How Satan’s footprints scared the world in 1855
To most, snow signifies the most wonderful time of the year, but conversely, many of the most terrifying moments in horror have happened while snow tumbles silently from the sky.
The climactic hedge maze chase in The Shining. The hopeless acceptance of a dire fate in The Thing. The blood-soaked hunts in Let The Right One In. There’s just something in the cold stillness of a snowbound vista that can send a chill down the spine that has absolutely nothing to do with the freezing weather.
So, with that in mind, one can only imagine how scared the inhabitants of Devon must have been in February 1855 when something seemed to be stalking them, and the only sign that anyone was there was a set of footprints in the winter snow.
The night of February 8th, 1855, was carpeted by seasonal snow. However, the morning afterwards showed something that, on the surface, seemed to be pretty normal. A set of prints made by what looked like an animal. More specifically, they were cloven hoofprints. What could possibly be scary about this? Then, two facts came to light upon closer inspection. The first was the fact that whatever left these prints had seemingly only one pair of hooves. This was something hooved that walked up on two legs.
There aren’t that many of those around apart from… well, no, it can’t be him, right?! After all, deer have been known to walk on two legs, so locals presumed this was nothing more than a humble deer that spent a little bit more time upright than they should have. But these prints were found all over the county on that one night. In total, the ground that this creature covered seemed to be between 40 and 100 miles.
This was no deer walking upright, and with numbers like that, this was no man either. This was the one thing that walked upright with cloved hooves that could have the power to do that. Satan himself.
What on earth happened with ‘The Devil’s Footprints’?
The more people talked, the more people discovered the extent of this inexplicable phenomenon. These prints were seen outside of woods and down high streets, garden paths, even across roofs, and up walls. Most bizarrely, they even made their way right up to the Exe estuary, a two-mile-wide stretch of water, before continuing on the other side at exactly the same place they left off. All this in the space of one single night.
Within days, reports of ‘The Devil’s Footprints’ had made national news, with articles in The Times and The Illustrated London News interviewing petrified Devonians about their worst nightmare. They detailed how a number of the footprints had claw marks on the side of them, or that they’d taken their hounds to investigate them, and recoiled from the footprints in sheer terror.
Of course, not everyone was convinced about the footprints, with some saying it was nothing more than superstition and a mass panic, which is almost certainly what it was.
However, if a bunch of inexplicable footprints did show up in Devon and this isn’t a hoax down to its core, then what on earth caused it?! Some truly hare-brained schemes have been thrown out, from pairs of hopping mice to an experimental balloon trailing its mooring ropes. One particularly whimsical theory was that a kangaroo had escaped from a nearby zoo, although the person responsible for that theory, Reverend GM Musgrave, said himself that he spread it as nothing more than a distraction technique from the mass panic Satan himself had visited Devon.
As is the case with most urban legends, we’ll never truly know for sure. It’s probably a hoax that got swept up into a case of hysteria. The terrifying fact being, of course, that a case as dire as that is actually the best-case scenario. Anything is preferable to Lucifer himself wandering around your gaff.