DEVIL’S FOOTPRINTS

Opening

On the morning of 9 February 1855, after a heavy night of snow, people across east and south Devon found marks in the white that looked like small hooves. Four inches by three in the papers that liked a clean number, closer together or farther apart depending on the parish. Mostly a single file. Reported on roofs, on walls, in yards shut by paling, and in open fields. More than thirty places if you count every letter.

The Times of 16 February printed EXTRAORDINARY OCCURRENCE and gave the country a Satan it had not asked the clergy to bless. The Illustrated London News later drew one perfect cloven shoe and a hundred-mile walk. Local notes from the first days are messier: donkey-shoe here, toes there, not always straight, not always the same size.

Timeline

Night of 8-9 February 1855Snow on the Exe towns. Morning of the 9th. Householders in Exmouth, Topsham, Lympstone, Dawlish, Teignmouth and further inland see the marks and start comparing.

13-16 FebruaryLocal gazettes run letters. On the 16th The Times lifts the story to national type. Superstition is named in the same column as the tracks.

24 February to 3 MarchA "South Devon" letter to the Illustrated London News, later tied to young William D'Urban, claims a uniform print, a hundred miles, roofs, a fourteen-foot wall, the Exe itself. On 3 March the News prints the tidy hoof that later books reprint as if it were a field photograph.

March. The Times goes quiet on Devon and notes similar talk from Congress Poland. The snow melts. The marks go with it. No plaster series from the first morning survives as a public set.

Key figures

The householders of the Exe parishes are the first layer. They have marks by the door and no agreement on the shoe.

Parish clergy and local editors collect the messy sizes. H. T. Ellacombe and the gazette correspondents are more use than the London drawing.

The Times desk of 16 February is the national hinge. "South Devon" / D'Urban is the man who writes the hundred-mile single animal into being. The Illustrated London News artist is the man who draws the hoof the record now wears.

No policeman produces a beast. No gamekeeper bags a traveller. The Devil is a headline, not a witness.

Physical and documentary trail

What exists:

One: the 9 February marks in snow across many Devon points, described that week in local letters with varying length, width, and step.

Two: reports of prints on roofs and inside shut yards, which is the part that will not sit on an ordinary donkey walking a lane.

Three: The Times, 16 February 1855, "Extraordinary Occurrence", the sheet that makes a county morning into a national devil.

Four: the Illustrated London News drawing of 3 March 1855, a uniform cloven hoof that discards the mixed local measurements.

There is no plaster series with parish labels from the 9th. There is no animal in a barn. There is no official zoological close that the towns kept.

The inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the footmarks of some strange and mysterious animal endowed with the power of ubiquity.

Things you might not know

• The tracks went through drainpipes. Some accounts had the prints leading into and out of drain pipes as narrow as four inches.
• A vicar invented kangaroos. The Rev. G. M. Musgrave spread a story that two kangaroos had escaped from a menagerie at Sidmouth. He later admitted making it up to calm parishioners who feared the Devil.
• Richard Owen said badger. The anatomist argued in a letter of 3 March 1855 that a badger was the likeliest maker.
• A local vicar kept tracings. The papers of the Rev. H. T. Ellacombe of Clyst St George, found after 1950, include letters and tracings of the prints made at the time.
• Someone blamed a runaway balloon. The writer Geoffrey Household was told an experimental balloon from Devonport Dockyard had trailed two shackles across the county, and that it was hushed up.
• Scotland had it first. The Times of 14 March 1840 reported foal-like tracks over at least twelve miles around Glenorchy.

Competing explanations

One unknown biped. This is the London reading: one walker, one shoe, roofs and all. It needs a body that was never bagged and a stride that local letters do not all share.

Many animals, one thaw. Badgers, cats, donkeys, mice, hopping birds, the snow slumping into hoof shapes. This reading loves the messy first measurements. It has more work to do on the high walls and the drainpipes.

Balloon drag or a hoax line. Offered. Not demonstrated across thirty points in one night of weather.

Later life of the case

The Devil's Footprints became a staple of books on the unexplained, usually with the Illustrated London News hoof and the hundred miles. The rediscovery of Ellacombe's letters and tracings gave researchers a messier, more local picture, and Mike Dash's 1994 study in Fortean Studies went back to the original sources to separate the first-week reports from the legend. For another Victorian scare that grew in the papers, see Spring-heeled Jack.

Finding

Devon woke on 9 February 1855 to marks in new snow that looked like small hooves, on lanes and also on roofs and inside yards that a donkey does not casually visit. Householders were not staging a London feature. They were looking at their own steps. Something walked, or many things did, and the white held it long enough to frighten a county.

What still will not resolve: a plaster series from that first morning, labelled by parish, or an animal taken in the act. The Illustrated London News drew one perfect hoof and a hundred miles. A set of messy local casts would have been worth more than that engraving, and we do not have them.