March 19, 2020 • 29 mins
In October 2017, we talked about mysterious prints that looked like hoof marks appeared all over the English seaside county of Devon in February 1855.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, here is an episode from our ten episode
playlist that we're calling Offbeat History. Yeah, we're adding this
to our our regular publishing schedule as one kind of
big drop all at the same time on March nineteen.
And that is so that you have maybe have a
little bit of extra entertainment options available to you, particularly
(00:23):
if you are self quarantined or sheltering in place. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Fry and I'm Tracy. If you Wilson Tracy, we
(00:45):
are officially into my favorite time of year. I know
you're so excited. It's spooky episode season. Uh. And as
regular listeners know, this is a time when we explore
some of the weirder bits of history. We get a
little looser. Some of our research comes from kind of
crazier sources. Um. And this episode may sound spooky based
(01:06):
on the title, and it is a history mystery, but
the reality is definitely more of a fun and pretty
silly mystery than anything that's scary. So if you are
one of those people, I know, we sometimes have listeners
right in and say they are a little too afraid
sometimes or spooked by our October episodes. Uh, this one
is not going to get too frightening. You don't have
to worry about it at all on this one. Uh.
(01:28):
And I will say this too. The term the devil's
footprints gets applied to a lot of different things, but
this to me seems like the most common one, which
is an incident that happened in England in eighteen fifty five.
So if you are thinking it is another one, it
is not. Yeah. There are also like a lot of
local ghost stories that have some combination of devilish figure
(01:52):
and walking around like places where plants don't grow, like
the Devil's tramping Ground is one I recall from my childhood. Uh.
And and that is actually what I thought this is
going to be about before I started reading your outline.
And then that is not what it's about. It is
about something sillier. Think it's sillier. It's very silly. It's
(02:14):
very silly. In the May six, eighteen fifty five edition
of Bell's Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, the following
headline ran Panic caused by the appearance of the Devil
in Devonshire sounds very frightening, and indeed, on February eighteen
(02:37):
fifty five, and theoretically for a day or two after,
depending on which account you're looking at, a very curious
thing happened in Devon, which is a coastal county in
the southwest of England. Eight fifty five had an unusually
cold winter for England, and there had been nothing above
freezing temperature since January. The rivers were totally frozen over,
(02:58):
and there were snowfall after snowfall with no thought in between.
The rivers themselves were so solidly iced over that a
feast had been held on one of them. I mean,
it's not uncommon for places with really cold rivers to
have events on frozen lakes, but rivers are a little dicier.
So it had been particularly cold. The night the mystery started.
(03:20):
It had snowed really heavily and then warmed up to
a point that there had been some rain, and then
the temperature dropped steeply once again, and all of that
precipitation froze over, and the people of Devon discovered in
the morning that unaccountable hoof prints were everywhere everywhere. We're
gonna get into that, uh something it seemed, had been
(03:41):
tramping all around the area, even in the most peculiar
of places. And not long after the event, and well
before the Sydney paper ran its sensational headline, the following
letter appeared in an English paper describing the event. This
is a very long letter, so Tracy and I will
alternate reading paragraphs of it. Okay, I'm excited that I
(04:02):
get to read this park because it begins to the
editor of the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, Sir. Thursday night,
the eighth of February was marked by a heavy fall
of snow, followed by rain and boisterous wind from the east,
and in the morning frost. The return of daylight revealed
the ramblings of some most busy and mysterious animal endowed
(04:26):
with the power of ubiquity, as its footprints were to
be seen in all kinds of unaccountable places, on the
tops of houses, narrow walls and gardens, and courtyards enclosed
by high walls and palings, as well as in the
open fields. The creature seems to have frolic about through
(04:47):
x Smouth, little Um, Limpstone, Wooldbury, Topsham, star Cross, Tagnmouth, etcetera, etcetera.
The letter goes on, there is hardly a garden in
Limbstone where his footprints are not prvable, and in this
parish he appears to have gambled with inexpressible activity. Its
track appears more like that of a biped than a quadruped,
(05:09):
and the steps are generally eight inches in advance of
each other, though in some cases twelve or fourteen, and
are alternate like the steps of a man, and would
be included between two parallel lines six inches apart. The
letter goes on, the impression of the foot closely resembles
that of a donkey's shoe, and measures from an inch
and a half too, in some cases two inches and
(05:32):
a half across here, and they're appearing as if the
foot was cleft, But in the in the generality of
its steps, the impression of the shoe was continuous and perfect.
In the center of the snow remains entire merely showing
the outer crust of the foot, which therefore must have
been convex. The creature seems to have advanced to the
(05:55):
doors of several houses, and then to have retased its steps,
but no one is able to are in the starting
or resting point of this mysterious visitor. Everyone is wondering,
but no one is able to explain the mystery. The
poor are full of superstition and consider it little short
of a visit from Old Satan or some of his imps.
(06:15):
And the letter actually goes on for some time after
this uh, and it describes in particular a recent sermon
that was given in Limbstone by a Reverend musk Grave,
in which the minister spoke at length about Satan as
a tempter who wished nothing more than to take men
from a virtuous path, but he did not think that
this was what was going on in their their town.
