Plot
On the road in Roland's Mustang, the team is heading toward the town of Hanover and then on to Ecto-Con, a paranormal conference in Atlantic City. Eduardo complains about a toll and about spending Spring Break with "geeks," while Garrett gripes that he is missing March Madness. Roland is carrying an antique sword he needs authenticated for his history professor; it may have belonged to the early American naval hero Commodore Stephen Decatur.
A flying monster swoops down and breathes on the car, dissolving the roof. Roland spots a gaping hole in the creature's belly as it makes another pass, then loses it by ducking into a tunnel. A sheriff pulls them over, recognizes the description, and identifies the attacker as the Jersey Devil before racing off to warn the town. Kylie decides they should call Egon and stay to help.
In Hanover, where a bicentennial celebration is underway, the townsfolk turn cold once they learn who the team is, blaming them for stirring up the Devil. While the others eat at the Rusty Mine Shaft Diner and get the rudest possible service, Roland takes the sword to the Museum of Ironworks. The curator, an old man named Ben, tells him the legend: more than two hundred years ago the Devil came out of the museum's forge, and Commodore Decatur stopped it from destroying Hanover by shooting it in the gut with a cannonball. Ben confirms the sword is genuine and says it was forged from the Devil's own heart.
The Devil returns. Ordinary bullets bounce off it and its breath atomizes the sheriff's rifle and Garrett's wheelchair, but Ben reveals the creature's weakness: Hanover iron, which burns it on contact. Driving the Devil off with thrown iron, the team learns from Ben that Decatur's cannonball tore a chunk from the monster, which he then forged into the sword. Eduardo realizes that is why the Devil has been chasing them.
Egon is stuck in traffic in Ecto-1 with Janine and a carsick Slimer, unable to bring the team's gear. Over the phone he classifies the Jersey Devil as a Class 3, a demonic life force inhabiting iron ore and minerals; the smelting process gave it access to the physical plane and left behind residual ecto matter that is harmful to it.
When Kylie tries to lead the Devil out of town with the sword, the creature snatches and swallows it, filling the hole in its belly and growing strong enough to rust whole buildings with a single breath. The sheriff, convinced the only way to appease the Devil is to hand the team over, handcuffs the Ghostbusters to a gazebo until the Devil's breath frees them by atomizing it. Roland's plan is to lure the Devil back into the museum forge so it melts down to its original form. With Ben and the others firing a cannon and the townspeople finally pitching in with Hanover iron, Roland tosses the iron fragment from earlier into the air; the Devil dives after it and is blasted point blank into the furnace, where it is destroyed. The damage to the town and to Roland's Mustang reverses, and Ben sends the team off with a laugh.
The Jersey Devil
The Jersey Devil is classified by Egon as a Class 3 Bio-Spheric Specter: a demonic life force inhabiting iron ore and other minerals. Its physical form is a large winged creature with two legs armed with prehensile toes; its face resembles a bat's but is made grotesque by inward-curving tusks like insect mandibles, and its hide is iron-hard and rust-colored with a spiked ridge along its back. Despite its bulk it sustains long-range flight. Its primary attack is a corrosive exhalation that reduces metal to rust or dust on contact; ordinary bullets bounce harmlessly off its hide. Having lost a chunk of its body to Decatur's cannonball, it retains the ability to reabsorb that material by swallowing objects forged from its own flesh, which is how it eventually reclaims the sword and restores itself to full power.
The creature's only physical weakness is Hanover iron, metal smelted from the same forge that originally gave the Devil access to the physical plane. The smelting process left residual ecto-matter in all iron produced from that forge, making it actively harmful to the entity. Contact causes visible pain and drives it off.
The episode grounds the creature in the real Pine Barrens legend of New Jersey. In the episode's in-universe history, the Jersey Devil erupted from a Hanover forge and was defeated by Commodore Decatur, who fired a cannonball into its gut, leaving a permanent wound. Commodore Stephen Decatur was a genuine early American naval hero; the real Pine Barrens legend has associated the Jersey Devil with the region since the colonial era. Garrett and Kylie describe the creature to the sheriff as a "flying lizard" and a "flying horse" respectively, two phrasings that echo historical eyewitness reports of the Jersey Devil in New Jersey folklore.
Egon's online Spengler's Spirit Guide entry for the Jersey Devil rates the entity as a Class 5 Phantasm, a higher classification than the Class 3 he gives in the episode itself.
