Episode 197 - The Devil's Footprints of 1855

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Hour podcast. My name My name is Abby Branker. I'm sitting here with Alan Codan. Hello. On the morning of February 9th, 1855, in Devon, England,

locals woke to find strange tracks in the freshly fallen snow. Is that uncommon? Well, there was something about these tracks

that were different than usual. It was a dog. So Devon in 1855 was largely rural. It was made up of small villages, farms,

and market towns scattered across the countryside. The region was no stranger to harsh winter weather, but the snowfall that arrived that night, the night of February 8th, was significant enough to leave a fresh, unbroken blanket of snow.

The tracks that were found were traced across fields, gardens, and village lanes, and ran a single line of unusual hoof-like impressions. At first, people assumed the tracks belonged to some kind of animal. Like a moose.

But that's where things get strange. The tracks appeared in more than 30 locations across Devon. They formed a single file line and measured roughly four inches long in about an inch and a half or two and a half inches wide, depending on the report.

Witnesses estimated the trail of prints extended between 40 and 100 miles. The tracks seemed to ignore natural and man-made barriers, passing directly over houses, rivers, haystacks, and walls. The footprints appeared on snow-covered rooftops

and atop tall walls, and some reported that they entered and emerged from drain pipes that were barely four inches across. Some believed the tracks belonged to the devil himself.

Today we are talking about the strange incident of the devil's footprints of 1855. I'm confused. That's my statement.

Why are you confused? Why would they think it was the devil? Does he have very little feet? Well, they were normal, they were actually tracks that would be, I think, somewhat bigger than normal animal tracks, like fox tracks or something.

These were bigger. But it's, he's got a size four foot. Four inch foot. Your shoe size correlates to like the number of inches of how long your foot is.

Yeah. But the hoof is the whole foot, you know, the hoof. The hoof. Yeah.

You know lots about hooves. Well, that's true. We do like to watch a lot of Nate the hoof guy. He's great.

He's great. No, I think the what's felt unnerving and out of place to these people is that A, there was this this track, right? These tracks that were single file tracks.

And there's a bunch of diagrams I'll show you that they drew at the time that ran somewhere between 40 to 100 miles across different areas of Devon. So it's almost like waking up in the morning and like, you know, what animal is traveling a hundred miles?

What singular animal overnight? you know, just in the time between the snow, when the snow stopped falling and they seemed to travel over places that weren't possible. Like it would just go, the tracks would lead right up to a house and then over the roof

of the house and then along the other side of the house as if it's something just like jumped on top of the house or through this like very small drain pipe that a normal person couldn't fit or normal animal couldn't fit through or on top of garden walls. Like it was not like they're like, oh, there's some tracks in the backyard.

there was a 100 miles of tracks and b tracks that nobody really identified as oh we know exactly what that animal is and then c the tracks ran all over the place like through things they shouldn't possibly have been able to get through on top of roofs on top of high places so that's why these tracks are

special tracks this was what year 1855 in England 1855 okay who measured the overall length of the prints so we're gonna get into it there some diagrams like I said that people kind of sketched up to show here. Let me find one to bring you into the fold here. So while you're looking that up, I'm just thinking about this because, you

know, there's no satellite imagery. They can't do it after the fact. They have to measure this. I see. Okay. I mean, yeah, it looks like hoof prints. They have to do all their measurements before anybody walks around and ruins the prints. Or before the snow melts or just the tracks get spoiled.

So somebody had to go around town and then report back to the mayor and be like, yeah, I measured it, it was 100 miles. No, and so the length, the distance of it, I'll say,

is estimated, that's why the range is 40 to 100 miles. But essentially they're all these reports came in from all these different parts of, you know, areas of this locality, and so they've pieced it together. But let's get into, I feel like you're, you have a lot of logistics questions.

I sure do. So let's get into a little bit deeper, but first let's talk about our sources. A Mental Floss article by Stacey Conrad, The Ongoing Mystery of the Devil's Footprints, A Discovery Global Geopark article on the Devil's Footprints,

And a Discovery article, The Mystery of the Devil's Footprints, and there's a few first-hand sources that we will cite as we go. The Devil's footprints were reported in a period of rapid change in Britain. When railways were expanding, photography was increasingly used,

and scientific explanations were becoming more prominent. At the same time, rural areas such as Devon still retained strong folk traditions that influenced how unusual events were interpreted. What's interesting to me about this topic and topics like this

is less about whether or not we believe it was the devil, right? I think most people would say it probably wasn't the devil. I think I would say it's probably not the devil. But to me what's interesting, especially through the lens of this podcast, is to look at how people and why people are reacting to something the way that they are at that time. And what's really interesting

about this specific case is that it's at this like kind of fork in the road moment for for Europe, right? Where you have industry, you have science, you have all of these things that are coming in,

but there's still this lingering superstition