Following The Footprints of The Devon Devil

That winter of 1855 was colder than a politician’s heart. Between January and March, the temperature had rarely risen above freezing in the UK, and the southwest countryside of Devon was largely hidden underneath a carpet of thick snow. This was back in the day when winters were real winters, snowmen were real snowmen, and icicles formed proudly on the dangling testicles of farmfolk who weren’t gonna let a spot of bad weather ruin their weekend.

The conditions were even worse in the north of England, but everything’s always worse in the North. Back down south, the snow fell as heavy as ever over Devon on the chilling night of 8th February, as two of the region’s rivers – the Exe and the Teign – froze over like glass. But this time, the snowfall appeared to have brought something else with it.

The residents of the villages scattered across the bottom half of the county awoke next morning to discover that a visitor in the night had left a remarkably long trail of footprints in the snow that defied logical explanation. They stretched out in a sinister pattern and moved in mysterious ways which were impossible to attribute to neither man nor beast. And the exact nature of the footprints has still yet to be conclusively identified.

So what exactly was it that got the national press into a belated frenzy and spooked the Devon locals to the degree that they became afraid to leave their houses? And could it be true that the Devil himself descended on the denizens of Devon on that dark direful night to demonstrate his disenchanting dance of death?

I realise that Simon has probably already yelled out “No!” at this point but I’m going to put the haunted cat amongst the zombie pigeons by suggesting that the answer might be yes. Yes, he did. Could be wrong though. Only one way to find out…

Fire Under My Feet

Depending on which of the many contemporary news reports you believed, it was either a baker or a farmer who was the first of the early risers to spot the footprints.

One baker from the town of Topsham reportedly raised an eyebrow when he found mysterious tracks near his shop whilst he was getting ready to open up for the day. Perhaps not being the most inquisitive of souls, he shrugged them off until he began to hear further reports throughout the day of strange footprints popping up all over the place which formed quite an epic trail.

Meanwhile, a farmer got into more of a flap when he saw the same set of curious footprints on the very same morning approaching one of his barns. They appeared to stop dead at the barn door, and the farmer naturally began to grow concerned over the welfare of his animals inside. He needn’t have worried. The animals were fine and dandy.

But after closer inspection, he was shocked to find that the set of footprints appeared to just carry on up the outside wall of the barn and right across the top of the roof. It was as if the night prowler had a problem with the concept of opening doors, but had no difficulty at all in just walking right up the side of any structure that happened to be in his way.

As the morning drifted hazily into a bleak afternoon, word had quickly spread around the region that some strange and quite possibly dangerous creature had been wandering around the snow-clad countryside in the middle of the night leaving unearthly tracks in its wake, prompting immediate suspicion that it was either the Devil, a giant sea monster, or a Northern tourist. Some of the locals instinctively grabbed their guns and dashed out to catch the scent, whilst others adopted a calmer approach and took the time to draw sketches of the tracks and try to figure out just how far they had stretched.

Later press reports indicated that this single trail of unbroken footprints dragged on for somewhere between 40 to 100 miles (or 60 to 160 km), trekking across as many as thirty different towns during the creature’s night ramble. The first sightings appeared to be near Exmouth, but then the trail travelled up to Topsham and then crossed the estuary of the river Exe before heading to Dawlish and Teignmouth, with additional reports suggesting that the trail then stretched as far south as Totnes and Torquay.

Don’t worry if you’re not fully absorbing the geography of this – I live in the county right next door and all I know about Devon is that it’s got a really good model village in Babbacombe with railway loops and fire-breathing dragons and stuff. You can save up to 10% on ticket prices if you book in advance.

The point is that this was a pretty long journey for any creature – human or otherwise – to have undertaken in a single night during a severe snowstorm, way back in the days when electricity was yet to light up the streets of the country villages.

But it was the nature of the tracks that got some of the locals cowering beneath the bedsheets in terror. The cloven hoofprints trampled into the snow had clearly had been made by a biped creature planting one foot in front of the other, rather than a four-legged animal that might just have escaped from a farmer’s barn. A cloven hoof is the kind of divided or split hoof that you might usually expect to find on cattle or goats or pigs or deer which traditionally come with four legs. But these tracks appeared to have been made by a two-legged creature which was forming footprints that were just over four inches long, three inches wide, and somewhere between eight to sixteen inches apart – so if they were made by a man, it would have been a man who took a very small shoe size but had a pretty impressive stride rate – in fact, considering the size of the trail and the length of time his journey took, he would have been bopping along at around seventeen miles per hour.

It would also have been a man with a very unusual walk, as these footprints – which some say were branded into the snow as if the feet were as hot as an iron – were also in a dead straight line with one foot planted perfectly after the other. This doesn’t exactly resemble the slightly wonkier footprints typically made by a human, regardless of whether or not the said human is staggering home after a heavy night on the sauce.

In fact, it was the unswervingly straight and unbroken nature of the tracks which caused the locals to really start biting their fingernails and digging out their Bibles for comfort. This visitor was clearly not one to deviate from its chosen path. The entity had travelled through villages and cemeteries and rivers and hedges and giant haystacks without feeling impeded by any obstacles it came across on its defiantly straight journey.

Just as the farmer had initially noted, some of the footprints were found to walk straight up the walls of buildings and carry on across the roof before coming back down again on the other side. In other cases, the footprints stopped at the bottom of small drainpipes no more than about four inches in diameter before coming out again up near the gutter. And whilst the marks were also initially thought to have stopped dead when the visitor approached an estuary of the river Exe, the trail was later picked up again directly over the other side, as if the creature had just glided straight over a two-mile stretch of water and then resumed its unwaveringly straight and crunchy trek across the snow.

It seemed that it either knew exactly where it was going or it hadn’t quite figured out left and right turns yet.

On an even more disturbing note, there were also reports that the tracks led right up to the front doors of cottages before disappearing again, as if the visitor had passed right through the homes of victims to curse their souls before popping out through the back door. As one eyewitness from Exmouth reported: “The marks came up the front garden to within a few feet of the house, stopped abruptly, and began again at the back within a few feet of the building.”

So, to sum up, we’re looking for a biped creature with cloven hooves of fire who can walk up walls, leap across rooftops, glide across water, and squeeze through drainpipes. My first thought was that it could have been a particularly determined Jehovah’s Witness. But then I decided that it was probably just a surprisingly athletic two-legged goat. So there you have it.