The Jersey Devil later made a non-canon cameo on the cover of Ghostbusters Issue #9 (Cover RI-B). Ray Stantz asks about the creature on page nine of Mars Attacks The Real Ghostbusters. The entity also appears on the IDW Convention Variant Cover of Ghostbusters 35th Anniversary: Extreme Ghostbusters.
One-episode characters and items
Old Ben is the curator of the Museum of Ironworks in Hanover and the episode's key human ally. The only resident of town who does not treat the Ghostbusters with hostility, he confirms the Decatur sword is authentic, explains the forge lore and the creature's weakness, lends Garrett a wooden wheelchair from storage after his is atomized, and ultimately dons military regalia to man a cannon for the final confrontation. He is also the only Hanover resident not frightened by Slimer.
Hulga is the waitress at the Rusty Mine Shaft Diner who represents the town's hostile reception. She shoves coffee onto the table and squeezes excessive ketchup onto Garrett's burger. After the Ghostbusters prove themselves, she joins the townspeople in pelting the Devil with Hanover iron and tells Roland the town owes the team a favor, before joining the general retreat when Slimer emerges from Ecto-1.
Sheriff White is Hanover's law officer. He initially identifies the monster and warns the town, but turns antagonistic when the Ghostbusters refuse to leave, ordering them to go and then handcuffing them to a gazebo on the theory that surrendering the "agitators" will appease the Devil. His theory is proven wrong. Garrett nicknames him the Sheriff of Nottingham.
The Sword of Stephen Decatur is the episode's structural MacGuffin. The sword is forged from a fragment of the Jersey Devil's body, which Decatur extracted with his cannonball and then had smelted into a blade. The Devil attacks the team from the outset because it is drawn to the sword and wants to reclaim the missing piece of itself. When it finally swallows the weapon, the hole in its torso closes and it grows significantly stronger. Because the sword is composed of the Devil's own flesh rather than Hanover iron, it offers no protection against the creature.
Cast
The regular voice cast features Tara Charendoff (credited as Tara Charendoff), Maurice LaMarche, Jason Marsden, Pat Musick, Alfonso Ribeiro, Rino Romano, and Billy West. Guest voices are Eddie Albert, Edward Albert, and April Winchell. Eddie Albert and Edward Albert, two of the three guest performers, were father and son.1
Production
Altbacker and Krieg pitched two ideas that were rejected before Altbacker, a Long Island native who knew the regional legend, suggested the Jersey Devil and the episode was approved. The first draft of the script is dated April 14, 1997.2 That draft included a character cut from the finished episode, Ben's granddaughter Sarah, a young girl saved by Eduardo who in turn helps the team.34 In the first draft, Ben also took Sarah with him to Atlantic City at the close of the story. In the first draft Roland's history professor was named Lipnicki rather than going unnamed.5
The first draft also differed in several creature-related details. Old Ben's dialogue included a reference to explorers who went looking for the Jersey Devil in the mines in the 1960s and were said to have been killed, a passage removed before broadcast. The entity was classified as a "Class Three Petrological Specter" in the draft rather than the "Class 3 Bio-Spheric Specter" used in the finished episode. The draft's ending was more open-ended: Kylie speculated the Devil might have been shoved back into its own dimension or had its energy dissipated, rather than being definitively destroyed in the furnace.
Notes and references
The episode draws on real New Jersey folklore. The sheriff mentions the Pine Barrens, the region long associated with the legend, and Ben names Bruce Springsteen as the area's most famous native.6 Commodore Stephen Decatur, invoked as the man who once fought the Devil, was a genuine early American naval hero. Hanover is one of several towns of that name in New Jersey; the episode places this one as incorporated in 1797 and located in southern New Jersey near the Pine Barrens.
The script is dense with pop-culture references. Garrett, hearing "Jersey Devil," first assumes the sheriff means the New Jersey Devils hockey team. He quotes "Nice shootin', Tex" from the first Ghostbusters film, compares the sheriff to the Sheriff of Nottingham, and, handed an old wooden wheelchair, references Morticia of the Addams Family. Eduardo invokes Tom and Jerry when given the iron to throw, and Kylie tells Egon the Hanover iron is "like Kryptonite" to the creature. Eduardo also says he had voted to spend Spring Break in Daytona Beach, placing the episode in the last week of March.
In the broadcast order this episode followed "Greased" and preceded "Dry Spell."
References
Some content on this page was researched using the Ghostbusters Wiki on Fandom.
