Hello, it's Richard mccleinsmith here with a quick update before we dive into today's episode. Unexplained is very excited to be a part of Crime Wave at Sea this November, joining forces with some of the eeriest voices in the world of true crime and the paranormal four nights in the Caribbean, with amazing podcasts like Last Podcast on the Left, Scared to Death and many more live shows, Meet and greets, creepy Stories under the Stars and you can be there too,
but don't wait. Rooms are nearly sold out. Head to Crimewave Atsea dot com forward slash Unexplained to grab your fan coat and lock in your cabin. We'd love to see you on board. Great flurries of snow spiraled around the church spire and settled heavily on the roofs of the nearby cottages, like a scene from a Victorian Christmas card. It was the night of February eighth, eighteen fifty five in the parish of Withercombe Rawley in the County of
Devon in the southwest of England. But while the residents of the village and those across the county shivered in their beds, something was abroad, silently scurrying from house to house, across fields and over fences. By dawn the following morning, all about the land was carpeted with a sharp frost. It was an hour or so after daybreak when the Reverend George Musgrave, wrapped up in a heavy coat, left the comfort of his rectory parlor and made the short
walk across to the church. Moments later he caught sight of some peculiar prints on the frosty ground. Musgrave dropped to his knees to inspect them closer. Transfixed by how odd they were, Trembling with wonder and excitement, he jumped up and hurried back into the rectory. Then swiftly reappeared, carrying some sheets of paper and a fountain pen. With great care, he knelt down once more onto the frozen ground. Then he placed a sheet of paper over some of
the tracks and began to trace their outlines. Whatever they were, they were clearly footprints, only not in the double line that a four footed animal would make, but in one single row, like something with only two legs, and they looked to have been made by an unknown creature with cloven Who you're listening to unexplained, and I am Richard McLean Smith. The winter of eighteen fifty five was a
bleak one, even by England's chili standards. Temperatures remained at or below freezing for weeks, making it colder than anything in living memory. The southwestern coastal county of Devon, which usually saw slightly milder weather than northern England, did not escape the Great Frieze. Two of the region's largest rivers, the ex and the Teen, had frozen over entirely in places. Night after night, icy flakes fell relentlessly, piling up in
great drifts and blanketing the countryside. However, residents across the southern part of the county woke up on that morning of February ninth to find something much more chilling than frost and snow. Across a remarkably wide swathe of countryside from the town of Exeter to the coast, mile after mile of what appeared to be strange footprints had appeared like something from the pages of a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Numerous tracks of what were colloquially called footmarks were reported
from more than thirty locations across Devon. If the tracks had been left by a single creature. Its total travel distance that one night would have been somewhere between forty and one hundred miles. The size and shape of the footprints, as well as the roots they followed, seemed to defy
the laws of nature and physics. Typically measuring four inches long by three inches wide, many of the prints, as Reverend Musgrave had noticed, at the shape of a cloven hoof, not unlike a donkey's, except just like Musgraves, they progressed in a straight, single line, one after another, spaced about eight and sixteen inches apart. In the shallow snow, they were between half an inch and four inches deep, often meandering across gardens and through villages eerily. In places, they
were said to do impossible things. In the countryside, as well as leaving trails across frozen lakes and rivers, they would stop at one side of a haystack, leaving its sides and top undisturbed, then recommence abruptly on the other side and vanish through small holes in thickets and hedges, only to appear again, impossibly, it seemed, on the other side. But most unnervingly, they seemed to go from door to door,
venturing up to front steps before seemingly backing away. In some places, it was said that there was hardly a home that had not been visited. Most of the people who saw the bizarre tracks were country folk familiar with all manner of animal trails, but none of them had seen anything like this before. To many of the god fearing Devonians, the strange marks brought to mind sinister echoes of a bit biblical story from the Book of Exodus, chapter twelve, known as the Plague on the first Born.
In the story, God addresses Moses and tells him that on an appointed night, he will visit Egypt and strike down every firstborn, be it human or other animal. But to others, the fact the prince were seemingly created by something with a cloven hoof they brought to mind something else, entirely the devil. Either way, whatever it was so unsettled one group of local tradesmen from the coastal town of Dawlish.