Join us next time on ‘Decoding The Unknown’ when we’ll be investigating just how much hamster you’re really like to find in a hamburger. Ah no, wait, I’m being told in my earpiece that neither of those answers really tick all the boxes. We’re going to have to plough a little deeper to see whether the Prince of Darkness really did dance through Devon on that bitter night in 1855…

The Devil’s in the Detail

The Devil’s Footprints certainly left their mark in the local press over the next few days – or to be more accurate, the papers were talking about The Devil’s Hoofmarks. Although the word ‘footprint’ has been knocking around since the 1550s, it wasn’t used quite as much in the 19th century as we didn’t yet fully appreciate the forensic value of a footprint and we were just as likely to use simpler terms such as ‘footmarks’ or ‘foot-tracks’ to describe the impression of a creature’s foot left behind on a surface. Or in this case ‘hoofmarks’ to describe the impression of a demon’s cloven hoof strutting across a snowy rooftop.

But whilst local papers such as ‘The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette’ wasted no time in reporting on the curious hoofprints, the national press weren’t quite so quick off the mark. In fact, it took over a week or two before the mystery finally began to make it into national papers such as ‘The Times’ which included the following observations in its belated report on 16th February:

It appears that on Thursday 8th February, there was a very heavy fall of snow in the neighbourhood of Exeter and the south of Devon. On the following morning the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the footmarks of some strange and mysterious animal, endowed with the power of ubiquity, as the marks were to be seen in all kinds of unaccountable places. There was hardly a garden in Lympstone where they were not observable.

The impression of the foot closely resembled that of a donkey’s shoe. At present it remains a mystery, and many superstitious people in the above towns are afraid to go outside their doors after night.

Over the course of the next few days and weeks, the national press actually got into a bit of lather about this, and the letters pages were heaving with speculation as to what harmless or ghastly creature could have been responsible for causing so much panic. One early regular correspondent went by the pen-name of ‘South Devon’ but was later revealed to be a guy called William D’Urban – a local man who described himself as an experienced hunter with a proven pedigree in tracking wild animals in the snow.

Over the course of his many letters to ‘The Illustrated London News’ magazine – the world’s first news magazine to feature pictures, albeit fancy illustrations rather than paparazzi photographs - William D’Urban was quick to rule out some of the more reassuring suggestions from readers which involved the tracks being made by humans, birds, donkeys, or, I don’t know, penguins. He observed:

At present, no satisfactory solution has been given. No known animal could have traversed this extent of country in one night, besides having to cross an estuary of the sea two miles broad. Neither does any known animal walk in a line of single footsteps, not even man.

As the speculation grew in the newspapers and within the feverish imagination of local residents, it appeared that all the signs were pointing to a visitation from the bowels of Hell. After all, if the prints belonged to neither a human nor an animal, then surely they could only belong to Lucifer who was roaming through the county in search of sinning souls, even going as far as to try a bit of doorstep cold-calling despite the slightly anti-social hour.

Some of the locals got it into their heads that it was all because several churches had made recent changes to the traditional prayer book which had opened up a portal between Hell and the Earth, and given Satan an opportunity to take a mini-break in Devon, even if it wasn’t the best time of year to hit the beaches and the nightclubs. Others claimed that the Devil had managed to get in through the backdoor following a recent significant drop in church footfall which had weakened the bond of faith and subsequently weakened God’s ability to protect his loyal flock from the temptations of evil. It’s perhaps more likely that the stinky weather had played a part in the drop in church attendance – but it’s reported that some crafty vicars were actively promoting the idea that the lower turnouts were to blame for the Devil prancing around the countryside, as they figured this might get more bums on seats. I suspect that they had to place a bigger order for communion wafers in time for the following Sunday’s service.

Of course, one of the main reasons why so many people assumed they were witnessing the tracks of the Devil – quite aside from the more supernatural aspects of his long journey – is because he would seem to be one of the very few suspects to fit the description of a biped with cloven hooves.

Having never knowingly met the guy myself, I’m having to rely on descriptions of the Devil from other sources, but that’s a bit more difficult than I first thought. He was never really depicted at all in the earliest forms of Christian artwork, and he was never even properly described in the passages of The Bible. The only clue we get is that Lucifer the Lightbearer used to be a stunning angel back when he was part of the in-crowd, and since his fall from favour he had taken to disguising himself as, wait for it, a stunning angel of light.

Which sounds a bit like Wile E. Coyote adopting a cunning disguise of a wily coyote. But there’s no reference as to what kind of physical transformation his true form was supposed to have undergone in the meantime, if indeed he changed his appearance at all.

It wasn’t until around the 9th century that we first began to see artwork of Satan which depict him showing off his groovy new horns and his proper hairy legs and his swishy goat’s tail and those funky cloven hoofs. He was also given a new pitchfork to wield around this time. And this was probably because Christianity was travelling right around the world for the first time, and the concept of the Devil was getting mashed up with a whole other bunch of celebrity deities, including most notably Pan – a god from ancient Greek religion and mythology who was rocking the look of a biped half-man half-goat. So the idea of a cloven-hoofed Devil was always a borrowed concept in a way, and even the most fervent bible-basher shouldn’t necessarily have jumped to the conclusion that cloven hoofmarks were evidence of the Devil coming out to play.

An alternative but equally frightful theory is that the visitor was Spring-Heeled Jack – the cloaked figure from the Victorian era with ghoulish facial features, clawed hands, and eyeballs of fire, who was reported to have struck terror into the hearts of British citizens as he somehow leaped incredible distances in a single bound and larked about on rooftops like a tit. The timeframe certainly fits, as sightings of Spring-Heeled Jack were reported between 1837 and the turn of the 20th century. And it also fits in with the idea of our mystery Devon night prowler leaping around rooftops and jumping over walls, even if Spring-Heeled Jack wasn’t usually known for squeezing inside tiny drainpipes.

However, it’s generally accepted that Spring-Heeled Jack was an urban legend who is now more famous for his appearances in later works of fiction, eventually evolving into a heroic costumed avenger and a very early version of a comic superhero. Besides, although Spring-Heeled got around England quite a bit, he was never thought to have travelled as far south as Devon.

But whatever the identity of this long-distance rambler, he or she or it had the locals getting all jittery the following day, as groups of big men with big guns launched a hunt for the creature on a mission to make it die, whilst everyone else bolted the doors shut and wondered if they’d ever dare leave the house again. Even a vicar joined in a small hunt that took place as far south as Torquay although he may have been brandishing a Bible rather than a gun. But the dogs that accompanied this group weren’t mad keen on the idea of sniffing out the Devil.

After they were released into the woods, it was glumly noted that “The hounds came back, baying and terrified.” At this point, it seemed that the group lost their nerve and headed back home. Perhaps a one-off dance from the Devil during which nobody was hurt may not have seemed so bad in the grand scheme of things.