(06:37):
Reverend musk Grave, apparently, based on this sermon, believed, according
to the letter writer, that the hoofprints were actually those
of a very busy kangaroo, which is hilarious. Kangaroos don't
have who's. Just want to say that, I mean yeah,
And we're gonna revisit this kangaroo thing in a little
(06:58):
bit as well, along with another of other animals who
don't have who's or wear shoes. The writer measured horse
prints that were left the same night and notes that
they did not match these mystery prints. Additionally, he mentions
that a kangaroo's foot has clause of an uneven length,
So really, how could the print look so like that
(07:20):
of an hokey he or she? Because we don't know
who wrote the letter then wonders if the prints couldn't
have been the result of a cat wherein the back
and front footsteps over left? Uh? The letter writer wrote, quote,
I think it very likely that the combined impression of
behind and four foot in the thawing snow may have
(07:40):
produced the mystery. And this letter to the editor concludes
there and is then signed yours obediently spectator. So accounts
of this events are a little sparse, but as the
few contemporary descriptions were pieced together, it started to appear
these hoof marks had been recorded along a stretch of
(08:03):
dozens and dozens of miles. The prints were reported in
depths ranging from one and a half to four inches,
and is mentioned in the letter above, they defied logic
in their placement and a lot of cases, not only
did they wander vast different distances with no apparent return trip,
but they also appeared on rooftops, and they dropped off
(08:26):
and resumed on either side of obstacles that seemed impossible
for immortal being to just get over. One account even
indicated that whatever it was had passed through a haystack.
And in addition to these prints in Devon, which seemed
to indicate that the mystery creature had made its way
to almost every house that had encountered, these steps went
(08:48):
right up to doors and sometimes all of the doors
in an area. Uh there were a smaller number of
these prints reported in Dorset to the East as well.
All in all, thirty different locations reported visitation from whatever
it was making these tracks over the course of a
couple of nights. One of the oddest aspects of this
whole mystery was the uniformity of the prints. They looked
(09:10):
as though they had been left by a biped and
for the most part, each print was in line with
the next and single file rather than side by side. Some,
but not all, of the prints looked cloven, as described
by the Spectator and the letter, and the steps, even
the longest stride that was reported, really appeared to have
been quite short. Yeah, and you'll note in that Spectator
(09:33):
letter the writer suggests that they are side by side
like a humans walking would be, with about six inches apart,
but most of the accounts actually have them in a
straight line, not as though someone or something we're taking
alternate steps. One calculation actually determined that all, if all,
of these hoof prints were the work of one creature
(09:54):
for it to have traveled as far as it was
reported and used the stride distance the prints indicated, but
to have happened, you know, on a given night or
over the course of a couple of nights, it would
have had to have made six steps per second. So
you may be thinking, were these tracks going somewhere? We
will talk about that after we pause for a word
(10:14):
from one of our sponsors. So it wasn't long after
that first point of discovery, on the morning after the
night of February eight, that the locals decided to do
exactly what most people would do I probably would do it.
(10:34):
They tried to follow the tracks to find their source.
Presumably these particular people did not think that they were
going to find the actual devil at the end of
the line. Either that or they were just very brave souls.
Some of the people who followed the prince did arm
themselves so that they were ready for it to potentially
be the devil or something else dangerous. A group of
(10:55):
men from Dollish followed the tracks for about five miles
and they turned up thing and a pair of people
and Cliff St George followed a set of markings as well,
and their effort turned up more than the Dollars group.
They found four pieces of feces, each slightly larger than
a grape and sort of whiteish in color. Tracings made
(11:16):
by people in various locations. Then compared later on showed
that the prints were very much the same regardless of
where they were made. But unfortunately no one tracked any
of the print trails far enough to see if they
all linked up somewhere. And we'll actually um come back
to this in just a moment. So the vicar of
the parish and Cliff St George, Reverend ht Ellacombe, collected
(11:39):
assorted letters and tracings of hoofmarks and he actually kept
all of that in the parish records for literally years
and years and years. They went mostly unnoticed until about Nino,
and then they were published in the Report and Transactions
of the Devonshire Association that year, after the local historian
got a folklorist in interested in them, so they got
(12:00):
talked about again, but they had just been sitting there
since the mid eighteen hundreds. The reverend also compiled accounts
from his parishioners as well as his own observations, and
also sent a sample of his Whitish execraments. Naturalist Richard Owen,
the scholar who had become famous for his work in
anatomy and paleontology, and was superintendent of the British Museum's
(12:22):
National Natural History Department starting in eighteen six, which was
the year after the mysterious hoof prints had appeared. He
never got back to him no, but he does weigh
in on the subject later on. One of the accounts
that Ellacombe had collected indicated that at least one set
of prints was obviously isolated and not connected to any others,
(12:45):
and this was a series of tracks in the middle
of a field, so this suggests that it could not
have been a single entity that caused this. And additionally,
there were fairly organic variations in sizes of prints that
were found in different locations, so it makes it really
unlikely that just one animal or even human hoaxers provide
(13:06):
the explanation. To further complicate the whole mystery from modern
sleuths or theorists. Forty years after the fact, some of
the people who had been in Devon at the time
of the odd footprints recalled that icy February, but their
recollections get a lot more varied. Some of this is
surely because of how much time had passed and the
(13:26):
legend sort of degrading their actual memories that were being recounted. Yeah,
we've talked about on the show so many times that
one eyewitness accounts are not reliable anyway, and as time
goes on they get less and less and less reliable.
And in this case, a legend had grown completely up
around this incident, so undoubtedly their recollections were colored by
(13:47):
things they had repeated or heard or discussed along the way.
