31 Days of Hallowe'en: Day Twenty-Four

 Day 24: The Night the Devil Walked In Devon

   On 9th February 1885, the residents of East and South Devon, England, woke to find someone or something had left a 100 mile trail of hoofprints in the freshly fallen snow. They seemed to have been made by a creature walking upright on two legs with cloven hooves. The prints ended at one end of a drainpipe and began again at the other end, the creature apparently having crawled though. The drainpipe was 4inches in diameter. At another point, the cloven hooves continued over the roof of the barn. Inside the barn, a cow was found in the hay loft. There was absolutely no way it could have gotten up there, it couldn't have climbed the ladder and there was no other way up there. Other obstacles seemed to have just been walked over as if they weren't there or that height had no meaning.

  The prints themselves were 4 inches long, 3 inches across and between 8 and 16 inches apart, mostly in single file. There were many theories on how they occurred put forward, hopping mice, a kangaroo, badgers, even the trailing shackles of an experimental balloon. The problems with these explanations were numerous. For one, Kangaroos do not leave hoofprints, jump on buildings or take journeys through Devon at night. There was a theory that Kangaroos had escaped from somewhere but it was later found to be a false report made up to assuage the fears of parishioners. The wood mice is more likely as hopping mice can leave a trail that looks like hoofprints, however it does not explain where some of the hoofprints led and why they seemed to stop and start pretty abruptly. The badger  theory is problematic as badgers don't tend to leave footprints that look like a creature walking on two legs. They do have four after all. The balloon one is bizarre. Why would the balloon change it's height, leave such similar prints and not be seen? Though the wood mice theory is the most likely, it seems a little unlikely and does not explain the cow in the hayloft, no-one could explain that. Some people also reported that the footprints looked like they had been made by hooves that were hot. A sort of panic soon spread. There was talk of a terrifying creature leaving the trail and a hunt was launched but no such creature was found. 

  The incident was reported in The Illustrated London News and Bell's Life in Sydney. While there were other reports of similar incidents in other parts of the world, none were close to being on the same scale. When similar reports were made after this incident, they were very often found to be false or a hoax. In the end no clear and fully accepted explanations were ever given for the strange events on the night of 8th February 1885. In many homes, children hid in closets and under blankets when they heard what the hushed voices of the adults around the fireplace said. That the Devil had walked in Devon that night.