VI – The Footprints

There is something peculiarly unsettling about footprints in snow.

A noise in the night can be blamed on the house settling. A shape glimpsed through a window can become a tree when daylight comes. But footprints are different. They suggest that something was physically there. Something passed through the darkness while everyone else was asleep and left behind a trail. And on the morning of 9 February 1855, people across south Devon woke to find that something apparently had.

During the previous night, snow had fallen heavily across the county. By morning, strange tracks were being reported over an extraordinary area around the Exe estuary and the south Devon coast. They appeared near Exmouth and Lympstone, at Topsham, Dawlish and Teignmouth, and reports soon spread farther afield. They looked, according to many who saw them, rather like hoofprints. The problem was where they went.

The marks seemed to continue across fields and gardens, through enclosed yards and over obstacles which ought to have stopped whatever was making them. Contemporary reports described tracks appearing on walls and roofs, and within places surrounded by high boundaries. The Illustrated London News was reporting on the mystery by 24 February, when it published accounts of the strange marks alongside illustrations of some of the impressions. British Newspaper Archive It was exactly the sort of mystery the Victorian press adored. And almost immediately, the Devil entered the story. Not metaphorically. Actually the Devil.

Before long, the tracks were being called the Devil’s Footprints. The name has stuck for more than 170 years. But there is a problem with the version of the story most often told today.

There probably wasn’t one trail.

Modern retellings sometimes describe an almost impossibly neat sequence of identical cloven hoofprints stretching for dozens of miles through Devon. Read the contemporary descriptions, however, and things become considerably messier. The tracks were not described consistently. Some witnesses thought they resembled the shoe of a donkey. Some described something more like a cloven hoof. The reported dimensions varied. So did the distance between impressions. Tracks seen in one place did not necessarily match those reported somewhere else. That’s important. Because rather than asking what single animal – natural or otherwise – could have travelled an impossible route across Devon during one snowy night, perhaps we should ask whether anyone ever proved that all these tracks belonged to the same creature in the first place. There was certainly no shortage of candidates. A kangaroo was blamed.

Yes. A kangaroo.

One explanation claimed that a kangaroo had escaped from a private menagerie and bounded its way across the snowy countryside. The Reverend G. M. Musgrave later acknowledged helping the story along because some of his parishioners were becoming rather too convinced that Satan himself had been taking a winter stroll through Devon.

Badgers were proposed too. The eminent anatomist Richard Owen was among those who considered an ordinary animal responsible. Birds entered the argument. Rodents were suggested. People experimented with tracks in snow and demonstrated that perfectly mundane feet could leave decidedly peculiar impressions under the right conditions.

And this is where the Devil’s Footprints become much more interesting than a simple story about Satan wandering around Devon. Snow lies. Not deliberately, obviously. Snow has very little commitment to a good paranormal mystery. But an animal’s footprint in snow is not necessarily a perfect representation of its foot. A small creature may place a hind foot partly into the impression left by a forefoot. Loose snow can collapse inward. Thawing can enlarge a mark. Wind can soften its edges. Refreezing can preserve a distorted impression long after the tracks around it have altered. An ordinary footprint can become something distinctly extraordinary-looking.

Now imagine that happening across miles of countryside after widespread snowfall. Different animals leave different tracks. Different snow conditions alter them differently. Then somebody finds an odd print. Somebody else finds another. A newspaper reports mysterious hoofprints. And suddenly everybody is looking at the snow. That may be the real key to what happened in Devon in February 1855. Because nobody appears to have walked beside one continuous set of tracks from beginning to end and established that a single trail really did cross the entire reported distance. Instead, reports arrived from different places.

They were compared.

Similarities were noticed.

Differences were forgotten.

And slowly, dozens – perhaps hundreds – of individual observations became one story. One creature. One journey. One impossible night.

The newspapers undoubtedly helped. The story travelled far beyond Devon, appearing in the national press and generating correspondence, theories and speculation. The Illustrated London News devoted space to it within weeks of the snowfall, preserving the phenomenon as part natural-history puzzle, part supernatural sensation. British Newspaper Archive Once that happened, the footprints acquired something considerably more durable than snow. They acquired folklore. And folklore likes a good monster. A badger isn’t particularly memorable. Neither is a rat hopping through deep snow.

But the Devil?

The Devil crossing Devon while everyone slept, stepping over walls, walking across rooftops and leaving his mark outside people’s homes? That survives.

Something happened that night. There really was snow. People really did find strange tracks. Contemporary newspapers really did report them. And some witnesses genuinely struggled to explain what they were seeing. What becomes less certain is everything that happened once those individual observations were stitched together.

The mystery may never have been the identity of the creature.

The mystery may have been how many creatures there were.

Foxes. Badgers. Birds. Rodents. Perhaps somebody’s dog. Perhaps tracks distorted beyond recognition by changing snow.

Each perfectly ordinary.

Until somebody drew a line between them.

And at the end of that line stood the Devil.

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The Footprints

Realm: The Wild
Keywords: pursuit · evidence · uncertainty · interpretation · something passed this way

The Footprints appear when evidence exists, but its meaning remains uncertain.

Something has happened. There are marks in the snow. The mistake is assuming that because evidence is real, the first explanation attached to it must also be real.

This is a card of investigation.

Look closely.

Separate what you can see from what you have been told you are seeing.

And never forget that sometimes the most frightening creature at the end of a trail is the one we put there ourselves.

Some paths lead where no creature should. Others only seem to – once we have decided where they lead.

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Sources & Further Reading

Contemporary sources

The Times, 16 February 1855, “Extraordinary Occurrence” / reports of the mysterious Devon footprints. This is one of the earliest national newspaper accounts of the phenomenon. ufo-com.net

Illustrated London News, 24 February 1855, p. 187, “Foot-Marks on the Snow, in Devon.” Includes a contemporary description and illustration of the tracks and records the extraordinary routes witnesses claimed they followed. Wikimedia Commons

Illustrated London News, 3 March 1855, p. 214, “Professor Owen on the Foot-Marks in the Snow in Devon.” Richard Owen proposed that badgers could account for at least some of the mysterious tracks. Wikimedia Commons

Illustrated London News, 10 March 1855, p. 238. Further correspondence included experiments showing how rodents moving through snow could produce apparently hoof-like impressions. Field Report Archive

Later research

G. A. Household (ed.), The Devil’s Footprints: The Great Devon Mystery as It Was Reported in the Newspapers of 1855, Devon Books, 1985. A useful collection bringing together contemporary newspaper material. Google Books

Mike Dash, “The Devil’s Hoofmarks: Source Material on the Great Devon Mystery of 1855,” Fortean Studies, 1994. Particularly valuable because Dash collated the surviving contemporary material, including correspondence associated with Rev. H. T. Ellacombe and Rev. G. M. Musgrave. studylib.net

Brian V. Ridout, “The Devil’s Footprints Revisited,” Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association, vol. 153 (2021), pp. 291–306. A modern reassessment of the historical evidence.