And so this has built up a series of eyewitness
accounts that are flatly wrong and have completely muddied the
waters as to what exactly happened. For exact ample, several
of the count the accounts relayed decades later, kind of
upp to the spooky factor of the prints, including details
such as all the prints being in oddly straight lines,
(14:09):
which they absolutely were not so in the face of
such an odd mystery. Naturally, all kinds of theories have
come up, and we are going to walk through a
few of the most common. So this is where it
gets really fun to me, because it's absurd. There's a
lot of crazy animal theories. River otters have been offered
(14:30):
up as the culprits, and otters certainly could have passed
through some of the narrow openings that the perpetrator of
the so called Devil's footprints allegedly traversed. That was one
of the things that people found so odd that it
would go through like a hole in a hedge. River
otters would likely have been desperate for food in the
icy winter, and these tracks were all close to rivers
or smaller streams. But the sheer number of prints and
(14:52):
the ones that are way up in high places make
this a very unlikely solution. Uh. One thing we should
point out is that like, yes, many of these animals
have feet that are not hoofs. But there's always this
this thing that comes up in these discussions of animals
that are not hoofed of like, well, but if they
put their feet together in a certain way, and because
(15:14):
there was a little bit of a rainfaw and then
a refreeze, they may have frozen in a more uniform
shape than they actually made, But really, river rotters very
unlike like I get, I live in a place where
there's lots of snow, And it's definitely true that when
an animal tracks through somewhere and then there's a freeze
(15:35):
and a thought and a bunch of changes in the weather, like,
the shape of those tracks does not hold up. But
having a bunch of otters, or even one very industrious
otter whose entire track all over everywhere uniformly suddenly became
a horshe shape like stretch right, Well, my thing too
(15:55):
is like how odd would it have been? Like an
army of any one of these animals just ran through
Devon one night and then never again. Another theory, naturalist
Richard Owen, the one who never answered the Reverend in
his inquiry, put forth an idea that the prince worthy
(16:15):
work of badgers. This theory wasn't developed so much with
the Prince themselves in mind. It was more of a
Knockham's razor situation. Badgers are the only animal that would
have been near enough, nocturnal and known to travel long
distances in search of food and cold temperatures. Of course,
leaving out the prints as part of the set of
(16:37):
requirements opened this theory up to naysayers, and rightly so.
Badgers have a really wide, staggered tread that would have
resulted in parallel tracks, uh, which most of these were not.
And badgers are certainly not known for being able to
hop onto roofs or over walls. Also in the same category, rodents,
(17:01):
A lot of rice mice and rats are known to
hop with their feet together in a way that does
kind of resemble the hoof marks. But the volume of
prince and the idea that this huge number of rodents
had all been hopping about lots of long distance makes
that fall apart pretty quickly. If it had been rodent tracks,
one would think that anyone ever nearby had seen to
(17:24):
something similar before. Yeah, rodents are common. Uh. So we
get back to my favorite, which is the kangaroo theory,
which was one of the most popular at the time.
So Reverend GM Musgrave, who we referenced earlier, actually wrote
to the Illustrated London News to counter the account of
(17:44):
a person who had signed their letter as South Devon.
We'll talk about that more in a bit, uh, And
asserted that the data that was supplied by South Devon's letter,
who claimed to be a tracker and have some ideas
about this, was inaccurate. Musgrave was the reverend referenced in
the spec Tater letter who told his congregation that he
believed an escaped kangaroo was to blame. Musgrave himself did
(18:06):
not actually believe this theory, but he was really concerned
that the idea of the double loose in their area
was far more damaging to his congregation than letting them
believe that a kangaroo was on the loose. There were
two kangaroos in a nearby private zoo, but neither of
them is known to have escaped. There were similar theories
(18:26):
about an escaped monkey or a wolf, and missing monkey
has never appeared in the records, and wolves have been
extinct in England since the fourteenth century. I also sort
of think with this whole kangaroo situation, this isn't an acronym,
but this is like a bugs bunny level of kangaroo behavior.
It really is. Uh. The prince certainly looked like those
(18:51):
of a donkey, which was another theory, and it turns
out that donkeys do often plant their feet in a
single line behind one another, so that gives that some credence,
And for a moment, the idea that the prints were
left by a donkey seems perfectly reasonable, exampt for those
pesky roof tracks and instances where the tracks stopped and
(19:12):
started on either side of an obstacle. I am very
on board with the idea that they were flying donkeys.
So these are not the only absurd ideas. And we
are going to talk about some more, including a lengthy
discussion about birds after we first take a quick sponsor break.
(19:37):
So still unraveling this mystery of the devon footprints or hoofprints.
While agile cats certainly could have gotten up to roof level,
the theory that it was cats has the obvious flaw
of the hoof prints. And as you may recall, that
writer of the first letter we mentioned suggested that if
a cat's back paw landed in the same spot as
the front paw, it could maybe make the right print.
(19:59):
That this see was really far fetched, as all of
the cats involved would have had to make that perfect
print every single time, all over the place. Yeah. Cats.
It goes back to all the other theories about non
hooved animals that may have done it. Like the idea
that that that many prints over miles and miles and
miles of tracks would have uniformly made that shape. If
(20:23):
it's so far fetched, Yeah, I mean we've both had cats.
I still have a lot of cats. They sometimes fall
down just while they're walking. I can't imagine they would
they would get that level of precision every single time,
especially on ice. Yeah. Uh. Birds have become one of
the most popular explanations for the devil's footprints, and this
(20:46):
theory was already popular back in eighteen fifty five. Birds
could alight at random intervals, They could easily leave prints
on top of buildings or other high places. They could
hop over fences easily, but of course they don't have hooves.
Although now I want to make a bird drawing that
has a hoof, and it would be funny to counter
(21:07):
the bird flock idea. There are the writings in the
Illustrated London News by the signer that we referenced earlier
named South Devon, and he starts birds could not have
left these marks, as no bird's foot leaves the impression
of a hoof, or even were there a bird capable
of doing so, could it proceed in the direct manner
above stated, Nor would birds, even if they had donkey's
(21:30):
feet confined themselves to one direct line, but hop here
and there. But the nature of the mark at once
sets aside it's being the track of a bird. The
effect of the atmosphere upon these marks is given by
many as a solution. But how could it be possible
for the atmosphere to affect one impression and not affect another.
