Devil’s Footprints
The winter of 1855 was harsh, and the snow fell thick. People froze to death, and others were close to starvation as food stores were ruined and livestock deceased. As if this were not bad enough, the people of Devon, a county in the Southwest of England, were apparently visited by the Devil himself in February. From February 8th-9th, cloven hoof tracks mysteriously appeared across 40 to 60 miles (64 to 96 km). Whilst it would be tempting to blame goats or deer for the tracks, this does not explain how the footprints came to be present on rooftops.
The tracks appeared over the course of several nights and seemed to indicate that whatever made the tracks was traveling in a predetermined direction, climbing directly over houses and haystacks in an unbroken line. The devil was not initially blamed, and many Devonians suspected that they were the victims of a practical joker mocking the rural populace. The national press was flummoxed, and attributed the tracks to ‘some strange and mysterious animal endowed with the power of ubiquity’. However, the tracks apparently coming from a cloven-hoof naturally led to the assumption that the devil, in his popular Baphomet-incarnation, was responsible.
Once the devil-hypothesis gained favor – after all, who or what could walk in a straight line over obstacles and leave cloven prints for 60 miles in winter – a reason for the devil’s visit to Devon was found. The church had recently replaced its standard prayer book with a new, less-popular, version. Naturally, this attracted the devil, presumably hoping to find some easy pickings amongst the now-sinful population. The devil is an ever-present in folk belief, often blamed for natural formations and duped by clever people like a pantomime villain, and so his reappearance in nineteenth-century Devon would not have seemed implausible.
Although the lack of concrete evidence for the phenomenon is a red flag for rational minds, this also means that the hoof-prints remain unexplained. Since more than 30 separate locations in Devon and neighboring Dorset bore witness to the hoof-prints, there must be a grain of truth. Theories about the prints’ provenance include a balloon escaping and trailing its line over all in its path, mice jumping in the snow and, most implausibly, badgers. Most likely, traveling gossip about one set of unusual tracks probably led to fearful locals attributing perfectly normal prints to the same supernatural source.
The thought of someone or something causing the mysterious tracks, scaling houses whilst the unwitting were asleep in the process, is deeply disturbing. In March 2009, a pensioner from Devon awoke one morning to find another set of mysterious footprints in the snow, which she instantly feared were from the devil again. This is a fascinating demonstration of the perseverance and power of folk belief: without the unsolved incident of 1855, would the 21st-century lady have given the prints a second glance? The story made national news and even attracted cryptozoologists to Devon to study the unexplained prints.