It’s not like he even caused any damage to a single drainpipe. The biggest fear was that he might raise a lot more Hell during a swift return visit.

And it’s not like it’s the only time in history that sightings of sinister footprints have been reported and never conclusively identified. Yet none of the other footmarks ever made quite such an imprint on the hearts and minds and sheds of the public as the ones that were made on that bitter night in Devon.

The 19th century was a particularly popular period for fearful findings of fantastical footfall. A little earlier in 1840, an epic four-year voyage of discovery led by famed explorer Captain James Clark Ross had taken his crew to the Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean. During an exploration of one completely deserted island, the crew were mystified when they stumbled across fresh hoofprints in the snow which were around three inches long and two inches wide and shaped a bit like a horseshoe.

As Captain Ross himself later observed in his 1847 document of the voyage: “Of land animals we saw none; and the only traces we could discover of there being any on this island were the singular footsteps of a pony or ass, found by the party detached for surveying purposes.” You’d reasonably expect to see hoofprints in an English countryside heaving with hoofed animals, but it’s more surprising when there’s not a single creature of any kind in sight. However, Captain Ross was back in England during the sightings of the Devil’s Hoofmarks in Devon, and as he didn’t bother to venture an opinion on the matter, we can perhaps assume that he didn’t see any connection himself.

Moving right up to the other end of the UK, there were multiple reports of mysterious tracks popping up around two Scottish glens in the 1840s, stretching across a range of twelve miles. As reported by ‘The Times’:

The print of the foot in every respect is an exact resemblance of that of a foal of considerable size. As no one has had the good fortune as yet to have obtained a glimpse of this creature, nothing more can be said of its shape or dimensions; only it has been remarked, from the depth to which the feet sunk in the snow, that it must be a beast of considerable size.

In the very same year that the Devil stalked Devon in 1855, ‘The Illustrated London News’ also reported that mysterious footprints were a regular occurrence on the hills of Piaskowa Göra in what we now call Poland. A respected doctor of medicine in the area revealed that unidentified marks popped up on the snow and in the sand all year round, and that the locals happily believed them to have been caused by supernatural influences as they could not be attributed to any known animal.

But it does seem that the Devil is especially attracted to Devon, possibly because he’s partial to a bit of clotted cream and a gallon or two of strong cider. If we leap forward in time to the 1950s, we can read a report from anthropologist and physical researcher Eric Dingwall who seemed convinced that a businessman by the name of Mr Wilson had come across a set of unusual hoofprints in the sand on a remote Devon beach. These prints differed from the trail found nearly a century earlier as they were not cloven, and they were a whopping six feet apart which suggests that the Devil was either in more of a springy mood this time or he had grown considerably since his last visit.

But the other curious thing is that the prints just started from nowhere in a closed beach with challenging accessibility. According to Eric Dingwall: “The beach was a comparatively narrow space completely enclosed by rocky headlands on either side. It looked as if each mark had been cut out of the sand with a flat iron, starting immediately beneath a perpendicular cliff and ending in the sea.

There was no returning track.”

This story failed to generate widespread attention in comparison to the 1855 sightings, and neither did a much more recent story from Devon in 2009 in which a great-grandmother from the village of Woolsery believed that the Devil really had come back for another dance after all this time. 76-year-old retired government official Jill Wade awoke one March winter morning to find cloven footprints in the snow that had fallen on her back garden – and they closely resembled the bewildering size and pattern of the original marks planted 150 years earlier by a biped with cloven hooves. Jill was so intrigued by the prints that she got in contact with The Centre for Fortean Zoology who sent round their top guy Graham Inglis to investigate. Whilst Graham admitted that he’d never seen such strange footprints in his life, he remained sceptical that the prints were made by the Devil, and thought it more likely that they were made by hopping rabbits or hares.

And whilst The Centre for Fortean Zoology was unable to conclusively crack the case, the owner of the centre Jonathan Downes felt that there was probably a very natural if elusive answer. He said: “Do I believe that the Devil comes from the pits of Hell to wander around the gardens of North Devon? Of course not.”

Too right. He’s clearly a South Devon kinda demon.

Whilst there are no definitive answers to any of these other sightings, there’s also not much to investigate and not much in the way of evidence aside from the vague testimony of a few individuals. And I can’t help wondering if Jill Wade had just lost the plot after retiring from the wild and crazy life of a government official.

I suppose you could say there’s also a distinct lack of concrete evidence related to the 1855 walkabout. The press may have been packed full of speculation and theories and rumours for months afterwards, but there were relatively few first-hand accounts of the actual event from named sources, and it’s not as if everyone was taking photographs or filming themselves following in the footprints of the entire journey. Still, we haven’t quite reached a complete dead end, and there’s at least a little more evidence than I first suspected – a whole box of contemporary documents in fact which had been stashed away in the corner of a church to gather dust for about a hundred years.

Interest in the story had largely evaporated by the turn of the 20th century as the fearful footprints falteringly fell into the fog of forgotten folklore. But interest was rekindled in the 1950s following a series of retrospective articles printed in the thrillingly-named local publication ‘Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association’. Inspired by the first of these new articles, historian Major Antony Gibbs undertook a little detective work and found himself snooping around a church in Clyst St George in East Devon where he came across the box of documents hidden away in a parish box.

Between 1850 and 1886, Reverend H.T Ellacombe had served as the rector of the church and it seems that he’d become quite immersed in the footprints. The box contained a pile of correspondence from his parishioners which contained details of individual sightings and stories, along with a big stack of letters from other vicars in the region who were responding to Reverend Ellacombe’s request for their take on the matter. The box also contained a sample of contemporary tracings and sketches of the hoofprints which the Reverend had been collecting from his parishioners for analysis.

Whilst it’s half-interesting to take a glimpse of these hurried sketches put together by witnesses who were on the crunchy ground at the time, you could probably get a very similar sample of results by just giving a crayon to small child and asking them to imagine what a cloven hoofmark might look like. Perhaps the most intriguing documents of all were copies of letters that Reverend Ellacombe had apparently sent to ‘The Illustrated London News’ but with the words ‘NOT FOR PUBLICATION’ scribbled prominently across the top of each page. The paper had agreed to his request – even if they must have been wondering why he was bothering to send them in at all - so this was now the first time in a century that anyone had been able to view the secret letters, parts of which were eventually published in ‘Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association’ a century later.