On the morning that the above was observed, the snow
(21:53):
bore the fresh marks of cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, and
men clearly defined. Why then should a continuous track far
more clearly, defined, so clearly even that the raising in
the center of the frog of the foot could be
plainly seen. Why then should this particular mark be the
only one which was affected by the atmosphere, and all
(22:14):
the others left as they were. Besides, the most singular
circumstance connected with it was that this particular mark removed
the snow wherever it appeared, clear as if cut with
a diamond or branded with a hot iron. In one instance,
this track entered a covered shed and passed through it
out of a broken part of the wall. At the
other end, where the atmosphere could not affect it. The
(22:36):
letter continues, the writer of the above has passed a
five months of winter in the backwoods of Canada, and
has had much experience in tracking wild animals and birds
upon the snow, and can safely say he has never
seen him or clearly defined track, or one that appeared
to be less altered by the atmosphere than the one
in question. Marks left upon thin snow, especially may after
(22:57):
a time blur a little, but never lose their distinctive character,
as everyone will know who has been accustomed to follow
the track of the American partridge. And it was later
discovered through the Reverend Ellacomb's record so that the person
that had signed the name South Devon was actually a
young man named Durban, who was nineteen at the time
that all this happened. So in a paper about the
(23:18):
so called Devil's Footprints, Mike Dash asserts that it is
certainly worth considering that Durban's youth may have colored his
dismissal of a relatively mundane source for the Prince. And
now we get to the thing that I might have
thought of first, the possibility of human hoaxers. And so
naturally that has come up over time. It's entirely conceivable
(23:39):
that somebody wanted to make a bunch of their fellow
neighbors think the devil was larking about right outside their
homes just for a laugh. We have, of course seen
this be the case in other hoaxes throughout history, not
specifically with devils outside the door, but other weird, unexplained stuff.
Working against this theory is the sheer number of prince
and the variation in the prince the thought and the
(24:02):
refreeze could be but likely isn't an explanation there. Yeah,
and it would have just had to have been a
massive number of people involved. Um, there is a secondary
people theory that we'll talk about here in just a moment. Uh.
There have been some modern theories about the tracks that
were not part of the contemporary theory set. Like at
(24:23):
the time this was going on, pretty much all of
the theories we've just talked about, we're all being discussed
and analyzed. But in the modern era many new ideas
have come up, including UFOs, which we aren't really going
to get into, but basically some people think UFOs. One
less sensational theory suggests that a balloon with a dangling
rope that was maybe kind of uh hopping along the
(24:45):
ground may have made the marks, but the consistent shape
of the tracks kind of shoots that one down pretty quickly.
Another fairly recent theory is that a group of Romani
tribes put on animal like stilts to make the tracks
and to try to scare away superstitious arrivals. Sort of
how I was imagining that these tracks might have been
made in the first place, But backing up the serious
(25:07):
kind of a stretch, it seems kind of unlikely when
you consider that hundreds of people would have needed to
be involved, and yet nobody was witnessed doing it like
it does. It does seem like there's a huge crowd
of people on hoof stilts. Someone probably would have noticed.
But I love the idea of a huge crowd of
people trumping through the snow on hoof stilts. That's a
(25:27):
beautiful image. There's also a whole thing that's been cooked
up about why this wouldn't work, involving how like they
would have had to have used ladders to get on
some of the places that they were, and whether or
not they were doing that. But still trying to get
the same impression if they were using some sort of
hand stamp versus their feet, or if they were trying
to get on ladders on these stilts. Basically, it's it's
(25:49):
a popular theory in recent times, but it's also very
tricky to kind of back up. Uh. One of the
more plausible, though it's still pretty weird, twenty century theories
has to do with a weather event creating the tracks.
According to a Scotland native named j Ellen Rennie, warm
air coming into contact with extremely cold temperatures could create
(26:11):
condensation in such a way that it fell as large
blobs rather than drops the way the rain is normally seen,
and Rennie claimed to have seen this phenomenon several times
in his life, and this would certainly account for the
vast assortment of odd places that the Prince or rain
blob marks were found. So this explanation seems pretty sensible.
(26:34):
But by Rennie's own account, the instances where he encountered
it happening resulted in much larger marks that were spaced
much farther apart. They tended to fall in a long line,
not in the meandering patterns that were seen in Devon
in eighteen fifty five. Additionally, meteorologists have dismissed this phenomenon,
which only Rennie claims that he has seen. Yeah, no
(26:57):
one else has ever claimed to see anything like it. Uh.
In any case, part of what makes the Devon footprints
so unusual, aside from their characteristics that we've already discussed,
is the fact that this was a one time event.
At least it probably was. Allegedly a woman in Devon
had a similar phenomenon happened in her garden in two
(27:17):
thousand nine, but the primary source on that is the
Daily Mail, which is a tabloid, so that is not
really a serious claim. I kind of here's what I
think happened. Yes, I think we have a small number
of people on hoof stilts, also carrying hoof pokers, and
so they are both walking and poking the ground. And
(27:40):
then it's a giant Maine made hoax combining pokers and stilts.
But that's the That's one of the contradictions of the
Romani theory is that they were making the exact same
kind of imprint if they had hand stamps that they
made with their foot and that's almost impossible to do.
So that was the that was the why maybe not
(28:00):
on that one, But then how did they pass through
tiny holes? That's a fine what was The thing? That's
a wonderful, sort of exhilarating and frustrating thing about this
is that no one theory can really cover all the bases.
But I like the hoax theory myself as well. Regardless,
for now and probably forever, we don't really know what
(28:23):
caused us odd spade of footprints in one instance in Devon,
and it is pretty fun to speculate odds are regardless
of what the real answer is probably pretty benign. Really,
not the devil walking along the English coast. The kangaroo
sounds fun, I really think though, if the kangaroo jumped
up on your roof, you'd hear it and maybe see
(28:46):
it when it came through your roof into your kitchen,
and I would be like, Hi, kangaroo, please don't kick
me to my death. Would you like a snack? I mean,
you know, kangaroos are good stuff. Thank you so much
for joining us today for this classic. If you have
(29:08):
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(29:32):
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Hey, everybody, here is an episode from our ten episode
playlist that we're calling Offbeat History. Yeah, we're adding this
to our our regular publishing schedule as one kind of
big drop all at the same time on March nineteen.
