The Devil’s Footprints of 1855 – How the 100-Mile Story Was Built

In February 1855 national newspapers told the country that a single creature had walked one hundred miles across Devon in one winter night. A parish vicar in Clyst St George had a bundle of drawings in his desk that proved the prints were not even the same shape from village to village. He marked his draft letter to the Illustrated London News ‘not for publication’ and put it away.

The Morning of 9 February

Heavy snow fell across East and South Devon on the night of 8 to 9 February 1855. By morning, unusual marks had appeared in the snow across more than thirty disconnected locations, from Exmouth and Topsham to Dawlish, Teignmouth, Totnes and Torquay. A couple of sightings also turned up across the county border in Dorset.

The weather that night did most of the work. Heavy snow fell around midnight, a slight thaw followed, then rain, then a refreeze. Small clustered prints, the kind cats and rodents leave, melted into each other and froze again into larger, hoof-shaped lumps. The tenant at Aller Farm in Dawlish noticed this immediately. He pointed out that the freeze-thaw cycle had turned ordinary cat pawprints in his yard into strange compound shapes. That observation made it into the local record on the very first day.

In Clyst St George, Reverend H. T. Ellacombe began gathering tracings and notes from his parishioners. He was the only figure on the ground in February 1855 building a systematic archive of the actual prints as they appeared in different villages.

What he wrote down does not match what the papers later printed. His notes record prints that took different shapes in different villages, some cloven, others continuous and concave like donkey shoes. In several villages he also noted what looked like the brushing of bird wings in the snow next to the tracks.

Nobody else collected this raw data at the time.

Musgrave’s First Deliberate Plant

On 11 February, two days after the prints first appeared, Reverend G. M. Musgrave climbed the pulpit at Lympstone Church and told his congregation the tracks had probably been made by a kangaroo. It was the first time the kangaroo theory entered the public record.

Musgrave was vicar of Withycombe Raleigh, not Lympstone, so he was preaching outside his own parish.

The story he gave was specific. A couple of kangaroos, he said, had escaped from the private menagerie of a ‘Mr. Fische’ at Sidmouth, and their bounding gait would explain the strange single-file spacing of the tracks. The naming of both an owner and a town gave the claim the weight it needed to travel into the national press.

But then.

In private correspondence later that year, Musgrave admitted in his own words that he had never checked whether the kangaroos had escaped at all. He wrote that he had no idea how a kangaroo could have crossed the Exe Estuary to leave prints on both sides. In writing he confirmed he had used the story to break a real panic: Devon schools had closed, his parishioners were dreading to leave their homes after sunset, and armed villagers were patrolling the woods at night looking for Satan. That confession survives only as his own private admission, not as a finding by any formal inquiry.

How the London Press Built the Mystery

On 16 February 1855, six days after the prints first appeared, The Times ran a piece under the headline ‘EXTRAORDINARY OCCURRENCE’. The article reported the vast number of foot-tracks and noted that superstitious locals believed them to be the marks of Satan. In a single edition, the story moved from local oddity to national sensation.

Three weeks later, on 3 March, the Illustrated London News followed with eyewitness summaries from country estates like Mamhead and Powderham Castle. The paper presented these as points along a single trail.

The most influential letters driving the panic had been written by an anonymous correspondent signing himself ‘South Devon’. Reverend Ellacombe later identified this writer, in his private notes, as a 19-year-old local man named William D’Urban. D’Urban’s letters carried the forty-to-one-hundred-mile distance figure into the national press.

The arithmetic behind that figure was wrong. The London editors took dozens of separate, localised sightings from different towns and added their distances together as though one creature had walked the whole route. They published the total as a single journey.

The illustration that ran in the Illustrated London News showed a perfectly uniform cloven hoof, four inches long by three across, spaced sixteen inches apart in a clean single file. That was a tidy editorial choice. Ellacombe’s actual tracings, sitting in his desk in Clyst St George, tell a different story. The prints he recorded took different shapes in different villages, some cloven, others continuous and concave like donkey shoes. In several places he had also marked what looked like the brushing of bird wings in the snow.