Throughout the private correspondence, Reverend Ellacombe clearly outlined his own thoughts and findings on the perplexing prints. He wrote: “There is no doubt as to the facts – that thousands of these marks were seen on the snow on morning of the 9th extending over many miles of the estuaries.” Reverend Ellacombe had seen the marks for himself outside his own church – and he went on to describe the accounts given to him by what he described as credible eyewitnesses from around the region who all gave broadly similar descriptions of the shape and size and impossible patterns of the prints.

The Reverend’s faithful dog also reacted in a similar manner to the dogs belonging to the other vicar dude from Torquay. Of his own brush with the Devil, Ellacombe observed: “The creature was on my own premises and these marks were visible three days afterwards. My dog barked that night and so did the dogs of my neighbours where marks were seen.”

For his last party trick, Reverend Ellacombe had scooped up a small pile of white grape-sized excrement which he had found himself alongside the trail of footprints. He posted this to the highly-regarded naturalist Sir Richard Owen to try and get an expert’s verdict on this special winter parcel. But although the vicar kept a copy of his own letter, he doesn’t seem to have received or at least saved a reply from the naturalist. Perhaps Sir Richard Owen, much like myself, is of the opinion that it’s not worth responding to people who post shit through your letterbox.

It’s worth pointing out that whilst Reverend Ellacombe appeared to be fascinated by the origins of such unfathomable prints – and even began pondering over the notion of strange winged beasties descending from the sky - he never once suggested that the Devil was responsible for making them. And as he appeared to be a man who had studied the matter in more detail than anyone else at the time, maybe we can just take his word on that for now. I mean, I can’t conclusively disprove that the Devil didn’t go dancing in Devon that night, but maybe there are alternative theories we can examine first. Besides, I always imagined Satan to have slightly bigger feet.

But if it wasn’t Old Nick, then who or what the devil could it have been?

Idle Hands are the Devil’s Workshop

Before we turn our attention to potential culprits from the animal kingdom, one of the first theories that sprang to the more rational mind is that the whole thing was just a very human hoax. Considering the vast scope of the trail, it seems unlikely that it was all down to just a couple of meddlesome schoolkids or miffed vicars just pratting about in the middle of the night. It would need to be more of a highly-organised movement which perhaps had a clear motive for such a great undertaking.

We’ve already mentioned that some clergymen were reported to have played on the idea that God was punishing the citizens of Devon for abandoning their faith, and they were hoping that fear of further visits from the Devil might help push church attendance figures back up a bit. But could religious inner circles have been responsible for the marks in the first place? There was certainly a significant drop in church attendance during this period, as well as a growing conflict within the Church of England.

The recently-formed ‘Oxford Movement’ was keen to restore the Catholic heritage of Anglicanism and bring back mediaeval traditions rooted in weird ceremony and ritual and vestments and, I dunno, half-time jersey swapping. In contrast, the puritan Anglicans were horrified at the prospect of returning to such old outlandish ways and felt that The Oxford Movement were on a mission to hijack the modern Church of England. It’s speculated that a large group of puritan Anglicans was responsible for creating the Devil’s Footprints in a bid to convince everyone that God was unhappy with this growing trend, and that followers of the new movement were slowly dragging the people of Devon into Hell.

It’s true that churches and vicars do appear to play significant parts in the story, as if the whole thing rotates around churchyards and the opinions of clergymen. This might be largely because there wasn’t much else going in Devon at the time. The reason that we didn’t hear reports of footprints appearing in the Babbacombe Model Village and The Milky Way Adventure Park is because they hadn’t been built yet.

But proponents of this theory note that the footprints popped up in many of the churches which had specifically supported The Oxford Movement, whilst avoiding many of the churchyards of the loyal puritan Anglicans, almost as if the perpetrator was sending a very clear message.

If it wasn’t down to a clash between rival factions of The Church of England, then maybe it was down to a clash between rival groups of travellers. This idea wasn’t released into the wild until 1973 when Manfri Frederick Wood wrote his memoirs ‘In The Life of a Romany Gypsy’. Within the pages of the book, Wood recalls an old story told to him by his uncle which Wood states may have taken place in the neighbouring county of Somerset.

You might think that we can disregard this one straight away as we’re not even talking about the same county, but Wood also concedes that his memory is hazy and he’s not entirely sure of the date or location. He also mentions that the event caused major news headlines at the time, leading some to draw the conclusion that either Wood is actually recalling the events that led up to the Devil’s Footprints in Devon, or that the footprints stretched even further than first imagined.

It’s actually quite difficult to tell the story without using words that might get us demonetized, so we’re on safer ground if we just refer to the rival groups of travellers as Romany and non-Romany. The Romany ancestors of Manfri Frederick Wood were growing concerned that their territory was being taken over by rival groups, and so they spent 18 months planning an ambitious operation which was designed to scare away their rivals for good. The Romany travellers had what they perceived to be a powerful advantage on their side – they knew that the non-Romany lot were a superstitious bunch who were scared shitless of encountering The Mulo on their travels.

The Mulo was a kind of vampire or revenant from folklore that took on the persona of recently deceased people whom it held a grudge against, and then used that body to roam through the countryside in the middle of the night, seeking out fresh blood to suck from travellers’ camps. The Romany group is said to have assembled no less than four-hundred custom ‘measure stilts’ which were then used by seven different Romany tribes who marched through the county all night in an attempt to fool their rivals into believing that The Mulo was very much on the prowl in the region. The operation proved to be a walkaway success, as the non-Romany travellers fled their camps in terror and decided to set up home in a slightly less haunted environment.

The four hundred measure stilts sound like complicated contraptions which had boots planted at the bottom and were designed to make identical prints across the landscape in a precise straight line with an identical stride length. They could also be straightened out and turned into stepladders which would then be used to make the prints visible up walls and across rooftops. This was quite a different method from the one allegedly used by the purist Anglicans who were rumoured to have just shoved a horseshoe on top of a long pole to make all the prints in the less immediately accessible areas.

The problem with the traveller’s story is that it doesn’t really fit in with the narrative of the Devil’s Footprints. It’s not just the fact that Manfri Frederick Wood can’t be sure of the location or the timeframe – yes, it could have been Somerset or Devon in 1855 and it also could have been Skegness in 1927 for all we know – but it’s also that the details that don’t match the story. Wood doesn’t give much of a description of the hundreds of identical boots that were supposedly used by the Romany groups, and I can’t imagine the boots leaving cloven hoofmarks in the snow.

Even if they did, the cloven hoofmarks don’t have any particular association with the legends of The Mulo who took on the form of recently deceased people who presumably didn’t trot around on cloven hooves. The size and stride of the prints left behind by the Romany travellers also didn’t match up with the prints found in Devon. Maybe there is some truth to the idea that the Romany travellers pulled off a similar stunt at some unspecified place during some unspecified time, but it has nothing to do with The Devil’s Footprints in Devon.