And that is so that you have maybe have a
little bit of extra entertainment options available to you, particularly
(00:23):
if you are self quarantined or sheltering in place. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Fry and I'm Tracy. If you Wilson Tracy, we
(00:45):
are officially into my favorite time of year. I know
you're so excited. It's spooky episode season. Uh. And as
regular listeners know, this is a time when we explore
some of the weirder bits of history. We get a
little looser. Some of our research comes from kind of
crazier sources. Um. And this episode may sound spooky based
(01:06):
on the title, and it is a history mystery, but
the reality is definitely more of a fun and pretty
silly mystery than anything that's scary. So if you are
one of those people, I know, we sometimes have listeners
right in and say they are a little too afraid
sometimes or spooked by our October episodes. Uh, this one
is not going to get too frightening. You don't have
to worry about it at all on this one. Uh.
(01:28):
And I will say this too. The term the devil's
footprints gets applied to a lot of different things, but
this to me seems like the most common one, which
is an incident that happened in England in eighteen fifty five.
So if you are thinking it is another one, it
is not. Yeah. There are also like a lot of
local ghost stories that have some combination of devilish figure
(01:52):
and walking around like places where plants don't grow, like
the Devil's tramping Ground is one I recall from my childhood. Uh.
And and that is actually what I thought this is
going to be about before I started reading your outline.
And then that is not what it's about. It is
about something sillier. Think it's sillier. It's very silly. It's
(02:14):
very silly. In the May six, eighteen fifty five edition
of Bell's Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, the following
headline ran Panic caused by the appearance of the Devil
in Devonshire sounds very frightening, and indeed, on February eighteen
(02:37):
fifty five, and theoretically for a day or two after,
depending on which account you're looking at, a very curious
thing happened in Devon, which is a coastal county in
the southwest of England. Eight fifty five had an unusually
cold winter for England, and there had been nothing above
freezing temperature since January. The rivers were totally frozen over,
(02:58):
and there were snowfall after snowfall with no thought in between.
The rivers themselves were so solidly iced over that a
feast had been held on one of them. I mean,
it's not uncommon for places with really cold rivers to
have events on frozen lakes, but rivers are a little dicier.
So it had been particularly cold. The night the mystery started.
(03:20):
It had snowed really heavily and then warmed up to
a point that there had been some rain, and then
the temperature dropped steeply once again, and all of that
precipitation froze over, and the people of Devon discovered in
the morning that unaccountable hoof prints were everywhere everywhere. We're
gonna get into that, uh something it seemed, had been
(03:41):
tramping all around the area, even in the most peculiar
of places. And not long after the event, and well
before the Sydney paper ran its sensational headline, the following
letter appeared in an English paper describing the event. This
is a very long letter, so Tracy and I will
alternate reading paragraphs of it. Okay, I'm excited that I
(04:02):
get to read this park because it begins to the
editor of the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, Sir. Thursday night,
the eighth of February was marked by a heavy fall
of snow, followed by rain and boisterous wind from the east,
and in the morning frost. The return of daylight revealed
the ramblings of some most busy and mysterious animal endowed
(04:26):
with the power of ubiquity, as its footprints were to
be seen in all kinds of unaccountable places, on the
tops of houses, narrow walls and gardens, and courtyards enclosed
by high walls and palings, as well as in the
open fields. The creature seems to have frolic about through
(04:47):
x Smouth, little Um, Limpstone, Wooldbury, Topsham, star Cross, Tagnmouth, etcetera, etcetera.
The letter goes on, there is hardly a garden in
Limbstone where his footprints are not prvable, and in this
parish he appears to have gambled with inexpressible activity. Its
track appears more like that of a biped than a quadruped,
(05:09):
and the steps are generally eight inches in advance of
each other, though in some cases twelve or fourteen, and
are alternate like the steps of a man, and would
be included between two parallel lines six inches apart. The
letter goes on, the impression of the foot closely resembles
that of a donkey's shoe, and measures from an inch
and a half too, in some cases two inches and
(05:32):
a half across here, and they're appearing as if the
foot was cleft, But in the in the generality of
its steps, the impression of the shoe was continuous and perfect.
In the center of the snow remains entire merely showing
the outer crust of the foot, which therefore must have
been convex. The creature seems to have advanced to the
(05:55):
doors of several houses, and then to have retased its steps,
but no one is able to are in the starting
or resting point of this mysterious visitor. Everyone is wondering,
but no one is able to explain the mystery. The
poor are full of superstition and consider it little short
of a visit from Old Satan or some of his imps.
(06:15):
And the letter actually goes on for some time after
this uh, and it describes in particular a recent sermon
that was given in Limbstone by a Reverend musk Grave,
in which the minister spoke at length about Satan as
a tempter who wished nothing more than to take men
from a virtuous path, but he did not think that
this was what was going on in their their town.
(06:37):
Reverend musk Grave, apparently, based on this sermon, believed, according
to the letter writer, that the hoofprints were actually those
of a very busy kangaroo, which is hilarious. Kangaroos don't
have who's. Just want to say that, I mean yeah,
And we're gonna revisit this kangaroo thing in a little
(06:58):
bit as well, along with another of other animals who
don't have who's or wear shoes. The writer measured horse
prints that were left the same night and notes that
they did not match these mystery prints. Additionally, he mentions
that a kangaroo's foot has clause of an uneven length,
So really, how could the print look so like that
(07:20):
of an hokey he or she? Because we don't know
who wrote the letter then wonders if the prints couldn't
have been the result of a cat wherein the back
and front footsteps over left? Uh? The letter writer wrote, quote,
I think it very likely that the combined impression of
behind and four foot in the thawing snow may have
(07:40):
produced the mystery. And this letter to the editor concludes
there and is then signed yours obediently spectator. So accounts
of this events are a little sparse, but as the
few contemporary descriptions were pieced together, it started to appear
these hoof marks had been recorded along a stretch of
(08:03):
dozens and dozens of miles. The prints were reported in
depths ranging from one and a half to four inches,
and is mentioned in the letter above, they defied logic
in their placement and a lot of cases, not only
did they wander vast different distances with no apparent return trip,
but they also appeared on rooftops, and they dropped off
(08:26):
and resumed on either side of obstacles that seemed impossible
for immortal being to just get over. One account even
indicated that whatever it was had passed through a haystack.
