner of the Humane Society of New Jersey thinks the sandhill crane is the basis of the Jersey Devil stories, adding, "There are no photographs, no bones, no hard evidence whatsoever,