And whether the prints were supposedly made by travellers or clergymen, the whole idea of a hoax orchestrated by humans just seems incredibly unlikely considering the scope of the trail. It would have been a mammoth task for even large groups of people to pull off in a single night. And whilst there wouldn’t have many witnesses knocking around during the middle of a particularly bleak Winter night, it’s surely inconceivable that not a single person was alerted to the presence of hundreds of travellers or mad vicars roaming around Devon and shuffling up and down gardens with stilts and poles to create imprints up walls and across rooftops. Maybe that’s what Reverend Ellacombe’s dog was barking at, but such chaotic midnight mayhem would have aroused more attention than just a few dog barks here and there.

I reckon it’s more likely that the prints were created by an entirely different animal which was just minding its own damn business rather than trying to pull off a silly prank. But what breed of Earthly creature could have left such a bewildering trail?

Wild Wild Life

‘The Exeter Flying Post’ came up with a very early suggestion from a bloke who reckoned he’d found the answer when he stumbled across the very end of the track and encountered the very creature that had made them. The man from Torquay had been following the strange marks found in his garden when he saw that they came to a complete stop, at which point he came face-to-face with the beast. It sounds like he had just been spontaneously following his own curiosity, so the poor defenceless chap wouldn’t have been carrying a gun and wouldn’t have had the backup of trembling runaway hounds to rely upon.

All he could do was stare into the eyes of the beast and pray for a quick death. Or maybe not. What he actually found was a toad loitering suspiciously around a tree stump.

And this was enough to convince the man from Torquay and ‘The Exeter Flying Post’ that the very same toad was the sole culprit behind all the footprints. A toad certainly would have found it a bit easier to hop through a tiny drainpipe than a typical human or goat. But bearing in mind that toads have webbed feet rather than cloven hoofprints, I think we can quickly rule out a single toad going on an extended jaunt across Devon.

Another popular early suggestion that never really took flight is that the marks were created by birds. Reverend Ellacombe had noted in his correspondence that some of the marks were accompanied with strange little flurries in the snow which could have been caused by birds flapping their wings to shake off the ice before taking off again. But again, whilst birds could easily have been flapping around in gardens and across snowy rooftops, their webbed or clawed feet don’t match up with the description.

And when the suggestion was brought up in the letters pages of ‘The Illustrated London News’, one astute reader took the time to point out: “Birds could not have left these marks, as no birds feet leaves the impression of a hoof, nor could it proceed in the direct manner stated – nor would birds, even had they donkeys’ feet, confine themselves to one direct line, but hop here and there. The nature of the mark at once sets aside its being the track of a bird.”

But one theory which certainly did gather momentum for a while came from yet another vicar who was keen to stick his oar in. This time it was Reverend Musgrave from Lympstone Church in East Devon who delivered a revealing sermon to his flock during the height of the press frenzy which was picked up by ‘The Illustrated London News’. Reverend Musgrave knew exactly what kind of animal had created the footprints: A kangaroo.

Obvious, really. One of the reasons why the prints had created such confusion and mystery in the first place is because the country folk of Devon would have been more than familiar with all manner of marks created by the local wildlife – and the fact that these particular marks could not easily be identified suggested that they were made by someone or something quite out of the ordinary. I don’t imagine that you saw too many kangaroos hopping around 19th century Devon which is why the locals had been scratching their heads for so long over the deeply unconventional imprints.

But surely that also puts forward a very good case against the kangaroo theory. What would a kangaroo be doing hopping around in the middle of the night in Devon? If it had somehow got lost, then it must have taken a pretty serious misbounce at some point.

Reverend Musgrave had an answer for that. This wasn’t just a random stray kangaroo in the wild. It had escaped from the zoo.

Or at least Musgrave had heard from a credible source that it had escaped from a private menagerie somewhere in Sidmouth on the English Channel in Devon. According to the report from The Illustrated London News’ on the sermon: “In speaking of Satan as a tempter, who was continually besetting our path, though invisible, Reverend Musgrave aptly alluded to this mysterious visitor who had left behind him visible evidence of his presence and expressed it as his opinion that the footprints were those of the kangaroo : but it must have been a busy animal indeed to have played up such pranks as this creature has done.” Yep, it must have been one pretty busy kangaroo.

And whilst there were indeed a couple of private menageries in Sidmouth which may well have hosted a kangaroo, there were no reports at the time of one bouncing over the gates to freedom. It would also have been quite tricky for a kangaroo to cross the two-mile stretch over the estuary of the river Exe, and their paws wouldn’t really have left the same kind of marks as a cloven hoof.

Although quite a few people accepted the kangaroo theory for a while, it later transpired that Reverend Musgrave had only jolly well gone and made the whole thing up to calm the fears of his frightened flock. In a letter to ‘The Illustrated London News’, the man himself sheepishly admitted: “I certainly did not pin my faith to that version of the mystery, but the state of the public mind of the villagers - dreading to go out after sunset, under the conviction that this was the Devil’s work - rendered it very desirable that a turn should be given to such a degraded and vitiated notion. I was thankful that a kangaroo served to disperse ideas so derogatory.”

I suppose it’s kind of nice that Musgrave wasn’t one of the vicars trying to instil the fear of God into his parishioners by making out that the Devil was coming after them. But I’m not convinced that he should have resorted to deliberately fibbing to his flock to banish their worst fears. Then again, it could be argued that telling porkies from the pulpit is part of the job description.

Sticking with ‘The Illustrated London News’ for a while, another correspondent with a bit of pedigree wrote in to offer his theory. You may remember that Sir Richard Owen was the acclaimed naturalist who received a parcel of excrement in the post from Reverend Ellacombe. Whilst Sir Richard didn’t appear to respond to the shit post, he was happy to pen a letter to the paper which outlined his theory that the culprits were clearly badgers.

He explained that badgers were the last plantigrade animals known to roam England – in other words they walk with their toes and midfoot bones flat on the ground, as opposed to digitigrades who walk with their toes and heel permanently raised, and unguligrades who walk on the nails of their toes and hooves with their heels and digits permanently in the air. Sir Richard argued that a badger’s claw could leave surprisingly large marks which are similar to the ones found in Devon that morning. He also pointed out that badgers are known for travelling long distances at night in search of munchies, and perhaps most significantly, a badger plants its back feet in the exact same tracks made by the front feet, creating the misleading impression of biped footprints.