And in addition to these prints in Devon, which seemed
to indicate that the mystery creature had made its way
to almost every house that had encountered, these steps went
(08:48):
right up to doors and sometimes all of the doors
in an area. Uh there were a smaller number of
these prints reported in Dorset to the East as well.
All in all, thirty different locations reported visitation from whatever
it was making these tracks over the course of a
couple of nights. One of the oddest aspects of this
whole mystery was the uniformity of the prints. They looked
(09:10):
as though they had been left by a biped and
for the most part, each print was in line with
the next and single file rather than side by side. Some,
but not all, of the prints looked cloven, as described
by the Spectator and the letter, and the steps, even
the longest stride that was reported, really appeared to have
been quite short. Yeah, and you'll note in that Spectator
(09:33):
letter the writer suggests that they are side by side
like a humans walking would be, with about six inches apart,
but most of the accounts actually have them in a
straight line, not as though someone or something we're taking
alternate steps. One calculation actually determined that all, if all,
of these hoof prints were the work of one creature
(09:54):
for it to have traveled as far as it was
reported and used the stride distance the prints indicated, but
to have happened, you know, on a given night or
over the course of a couple of nights, it would
have had to have made six steps per second. So
you may be thinking, were these tracks going somewhere? We
will talk about that after we pause for a word
(10:14):
from one of our sponsors. So it wasn't long after
that first point of discovery, on the morning after the
night of February eight, that the locals decided to do
exactly what most people would do I probably would do it.
(10:34):
They tried to follow the tracks to find their source.
Presumably these particular people did not think that they were
going to find the actual devil at the end of
the line. Either that or they were just very brave souls.
Some of the people who followed the prince did arm
themselves so that they were ready for it to potentially
be the devil or something else dangerous. A group of
(10:55):
men from Dollish followed the tracks for about five miles
and they turned up thing and a pair of people
and Cliff St George followed a set of markings as well,
and their effort turned up more than the Dollars group.
They found four pieces of feces, each slightly larger than
a grape and sort of whiteish in color. Tracings made
(11:16):
by people in various locations. Then compared later on showed
that the prints were very much the same regardless of
where they were made. But unfortunately no one tracked any
of the print trails far enough to see if they
all linked up somewhere. And we'll actually um come back
to this in just a moment. So the vicar of
the parish and Cliff St George, Reverend ht Ellacombe, collected
(11:39):
assorted letters and tracings of hoofmarks and he actually kept
all of that in the parish records for literally years
and years and years. They went mostly unnoticed until about Nino,
and then they were published in the Report and Transactions
of the Devonshire Association that year, after the local historian
got a folklorist in interested in them, so they got
(12:00):
talked about again, but they had just been sitting there
since the mid eighteen hundreds. The reverend also compiled accounts
from his parishioners as well as his own observations, and
also sent a sample of his Whitish execraments. Naturalist Richard Owen,
the scholar who had become famous for his work in
anatomy and paleontology, and was superintendent of the British Museum's
(12:22):
National Natural History Department starting in eighteen six, which was
the year after the mysterious hoof prints had appeared. He
never got back to him no, but he does weigh
in on the subject later on. One of the accounts
that Ellacombe had collected indicated that at least one set
of prints was obviously isolated and not connected to any others,
(12:45):
and this was a series of tracks in the middle
of a field, so this suggests that it could not
have been a single entity that caused this. And additionally,
there were fairly organic variations in sizes of prints that
were found in different locations, so it makes it really
unlikely that just one animal or even human hoaxers provide
(13:06):
the explanation. To further complicate the whole mystery from modern
sleuths or theorists. Forty years after the fact, some of
the people who had been in Devon at the time
of the odd footprints recalled that icy February, but their
recollections get a lot more varied. Some of this is
surely because of how much time had passed and the
(13:26):
legend sort of degrading their actual memories that were being recounted. Yeah,
we've talked about on the show so many times that
one eyewitness accounts are not reliable anyway, and as time
goes on they get less and less and less reliable.
And in this case, a legend had grown completely up
around this incident, so undoubtedly their recollections were colored by
(13:47):
things they had repeated or heard or discussed along the way.