Once the unified parameters had been published, biologists tried to solve the problem the press had set them. Richard Owen suggested a badger and Frank Buckland an otter or raccoon, while the writer Geoffrey Household later raised the idea of a balloon trailing its mooring ropes. Thomas Fox, a Devon brewer, drew illustrations showing how leaping wood mice could press their limbs into the snow in clusters that mimicked cloven hoofs.

Each theory failed against at least one impossible constraint. No badger could walk one hundred miles in a night or scale a vertical wall; otters did not pass through solid haystacks; balloons did not weave through chimneys without their mooring ropes catching. The scientists were not stupid, their parameters were corrupt.

But then The Times went quiet. After 16 February 1855 the paper printed no further substantive domestic reporting on the Devon prints, and on 17 March it ran only a brief, sceptical note about similar tracks seen in Congress Poland.

No internal editorial files from that period have been recovered.

Ellacombe Stands Down

While the London press was building its single-trail narrative, Reverend Ellacombe was at his desk in Clyst St George writing a careful corrective. He drafted a long letter to the Illustrated London News laying out his tracings and his fieldwork.

The letter never went out.

The draft that survives, recovered from his church office almost a century later, carries a bold note across the top: ‘not for publication’. One later academic paper attributes the marking to Reverend Musgrave instead, but the larger archival tradition, including Mike Dash’s 1994 synthesis, attributes it to Ellacombe himself, and that attribution is followed here.

Meanwhile the Illustrated London News was filling its columns with anyone who would write in. Correspondents proposed devils, escaped monkeys, untethered balloons drifting up from the naval yard at Devonport, and outright supernatural visitation. The grounded, varied tracings sitting in a Devon vicarage were never sent to balance any of it. That silence had its largest cost on 17 March 1855. On that date the Illustrated London News printed a letter from Reverend Musgrave repeating his Sidmouth kangaroo theory at the national level. With Ellacombe silent, no parish vicar with raw data was in the paper to push back against another parish vicar with a fabricated one.

No documented motive survives for why Ellacombe held the letter back. His own files do not explain it. The decision was his alone; the moment was when the panic peaked; and the gap in his own correspondence is exactly the missing piece.

The Bundle Recovered in 1952

In 1950 the Transactions of the Devonshire Association published an article asking for further information about the 1855 event. Almost a century had passed and nobody had cross-checked the parish records against the newspaper story. A local historian, Major Antony Gibbs, took the prompt and went looking.

Two years later Gibbs found Ellacombe’s bundle of notes gathering dust in a church office in Clyst St George. In 1994 the researcher Mike Dash published ‘The Devil’s Hoofmarks: Source Material on the Great Devon Mystery of 1855’ in Fortean Studies, finally putting the recovered archive into print and walking through the varied natural origins of the prints across the different villages.

A modern footnote arrived on 12 March 2009. Jill Wade of Woolsery in North Devon woke up to find hoof-like marks across her snow-covered garden. Biologists examined the prints and concluded they were most likely made by a rabbit or a hare.

Nobody has yet explained who looked after Ellacombe’s bundle in that church office between his death and Major Gibbs’s visit.

Source

Sources include: the Reverend H. T. Ellacombe Parish Archive from Clyst St George (collected February 1855, recovered 1952); private correspondence of Reverend G. M. Musgrave (1855), preserved within the same archive; contemporary press coverage in ‘The Times’ (16 February 1855) and the ‘Illustrated London News’ (16 February to 17 March 1855); the 1950 query published in ‘Transactions of the Devonshire Association’; Dash, M., ‘The Devil’s Hoofmarks: Source Material on the Great Devon Mystery of 1855’, ‘Fortean Studies’ (1994); and ‘DevonLive’ reporting on the Woolsery print recurrence (12 March 2009).