Even the most energetic and hungry badger would have accomplished a quite staggering feat if it had made all the prints single-handedly in one night, but Sir Richard reasoned that the tracks were likely to have been made by several different hungry badgers spread out across the region and at either side of the estuary.

Now I’d rather listen to a respected naturalist than to yet another vicar getting hot under the collar about winged beasties and escaped kangaroos, even if Sir Richard never actually saw the prints himself. But the badgers would surely have come to rest every now and then rather than just ploughing on relentlessly like wind-up toys. And whenever they stopped for a breather, they would have revealed all four of their paws in the snow at various stops across the trail.

And again, Sir Richard fails to address some of the key aspects to the mystery. Unless the badgers had been bitten by radioactive spiders, I can’t see how they would have scaled the walls of houses or bounced across haystacks. Perhaps Sir Richard wasn’t even aware of all the aspects of the story at the time of writing his letter – in which case he should have made sure that he’d opened all the brown parcels in his own mailbox before penning letters to the newspapers.

But I don’t feel that badgers tick all the boxes on this one.

There’s another guy with a more recent take on the matter whose opinion I’d trust more than most as he’s probably researched the saga more exhaustively than anyone else in history. Welsh writer and historian Mike Dash first published his findings in ‘The Fortean Times’ in 1994, after collecting just about every scrap of primary and secondary evidence that he could possibly lay his hands on. This included a whole archive of contemporary newspaper clippings alongside the big box of documents compiled by Reverend Ellacombe which had been rediscovered in the 1950s. Whilst sifting through all the different ideas and theories that never quite answered all the questions, Mike Dash grew attached to a theory first quietly put forward in the letters pages of the press back in the day: At least some of the prints could have been made by hopping rodents.

The idea of a mouse hopping along such great distances might seem absurd, but mice and rats are known to spend a lot of time hopping, particularly when they’re trying to navigate their way across challenging territory such as a thick carpet of snow. More specifically, the humble hopping wood mouse would have left marks quite similar to the ones reported in the papers, as it holds all four feet together when jumping in the air, thus creating a single and fairly substantial footprint, the unusually formed pattern of which is not entirely unlike a cloven hoof. Also, unlike say, kangaroos and badgers, a wood mouse would have had little problem in squeezing through drainpipes or even climbing a vertical wall as long as the surface is not too smooth and has plenty of wrinkles and cracks – just like, say, the grooves and bumps you might typically find on the stone wall of a 19th century cottage in Devon.

It’s perhaps the most credible answer we have so far, even though it doesn’t quite explain every element of the mystery, and Mike Dash isn’t trying to claim that it does. For starters, you would expect the people of Devon to have easily identified the tracks of rodents as the county would have been crawling with mice and rats. It also doesn’t really make sense that different groups of rodents could have created a single uniform trail of footprints which spread out for many miles.

And whilst they’re very capable of hopping about, I’m not sure why they would have been hopping up and down the gardens of quite so many houses in the region, unless they were just doing it for the squeaks and giggles.

Still, it’s probably the most realistic animal-related theory we have to work with for now. Other slightly more improbable suspects to have been put forward over the years have included a domesticated swan which had escaped from Germany whilst wearing special padded shoes to prevent it from damaging the garden, an incredibly rare animal called a Unipede which was supposedly last spotted in Iceland in 1001 AD but was actually just made up by the writer of a letter published in the press, or an as yet unidentified breed of Arctic bird which had lost its way quite dramatically.

Wading even further into outlandish waters, it’s also been suggested that the prints were surely made by some kind of sea monster. It’s certainly true that the majority of mysterious footprints reported over the years seem to have been spotted very close to the sea. This goes right back to when Captain James Clark Ross first discovered those unaccountable prints after his epic naval voyage sailed to the Kerguelen Islands.

Whilst it was speculated at the time that the tracks may have been made by a mighty sea creature, Captain Ross himself felt that it was more likely to have been a donkey or some other wretched animal which had been cast ashore from a damaged ship. But the aquatic theme has persevered through the multiple sets of prints found in the coastal county of Devon from between 1855 to 2009, including of course the set of prints found on a closed beach in the 1950s, the trail of which led right back into the sea…perhaps an indicator that the sea creature was returning to its home after a splendid night out on the town. It’s not something we can conclusively disprove, but the curious sight of a giant sea monster with small cloven hooves would surely have been glimpsed by at least one resident of Devon over the course of up to a hundred miles.

Unless it was invisible. And whilst we’re at it, we can’t conclusively disprove that the marks were made by a mischievous two-legged centaur, Mr Tumnus from Narnia, The Old Leatherman of Connecticut taking a surprise vacation, or one of Santa’s reindeers which had escaped from The North Pole. Come to think of it, that last idea would explain a lot.

I’d put a fiver on it being Ruby, she was always the naughtiest reindeer in Santa’s magical herd.

But let’s back up for a minute. Maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. What if the mystifying footmarks weren’t created by any kind of real or mythical creature at all?

Secret Journey

British novelist Geoffrey Household first put forward a theory in the 1930s that the prints were created by something else entirely: An experimental weather balloon which had drifted astray. I must admit that I’ve just had to pour another strong coffee and check what I was supposed to be writing about here, as I felt for a minute that I’d accidentally leaped over into an entirely different ‘Decoding The Unknown’ script about UFO sightings. But don’t panic, I don’t think I’ve lost the plot just yet.

Geoffrey Household was a prolific writer of thrillers – often containing minor supernatural elements – who grew up in Devon listening to old stories about the Devil’s Hoofmarks. When Geoffrey was just a boy, he also heard a story from a local man by the name of Major Carter whose grandfather had worked at the naval base Devonport Dockyard during the time of the footprint sightings. Major Carter claims that the base had been developing some kind of secret experimental hot air balloon which would give the Royal Navy the ability to monitor approaching weather systems.

This balloon was supposed to be securely moored at Devonport Dockyard, but during the night of 8th February 1855, the spell of nasty weather may have been partially responsible for the balloon somehow breaking free from the ropes and gliding across the county. The point here is that there were two shackles right at the end of the mooring ropes. And Major Carter believed that the weight of the shackles caused the balloon to continually drift up and down.

As it was clumsily dragged across the ground at regular intervals, the shackles created the curious marks across miles and miles of countryside before the balloon eventually came down to land for good in the town of Honiton where it was swiftly retrieved by The Royal Navy. He also claimed that the Royal Navy had hushed up the incident afterwards, partly because the project was supposed to be top secret, partly because they were bit embarrassed by the whole thing, and partly because the runaway balloon had apparently caused a load of damage to greenhouses and conservatories which they didn’t fancy paying for.