And so this has built up a series of eyewitness
accounts that are flatly wrong and have completely muddied the
waters as to what exactly happened. For exact ample, several
of the count the accounts relayed decades later, kind of
upp to the spooky factor of the prints, including details
such as all the prints being in oddly straight lines,
(14:09):
which they absolutely were not so in the face of
such an odd mystery. Naturally, all kinds of theories have
come up, and we are going to walk through a
few of the most common. So this is where it
gets really fun to me, because it's absurd. There's a
lot of crazy animal theories. River otters have been offered
(14:30):
up as the culprits, and otters certainly could have passed
through some of the narrow openings that the perpetrator of
the so called Devil's footprints allegedly traversed. That was one
of the things that people found so odd that it
would go through like a hole in a hedge. River
otters would likely have been desperate for food in the
icy winter, and these tracks were all close to rivers
or smaller streams. But the sheer number of prints and
(14:52):
the ones that are way up in high places make
this a very unlikely solution. Uh. One thing we should
point out is that like, yes, many of these animals
have feet that are not hoofs. But there's always this
this thing that comes up in these discussions of animals
that are not hoofed of like, well, but if they
put their feet together in a certain way, and because
(15:14):
there was a little bit of a rainfaw and then
a refreeze, they may have frozen in a more uniform
shape than they actually made, But really, river rotters very
unlike like I get, I live in a place where
there's lots of snow, And it's definitely true that when
an animal tracks through somewhere and then there's a freeze
(15:35):
and a thought and a bunch of changes in the weather, like,
the shape of those tracks does not hold up. But
having a bunch of otters, or even one very industrious
otter whose entire track all over everywhere uniformly suddenly became
a horshe shape like stretch right, Well, my thing too
(15:55):
is like how odd would it have been? Like an
army of any one of these animals just ran through
Devon one night and then never again. Another theory, naturalist
Richard Owen, the one who never answered the Reverend in
his inquiry, put forth an idea that the prince worthy
(16:15):
work of badgers. This theory wasn't developed so much with
the Prince themselves in mind. It was more of a
Knockham's razor situation. Badgers are the only animal that would
have been near enough, nocturnal and known to travel long
distances in search of food and cold temperatures. Of course,
leaving out the prints as part of the set of
(16:37):
requirements opened this theory up to naysayers, and rightly so.
Badgers have a really wide, staggered tread that would have
resulted in parallel tracks, uh, which most of these were not.
And badgers are certainly not known for being able to
hop onto roofs or over walls. Also in the same category, rodents,
(17:01):
A lot of rice mice and rats are known to
hop with their feet together in a way that does
kind of resemble the hoof marks. But the volume of
prince and the idea that this huge number of rodents
had all been hopping about lots of long distance makes
that fall apart pretty quickly. If it had been rodent tracks,
one would think that anyone ever nearby had seen to
(17:24):
something similar before. Yeah, rodents are common. Uh. So we
get back to my favorite, which is the kangaroo theory,
which was one of the most popular at the time.
So Reverend GM Musgrave, who we referenced earlier, actually wrote
to the Illustrated London News to counter the account of
(17:44):
a person who had signed their letter as South Devon.
We'll talk about that more in a bit, uh, And
asserted that the data that was supplied by South Devon's letter,
who claimed to be a tracker and have some ideas
about this, was inaccurate. Musgrave was the reverend referenced in
the spec Tater letter who told his congregation that he
believed an escaped kangaroo was to blame. Musgrave himself did
(18:06):
not actually believe this theory, but he was really concerned
that the idea of the double loose in their area
was far more damaging to his congregation than letting them
believe that a kangaroo was on the loose. There were
two kangaroos in a nearby private zoo, but neither of
them is known to have escaped. There were similar theories
(18:26):
about an escaped monkey or a wolf, and missing monkey
has never appeared in the records, and wolves have been
extinct in England since the fourteenth century. I also sort
of think with this whole kangaroo situation, this isn't an acronym,
but this is like a bugs bunny level of kangaroo behavior.
It really is. Uh. The prince certainly looked like those
(18:51):
of a donkey, which was another theory, and it turns
out that donkeys do often plant their feet in a
single line behind one another, so that gives that some credence,
And for a moment, the idea that the prints were
left by a donkey seems perfectly reasonable, exampt for those
pesky roof tracks and instances where the tracks stopped and
(19:12):
started on either side of an obstacle. I am very
on board with the idea that they were flying donkeys.
So these are not the only absurd ideas. And we
are going to talk about some more, including a lengthy
discussion about birds after we first take a quick sponsor break.
(19:37):
So still unraveling this mystery of the devon footprints or hoofprints.
While agile cats certainly could have gotten up to roof level,
the theory that it was cats has the obvious flaw
of the hoof prints. And as you may recall, that
writer of the first letter we mentioned suggested that if
a cat's back paw landed in the same spot as
the front paw, it could maybe make the right print.
(19:59):
That this see was really far fetched, as all of
the cats involved would have had to make that perfect
print every single time, all over the place. Yeah. Cats.
It goes back to all the other theories about non
hooved animals that may have done it. Like the idea
that that that many prints over miles and miles and
miles of tracks would have uniformly made that shape. If
(20:23):
it's so far fetched, Yeah, I mean we've both had cats.
I still have a lot of cats. They sometimes fall
down just while they're walking. I can't imagine they would
they would get that level of precision every single time,
especially on ice. Yeah. Uh. Birds have become one of
the most popular explanations for the devil's footprints, and this
(20:46):
theory was already popular back in eighteen fifty five. Birds
could alight at random intervals, They could easily leave prints
on top of buildings or other high places. They could
hop over fences easily, but of course they don't have hooves.
Although now I want to make a bird drawing that
has a hoof, and it would be funny to counter
(21:07):
the bird flock idea. There are the writings in the
Illustrated London News by the signer that we referenced earlier
named South Devon, and he starts birds could not have
left these marks, as no bird's foot leaves the impression
of a hoof, or even were there a bird capable
of doing so, could it proceed in the direct manner
above stated, Nor would birds, even if they had donkey's
(21:30):
feet confined themselves to one direct line, but hop here
and there. But the nature of the mark at once
sets aside it's being the track of a bird. The
effect of the atmosphere upon these marks is given by
many as a solution. But how could it be possible
for the atmosphere to affect one impression and not affect another.
