The Devil's Footprints: A Winter Trail Across Devon

You open the door onto a foot of fresh snow and a single line of tracks leading up to the wall of your house, and continuing, apparently, straight over it. The prints are small, cloven, evenly spaced, as if something walked on two feet through the sleeping village. By breakfast half of Devon is finding the same trail, and by nightfall people are latching doors they never latch and calling it the work of the Devil.

The event is real and dated. On the morning after a heavy snowfall in early February 1855, residents across a wide stretch of south Devon in England woke to find a continuous line of hoof-like marks in the snow. The tracks were reported through and around numerous towns and villages, among them Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Dawlish, and Teignmouth, over a distance later described, probably with exaggeration, as something like a hundred miles. Newspapers, including The Times, carried the story. Witnesses insisted the trail ran in single file, each print roughly four inches long and eight inches apart, and that it passed over rooftops, haystacks, and high walls, and even, some said, up to the mouth of a drainpipe and out the other end.

The explanations offered at the time

Almost immediately, sober people reached for ordinary animals. Correspondents proposed badgers, otters, rats, and above all some hopping creature, a leaping rodent or bird whose paired prints could mimic a two-legged gait. One widely repeated idea, that an escaped kangaroo from a private menagerie was to blame, foundered on the sheer distance and the tidy single line. The naturalist Sir Richard Owen argued for badgers foraging in the snow. Others blamed wood mice, whose bounding leaves surprisingly hoof-like pairs behind them.

Why one animal never quite fit

Each candidate explains part of the trail and stumbles on the rest. A single species walking one unbroken line for scores of miles across rivers, roofs, and walls in a single night strains belief; a mix of animals, prints refrozen and rethawed, and the human urge to connect separate tracks into one story probably combined to build the legend. Snow is a poor recorder. It melts at the edges, doubling a print or blurring toes into a cloven shape, and reports gathered days later, from frightened people comparing notes, tend to converge on the most dramatic version.

Even so, the case has never been cleanly closed. Modern folklorists and researchers have revisited it repeatedly without agreeing on a single culprit, and the contemporary accounts are unusually consistent about the details, the uniform stride, the way the marks ignored obstacles a real animal would go around. The writer Mike Dash, who compiled the sources, concluded that several ordinary causes were probably at work but that no one explanation accounts for everything reported.

What the snow kept

The folklore label is the fair one; blaming the tracks on the Devil is a Victorian village reading a hard winter. But the physical event did happen, was written down while the snow was still on the ground, and has resisted a tidy answer for well over a century and a half. That is the part that keeps it interesting.

Readers have posted their own morning-after mysteries below, tracks and marks and trails with no obvious maker, and vote each one True, Fake, or Not sure. Study the footprints and cast your verdict.