I suppose this certainly explains how the prints were found in such unusual places as the balloon merrily bounced over walls and houses and haystacks and estuaries. But unless The Royal Navy were really ahead of the game, it’s about forty years too early for anyone to be developing weather balloons. There were no reports at all of any damage to property on that night, and it seems highly unlikely that such a balloon would have bounced across such a huge distance without inevitably getting tangled up in a bush or a tree or a 5G mast or something.

It all sounds a little like a story that was made up long after the actual incident. And Geoffrey Household never really gave much detail over the credibility of his witness Major Carter who may well just have been a random idiot spouting drunken bollocks.

Incidentally, speaking of idiots, many people at the time were convinced that the whole thing was orchestrated by a local village idiot. According to a segment in John Goodwin’s 1968 book ‘This Baffling World’, a group of around thirty hunters and their dogs were following the tracks the next morning when they came across the person who appeared to be making them. His name was Daniel Plummer – the village idiot of Woodbury in East Devon – who apparently had a reputation for decking himself in layers of chicken and goose feathers and then wandering through the woods making animal noises.

He sure sounds like a fun guy to hang around with. But despite what the hunters seemed to believe, it would of course have been impossible for the 100-mile prints to have been the work of a single man, idiot or otherwise.

One final theory to chew over which plenty of people believe has some real merit: What if we’re talking about perfectly normal footprints which were made by perfectly normal animals, but they somehow got distorted by the unusual weather conditions? It was a freakily cold night on 8th February 1855, but it’s possible that the freezing temperature may have dipped up and down throughout the night which could have temporarily thawed out the snow before freezing over again. This could have had the effect of distorting an innocent set of footprints into a new eerie shape which resembled a cloven hoof or a Devil’s foot. So the tracks would usually have been quickly identified as belonging to a goat or a donkey or a bird, but the rapidly shifting weather conditions had twisted and contorted the shapes into something which had never been seen before.

Anthropologist Dr John Napier has spent much of his life examining the phenomenon of Bigfoot, and he’s of the opinion that many of the sightings of mind-bogglingly huge footprints found in the snow which get attributed to a Sasquatch are actually just bear or yak prints which thawed out and froze again to create a new weird shape that looked like it was made by The Abominable Snowman. This was a theory that gathered some traction in the letters pages of the press, although others were quick to dismiss it, including that very vocal experienced hunter who signed off as ‘South Devon’ but was later revealed to be a William D’Urban. In one of his many letters, he noted: “On the morning that the tracks were observed, the snow bore the fresh marks of cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, and men clearly defined. Why, then, should a continuous track, far more clearly defined, should be the only one which was affected by the atmosphere, and all the others left as they were?”

He’s got a very good point. It just doesn’t seem possible that the freak weather conditions would only affect one set of prints from the hundreds that were likely to have been made that night. The only logical explanation is that the imprints from the Devil’s red hot cloven hoofs were branded into the snow as he danced over Devon and so they didn’t react in the same way to the fluctuating temperatures. And as we seem to have run out of theories, I’m not sure we can pull out a more rational answer from this long and winding trail of speculation.

But let’s give it a go anyway.

One Track Mind

A lot can happen in a week or two. It took around this length of time for the story of The Devil’s Footprints to make the transition from the small local papers to the national press. But it’s interesting to go back to the very first local reports and note how the language of the reports had changed quite dramatically by the time it hit the national papers.

Way back in the very beginning, there was no mention of cloven hoofmarks, no mention of the huge spread of the trail, and no allusions to the Devil. The reports merely spoke of unidentified footmarks which had popped up around the region, and were generally considered to have been made by some kind of animal. The very first report in ‘The Western Luminary & Family Newspaper for Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset’ suggested that they may have been made by a monkey which had escaped from a nearby menagerie.

Yet in the space of less than two weeks, a very different story had evolved in the pages of the national press. We were now talking about a perfectly straight single set of identical cloven hoofprints which stretched for over a hundred miles and appeared in some quite bizarre places which were impossible to explain.

One of the most influential letter writers during this period was that experienced hunter by the name of William D’Urban. We should point out straight away that William D’Urban was certainly no village idiot. He went on to become the first curator of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter.

So he certainly doesn’t sound like the kind of chap who would deck himself in layers of chicken and goose feathers and then wander through the woods making animal noises. But we should also note that William D’Urban was only 19 years of age when he wrote all those letters. Whilst he may have been a budding hunter, he can’t really have had the levels of experience that the tone of his letters suggested.

And it’s possible that his young imagination may have been getting just a little carried away when he kept banging on about identical cloven hoofmarks appearing in an exact straight line in every garden and rooftop of the county whilst vaulting over walls and crossing a two-mile stretch of estuary.

Even Reverend Musgrave – he’s the one who came up with the escaped kangaroo theory – felt compelled to write a response to ‘The Illustrated London News’ which observed: “The outline accompanying your intelligent correspondent’s recital of the circumstances hardly conveys a correct idea of the prints in question.”

The truth of the matter is that the footprints would only have been visible for a very limited time, and it would have been impossible for a single individual or party to investigate the whole trail, particularly back in 1855 when finding transport for such a long journey may have been a slight issue. There’s no evidence to suggest that anyone had been able to follow the trail for more than a few miles at most, and so aside from a few rudimentary sketches, there was no way of checking if the prints were identical. And there’s no real evidence - aside from the claims of a tiny number of supposed eye-witnesses who wrote into the press - to indicate that some of the more fantastical elements of the story were genuine at all. This includes the ideas that the footprints vaulted up locked gates, passed through haystacks without making a mark, and seemingly glided over the estuary of the River Exe.

By the way, even if the creature had managed to cross the two-mile stretch estuary to resume its journey on the other side, this might not have been so remarkable in itself It may have been possible to wade through the estuary at low tide, but it’s also probable that the estuary had completely frozen over during the night, allowing any creature great or small, to just skate right across without too much difficulty.

I’m not suggesting that the whole thing was fabricated from start to finish. I’m pretty sure that some unusual footprints were indeed discovered by the residents of Devon over a stretch of a hundred miles. But they weren’t necessarily the same set of footprints.

This is the ultimate conclusion reached by perhaps the most informed man on this subject, that writer and historian Mike Dash who was of the opinion that hopping mice may have caused some – but significantly, not all – of the marks. It’s possible that some footprints were created by animals that we haven’t even mentioned yet. One eyewitness from Dawlish recalled that he saw strange marks on that morning which baffled him at first until he realised that they were pawprints from his pet cat which had become strangely distorted after the ice thawed and then refroze them overnight.