On the morning that the above was observed, the snow
(21:53):
bore the fresh marks of cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, and
men clearly defined. Why then should a continuous track far
more clearly, defined, so clearly even that the raising in
the center of the frog of the foot could be
plainly seen. Why then should this particular mark be the
only one which was affected by the atmosphere, and all
(22:14):
the others left as they were. Besides, the most singular
circumstance connected with it was that this particular mark removed
the snow wherever it appeared, clear as if cut with
a diamond or branded with a hot iron. In one instance,
this track entered a covered shed and passed through it
out of a broken part of the wall. At the
other end, where the atmosphere could not affect it. The
(22:36):
letter continues, the writer of the above has passed a
five months of winter in the backwoods of Canada, and
has had much experience in tracking wild animals and birds
upon the snow, and can safely say he has never
seen him or clearly defined track, or one that appeared
to be less altered by the atmosphere than the one
in question. Marks left upon thin snow, especially may after
(22:57):
a time blur a little, but never lose their distinctive character,
as everyone will know who has been accustomed to follow
the track of the American partridge. And it was later
discovered through the Reverend Ellacomb's record so that the person
that had signed the name South Devon was actually a
young man named Durban, who was nineteen at the time
that all this happened. So in a paper about the
(23:18):
so called Devil's Footprints, Mike Dash asserts that it is
certainly worth considering that Durban's youth may have colored his
dismissal of a relatively mundane source for the Prince. And
now we get to the thing that I might have
thought of first, the possibility of human hoaxers. And so
naturally that has come up over time. It's entirely conceivable
(23:39):
that somebody wanted to make a bunch of their fellow
neighbors think the devil was larking about right outside their
homes just for a laugh. We have, of course seen
this be the case in other hoaxes throughout history, not
specifically with devils outside the door, but other weird, unexplained stuff.
Working against this theory is the sheer number of prince
and the variation in the prince the thought and the
(24:02):
refreeze could be but likely isn't an explanation there. Yeah,
and it would have just had to have been a
massive number of people involved. Um, there is a secondary
people theory that we'll talk about here in just a moment. Uh.
There have been some modern theories about the tracks that
were not part of the contemporary theory set. Like at
(24:23):
the time this was going on, pretty much all of
the theories we've just talked about, we're all being discussed
and analyzed. But in the modern era many new ideas
have come up, including UFOs, which we aren't really going
to get into, but basically some people think UFOs. One
less sensational theory suggests that a balloon with a dangling
rope that was maybe kind of uh hopping along the
(24:45):
ground may have made the marks, but the consistent shape
of the tracks kind of shoots that one down pretty quickly.
Another fairly recent theory is that a group of Romani
tribes put on animal like stilts to make the tracks
and to try to scare away superstitious arrivals. Sort of
how I was imagining that these tracks might have been
made in the first place, But backing up the serious
(25:07):
kind of a stretch, it seems kind of unlikely when
you consider that hundreds of people would have needed to
be involved, and yet nobody was witnessed doing it like
it does. It does seem like there's a huge crowd
of people on hoof stilts. Someone probably would have noticed.
But I love the idea of a huge crowd of
people trumping through the snow on hoof stilts. That's a
(25:27):
beautiful image. There's also a whole thing that's been cooked
up about why this wouldn't work, involving how like they
would have had to have used ladders to get on
some of the places that they were, and whether or
not they were doing that. But still trying to get
the same impression if they were using some sort of
hand stamp versus their feet, or if they were trying
to get on ladders on these stilts. Basically, it's it's
(25:49):
a popular theory in recent times, but it's also very
tricky to kind of back up. Uh. One of the
more plausible, though it's still pretty weird, twenty century theories
has to do with a weather event creating the tracks.
According to a Scotland native named j Ellen Rennie, warm
air coming into contact with extremely cold temperatures could create
(26:11):
condensation in such a way that it fell as large
blobs rather than drops the way the rain is normally seen,
and Rennie claimed to have seen this phenomenon several times
in his life, and this would certainly account for the
vast assortment of odd places that the Prince or rain
blob marks were found. So this explanation seems pretty sensible.
(26:34):
But by Rennie's own account, the instances where he encountered
it happening resulted in much larger marks that were spaced
much farther apart. They tended to fall in a long line,
not in the meandering patterns that were seen in Devon
in eighteen fifty five. Additionally, meteorologists have dismissed this phenomenon,
which only Rennie claims that he has seen. Yeah, no
(26:57):
one else has ever claimed to see anything like it. Uh.
In any case, part of what makes the Devon footprints
so unusual, aside from their characteristics that we've already discussed,
is the fact that this was a one time event.
At least it probably was. Allegedly a woman in Devon
had a similar phenomenon happened in her garden in two
(27:17):
thousand nine, but the primary source on that is the
Daily Mail, which is a tabloid, so that is not
really a serious claim. I kind of here's what I
think happened. Yes, I think we have a small number
of people on hoof stilts, also carrying hoof pokers, and
so they are both walking and poking the ground. And
(27:40):
then it's a giant Maine made hoax combining pokers and stilts.
But that's the That's one of the contradictions of the
Romani theory is that they were making the exact same
kind of imprint if they had hand stamps that they
made with their foot and that's almost impossible to do.
So that was the that was the why maybe not
(28:00):
on that one, But then how did they pass through
tiny holes? That's a fine what was The thing? That's
a wonderful, sort of exhilarating and frustrating thing about this
is that no one theory can really cover all the bases.
But I like the hoax theory myself as well. Regardless,
for now and probably forever, we don't really know what
(28:23):
caused us odd spade of footprints in one instance in Devon,
and it is pretty fun to speculate odds are regardless
of what the real answer is probably pretty benign. Really,
not the devil walking along the English coast. The kangaroo
sounds fun, I really think though, if the kangaroo jumped
up on your roof, you'd hear it and maybe see
(28:46):
it when it came through your roof into your kitchen,
and I would be like, Hi, kangaroo, please don't kick
me to my death. Would you like a snack? I mean,
you know, kangaroos are good stuff. Thank you so much
for joining us today for this classic. If you have
(29:08):
heard any kind of email address or maybe a Facebook
you are l during the course of the episode, that
might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete. Because we
have changed our email address again. You can now reach
us at history podcast at i heart radio dot com
and we're all over social media at missed in History.
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
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(29:32):
you listen to podcasts. Stuffy miss in History Class is
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