Track's of Satan: Appearance of the Devil's Footprints in Devon County England February 8, 1855

        

 

        They appeared overnight on February 8-9, 1855.

Cloven hoofprints that went on in single file straight lines across a distance of nearly one-hundred miles in the county of Devon located in the southwest of England.

Two nights after a heavy snowfall temperatures in the region dropped to well below freezing, unseasonably cold for any time of year in that part of England. The freezing temperatures caused a hard icy layer of frost to form atop the freshly fallen snow.

When residents across Devon awoke on the frigid sunny morning of February 9, 1855 they were shocked by the sight that greeted their eyes.

Not only did the hoofprints seem to go on forever, and be everywhere at the same time, but they had broken all the way through the icy snow and went all the way down to the earth below.

Some hoofprints went straight up the sides of houses, up sheer walls and over rooftops, while others went up and over haystacks and fences and continued on, completely unbroken in a straight line, off into the distance through fields, forests and frozen rivers.  The prints seemed to defy all laws of gravity and all logic.

Ominously, there were hoofprints that stopped abruptly right at people’s doorsteps, as if whatever had created those tracks was seeking to enter the homes of unsuspecting victims as they slept in the night.

Later that month the Times of London reported that the imprints, “Closely resembled those of a donkey’s shoe.”  But even the London Times reporters had no answers for how the prints could have appeared so rapidly or in such quantity or for how they could have travelled up walls and over houses and went on for such a great distance.

The Times concluded that the prints, “Whatever they may have been, were much more like those of a biped rather than a quadruped,” entirely dispelling the donkey hoof print hypothesis that the same newspaper had first proposed.

1855 Rendering of the prints

        Almost immediately the mysterious phenomena of the Devon county cloven hoofprints was seized upon by local religious leaders in their weekly sermons.  Clergy all across the south of England asserted that the nocturnal hoofprints were most definitely the work of demonic powers and promptly labelled them the “Devil’s Footprints” or the “Track’s of Satan”.

It was accepted as proven fact by many residents in the area that the cloven hoofprints were indisputable evidence that Satan and his legions of demons stalked about in the night looking for unsuspecting souls that they could possess and take with them to the depths of eternal and everlasting Hell.

A weekly English news magazine entitled Bell’s Life in Sydney published in its May 24, 1855 edition:

“The superstitious go so so far as to believe that they (the hoofprints) are the marks of Satan himself...a great excitement has been produced among all classes.”

This article further describes how the case of the Devil’s Footprints is frequently touched upon by ministers warning their congregations from the pulpit against the ill effects of a life of sin.  It was said, according to the article, that many in the county of Devon were still fearful of venturing outside their homes at night even a full three months after the mysterious cloven tracks had first appeared in the snow!

Many at the time seem to have attributed both the nature and appearance of the tracks to a half-goat, half-man demon creature named Buer which was said in the late Middle Ages to be one of the specific demons that guarded the gates of Hell.  According to folklore Buer has the face of a man but has five legs with hooves like those of a goat, which could have easily made the abundance of cloven hoofed prints discovered that morning in February of 1855.

The Demon Buer

        The true cause behind the Devil’s Footprints of Devon England that appeared on that frozen night in February 1855 has never been definitively solved.   But many of the explanations and theories surrounding the Devil’s Footprints are just as interesting, though not quite as terrifying, as the man-goat demon Buer.

One of my personal favorite theories is that the mysterious tracks were caused by a runaway Victorian Era hot air balloon.  That’s right--tracks in the snow caused by a hot air balloon that unexpectedly broke free of its moorings on that moonlit night.

This  theory was first proposed in the 1930’s by British novelist Geoffrey Household who had grown up in the area where the Devil’s Footprints appeared back in 1855.  Household claimed to have heard this story as a boy from a man named Major Carter (whether his first name was Major or he was an actual Major in the military sense is unclear) who said that back in 1855 he had worked at the nearby Davenport Dockyard for the Royal Navy.

Carter reported that at the the time the Devil’s Footprints appeared he had been  involved in work on an experimental type of hot air balloon, like a precursor to a sort of weather balloon that would have travelled high up into the sky and allowed the Royal Navy to observe approaching weather systems, which had accidentally broken free from the ropes which held it to the ground and dragged its shackles with it as it floated across the night sky over Devon County England on February 8-9, 1855.

Household says that Carter told him that government authorities never admitted to the true nature of the incident because of the experimental nature of the hot air balloon and also because several buildings were damaged as a result of the accident.

Victorian Era Hot Air Balloon

        It is exciting to think that the Devil’s Footprint incident could be a sort of nineteenth century Victorian Era Roswell type conspiracy theory, but as Geoffrey Household’s second-hand account, first published nearly 80 years after the initial incident is the only record we have of such a possibility, and also given the fact that hot air balloons would not be used for meteorological purposes for nearly another fifty years after 1855, it seems unlikely that hot air balloons had anything whatsoever to do with the appearance of the mysterious prints.

At the time, those not given to religious speculation were apt to think that the tracks could have been made by kangaroos.  During the Victorian Era it was popular for the wealthy to keep and maintain their own private zoos on their manorial properties.  Many speculated that perhaps a kangaroo from one of these local menageries could have escaped on the night of February 8, 1855 and caused these strange hoofprints all across the county.  Though this theory is very plausible there is no record of any kangaroos having escaped in the area or of having been recovered in the area at that time in the year 1855.  Additionally, it is doubtful if any kangaroo could have survived long enough in the frigid weather to travel such great distances across the south of England.

Some have also proposed that the Devil’s Footprints were a hoax, created and promulgated by local Anglican clergymen who felt that people at the beginning of 1855 had drifted too far from God and wished to draw them closer to their Creator by instilling the fear of Satan into their hearts.  We do know that church attendance in the middle of the nineteenth century was falling throughout most of England and that with the advancement of scientific knowledge people did tend to turn more and more toward reason and logic than they ever had before in human history.

Many other natural causes have been proposed to try and explain the mysterious tracks found in the snow on that night so long ago in 1855.  We will never know exactly what the Devil’s Footprints found in the county of Devon England in February 1855 really were.  Human history is littered with accounts of mysterious inexplicable prints and marks being found on the ground all across the earth.

Perhaps, each one of these seemingly inexplicable events has a very mundane and worldly explanation, or perhaps, Satan and his minions like the half-goat, half-man demon of our folklore still stalk the earth in the night looking for unsuspecting souls that they can drag down to the depths of Hell with them.

We may never definitively know.