It may not have looked exactly like cloven hoofprint – the witness said it was more like a hoof enclosed around a claw – but an agile cat enjoying another busy night on the tiles would certainly have explained how some prints were said to climb walls and saunter across rooftops In fact, this account might have been the single source and inspiration for all the reports of the prints climbing up the sides of the houses, even though the witness clearly stated that he knew these particular marks were made by his pet cat.

Otters may have been responsible for some of the other strange prints found in strangely inaccessible places, as one eyewitness reported that he believed an otter had squeezed inside a drainpipe on the exterior of his house. The harsh weather conditions may have driven hungry otters further away than usual from their hang-out spots along the now-frozen rivers, and back in the 1850s the countryfolk of Devon weren’t likely to be familiar with an otter’s trail. Again, this single report could have been the inspiration for all the subsequent stories about the prowler squeezing through drainpipes, even though the witness reckoned it was an otter rather than a demon.

And bearing in mind that the footprints looked quite similar to ones left behind by a donkey, who’s to say that some of the prints weren’t indeed left behind by donkeys? The iron shoes worn by the donkeys often split in the middle which could have created the impression of a cloven print. There were no recorded sightings of human footprints alongside the main trail, so it’s not clear what a stray donkey would have been doing mooching about alone at that time of night.

And one of the main reasons why this theory had been initially dismissed is because the prints appeared to have been made by a biped walking in a perfectly straight line rather than a four-legged donkey. William D’Urban had been quick to pooh-pooh the idea in one of his many letters to ‘The Illustrated London News’. He conceded that the prints certainly looked like “the perfect impression of a donkey’s hoof.”

But as we mentioned earlier, he then went on to point out that “No known animal walks in a line of single footsteps, not even man.” But it turns out that the 19-year-old experienced hunter might not have known exactly what he was talking about. Researcher Theo Brown later concluded that donkeys are actually the only animals that can plant their feet in an almost perfect straight line.

So we could be talking about donkeys.

Or we could be talking about nearly everything we’ve already discussed. It’s common for a Decoding The Unknown video to consider strange theories and then rip them apart to illustrate why they can’t possibly be true. But in this case, the answer might involve nearly all of the above.

I mean, it probably doesn’t involve an escaped kangaroo, a weather balloon, or a swan sporting strange footwear. And I’m pretty certain it doesn’t involve the Devil. But the dramatic weather conditions may well have pushed certain creatures further away from their usual habitat in search of food, and the fluctuating temperatures may well have distorted many of the prints into freaky shapes.

Witnesses at the time are likely to have spotted strange prints which had actually been made by toads, birds, hopping mice, badgers, donkeys, cats, and otters, and a whole menagerie of other creatures, although probably not a giant sea monster. And believe it or not, some of the marks were almost certainly made by human hoaxers locked in that religious feud between the Oxford Movement and the puritan Anglicans. It’s absolutely true that weird cloven hoofmarks were found all over the churchyards associated exclusively with The Oxford Movement, but the interesting point here is that most of these were found a whole five days after the original trail of footprints – suggesting that puritan Anglican pranksters were inspired by the increasingly spooky theories emerging from the original trail, and decided to build on the fear by targeting rival churches with fake footprints to suggest that the Devil was coming after The Oxford Movement.

But whilst all the hunters and investigators and bored vicars and scared dogs were examining specific footprints in a relatively small area, other hunters and investigators and bored vicars and scared dogs were examining entirely different footprints up to a hundred miles away, and everyone began to convince themselves that they were investigating the same mysterious single trail. The national press then began to sensationalise some elements of the story and brought the Devil into the equation - and this may partly have been down to the London-based papers having a bit of a laugh and poking fun at the superstitious country bumpkins of rural Devon who still believed that a sweating horse was a sign that it had just been ridden by a witch. And perhaps the memories of the witnesses later became as distorted as some of those refrozen footprints, leading many of the locals to believe that they really had seen a small section of indisputable cloven hoofmarks created by the Devil during his infamous 100-mile dance around Devon. In truth, it’s more likely they’d seen the misshapen marks of a rodent or a cat, but that doesn’t feel quite as exciting, and so the instinctive tendency was to hop on the mass hysteria bandwagon created by the gradually embellished and exaggerated accounts later reported in the press.

We’ll never know for sure of course, and the mystery lingers on in the imaginations of those who believe that sinister supernatural secrets were washed away forever over 150 years ago. And they might be right in their belief that something else was going on during that dark and brutal winter night. After all, what the devil do we know?

Frequently Asked Questions

What year did the Devil’s Footprints appear in Devon?

The Devil’s Footprints appeared in Devon in the winter of 1855.

What were the weather conditions like in Devon during the winter of 1855?

The winter of 1855 was particularly cold, with temperatures rarely rising above freezing. The countryside was largely hidden under a thick carpet of snow.

What did the residents of Devon discover on the morning of February 9, 1855?

The residents of Devon discovered a remarkably long trail of footprints in the snow that defied logical explanation. The footprints were sinister and moved in mysterious ways.

What were the characteristics of the footprints found in Devon?

The footprints were cloven hoofprints made by a biped creature. They were just over four inches long, three inches wide, and spaced between eight to sixteen inches apart. The footprints were in a dead straight line and appeared to walk up walls and across rooftops.

How far did the trail of footprints stretch?

The trail of footprints stretched between 40 to 100 miles (or 60 to 160 km), trekking across as many as thirty different towns during the creature’s night ramble.

What were some of the theories about the origin of the footprints?

Some theories included the footprints being made by a baker or a farmer, a giant sea monster, a Northern tourist, a kangaroo, badgers, hopping rodents, a weather balloon, or even the Devil himself.

What did Reverend H.T. Ellacombe find in his correspondence?

Reverend H.T. Ellacombe found a pile of correspondence from his parishioners containing details of individual sightings and stories, along with letters from other vicars in the region. He also had a sample of contemporary tracings and sketches of the hoofprints.

What was the theory proposed by Mike Dash?

Mike Dash proposed that at least some of the prints could have been made by hopping rodents, such as the hopping wood mouse, which holds all four feet together when jumping, creating a single footprint.

What was the theory proposed by Geoffrey Household?

Geoffrey Household proposed that the prints were created by an experimental weather balloon which had drifted astray, dragging shackles across the ground and creating the curious marks.

What was the conclusion reached by Mike Dash?

Mike Dash concluded that the footprints were likely made by various animals, including hopping mice, cats, otters, and donkeys, whose prints were distorted by the unusual weather conditions. Some prints may also have been made by human hoaxers.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Following The Footprints of The Devon Devil
• Hero image source by PJakopin / openverse, by.