The Devil's Footprints, Devon 1855

February 1855. Heavy snow fell across south-east Devon, followed by freezing rain and an east wind. On the night of Thursday 8 February, the villages on both shores of the Exe Estuary went to sleep.

Friday. The tracks were everywhere. In Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Teignmouth and Dawlish, people found prints in gardens and courtyards "enclosed by high walls and palings," in open fields, and "on the tops of houses and narrow walls." Nearly every garden in Lympstone had them.

A correspondent signing as "Spectator" wrote to the Exeter & Plymouth Gazette. The Times reprinted the letter on 16 February. "The impressions of the feet closely resembled that of a donkey's shoe," it read. The steps were generally eight inches apart. The trail seemed to approach the doors of houses, then retreat. No one found where it began or ended. "Everyone is wondering, but no one is able to explain the mystery."

On 24 February the Illustrated London News printed a letter signed "South Devon," with a drawing. In its account, "foot followed foot, in a single line," over roofs, hayricks and very high walls, "without displacing the snow on either side." One track "entered a covered shed, and passed through it."

Rev. G. M. Musgrove, vicar of Withycombe Raleigh, measured the line. The interval "was found to be undeviatingly 8½ inches." At a hayrick, the track continued "on the opposite side of the stack." Lost, it was found again "on the roofs of some houses."

Fear spread. "The poor" spoke of a visit from Satan, and the subject was "descanted on from the pulpit." Musgrove spread a rumour of kangaroos escaped from a menagerie at Sidmouth, and later said the story was meant to calm frightened parishioners. "I certainly did not pin my faith to that version of the mystery." At Clyst St George, Rev. Henry Thomas Ellacombe kept letters and tracings of the prints, which resurfaced after Theo Brown's 1950 article.

Explanations arrived quickly. On 10 March, Thomas Fox suggested jumping rodents. Professor Richard Owen named a badger, "a stealthy prowler and most active and enduring in search of food." R. T. Gould later objected that a badger's wide tread would leave a double line of prints, not a single one. A story recorded by Geoffrey Household blamed an experimental balloon from Devonport Dockyard that broke loose trailing two shackles.

Mike Dash, who gathered the source material in 1994, suspected some tracks were hoaxes. "There were simply too many prints, in too many locations, for any one entity," in Dash's words, yet "the mystery remains." Joe Nickell argued in 1996 that once the news spread, people searched their own gardens and folded the tracks of many animals into one story. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid noted that no one in 1855 could have followed 100 miles of track to confirm it was one trail. The MonsterTalk podcast, hosted by Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow, found the longest trail anyone verified was about 5 miles.

The legend grew with each retelling. Charles Fort took up the case in The Book of the Damned in 1919. R. T. Gould followed in Oddities in 1928, then Frank Edwards. Along the way, scattered tracks hardened into one continuous 100-mile trail of identical prints. AMC dramatised it for True Terror with George Takei. In Devon it lives on in a phrase. The devil walked in Devon.