They conspired to hunt it down and kill it. Seemingly undaunted by the prospect of it being Lucifer himself, the men took up guns and bludgeons and made their way to a local churchyard to begin their search, finding the tail end of some prince. There, they promptly began to follow them through the snow, while all about sparkled white under the mid morning sun. The prince first led them to the town of Luscombe and then Oakland, a total distance of around five miles, but the men found no
sign of a culprit. At Cliffs Saint George, on the other side of the River ex two villagers were following a different set of tracks when they discovered what appeared to be a strange whitish excrement among the marks. Others from the same area followed a further set of tracks to the edge of a field, where they stopped abruptly, only to reappear again in the middle of the field, suggesting the perpetrator may have taken to the air before
coming back down to continue its meandering. One man told a tale of a local fox hunt that attracted the prince down to a wood where whatever the thing was appeared to have been cornered, but when the hunt dogs rushed in to flush it out, they turned around and reappeared suddenly. Why in terror, too frightened to go back, not one person or group managed to track the mysterious prince for more than a few miles for a while.
The belief that Satan had been among them drove some locals across the county to implement a self imposed curfew, refusing to venture outdoors after nightfall. On that strange night in February, also at the parish of Cliss Saint George, Reverend Henry Elcom had been woken in the middle of the night by his dog. The animal had clearly been spooped and was barking loudly and pouring at the back door.
Having looked out into the night and seen nothing outside, the reverend finally managed to calm the dog down before returning to bed. The next morning, the reverend awoke, much like many others that day, to find the strange prince dotted about the grounds of his rectory. He later described the marks as being similar in shape, albeit varying a little in size, and constituted what to his eye was
some kind of claw print. Elacum also interviewed people who attempted to track the creature and obtained samples of the excrement found alongside the trails. He forwarded the samples to renowned naturalist Richard Owen, a controversial figure in the world of naturalism. Owen is perhaps best known for coining the term dinosauria, from which we get the word dinosaur, meaning
terrible reptile. His thoughts on the matter remain unknown. Perhaps less than impressed at receiving Reverend Elcom's scatological samples in the post, he neglected to send a reply. A few days later. Ellacum did receive a, however, from his colleague George Musgrave, who'd been so animated by his discovery of the prince he'd made the effort to preserve a record of them. Musgrave included a sample of one of his drawings, along with his own explanation for what it could be.
Unlike many of his parishioners, who feared the devil might be among them, it was Musgrave's theory that the creature was in fact a kangaroo that had perhaps escaped from a zoo or some kind of traveling show. Within a fortnight, the story of the mysterious footprints was being reported in the national press, including the Illustrated London News and enormously popular Weekly It broadcasted the story to a wide audience
and included images of the apparent footprints. This was the great age of the Victorian gentleman naturalist, typically a man from the upper or middle class with the financial means and social standing to pursue a passion for natural history, and so the floodgates were opened, and a host of unusual theories were proposed, ranging from the rational to the bazaar.
At the more rational end were that the footprints belonged to mice, rats, squirrels or otters, and had been enlarged in size by a freeze thor action, in much the same way that bare footprints in the Himalayas can become distorted and enlarged, only to be mistaken for yety tracts, as discussed in Unexplained, Season seven, episode eight, Walking on Snow.
Other suggestions verged increasingly toward the ridiculous, including the suggestion that the tracks had been made by the hindfoot of a badger that had somehow hopped its way across large parts of South Devon. In the weeks that follow the appearance of the unusual markings in the snow, an intriguing series of letters was published in the Illustrated London News
by a correspondent signing himself enigmatically as South Devon. The so called South Devon started by listing the primary places in which the footmarks were discovered, then made a series of assertive claims. One such claim was that the marks in every parish were in fact exactly the same size and the step distance the same length, contrary to what had previously been reported. The writer also noted that the Prince at one point appeared to have vaulted a fourteen
foot war and appeared on the roofs of houses. They also dismissed the idea that thawing and refreezing could have distorted the marks, noting that other animal prints made the same night remained perfectly recognizable. In total, he claimed that the marks formed a trail at least one hundred miles in length, and were all in a straight line, and had even at one point crossed the two mile wide river.
Ex South Devon claimed to be an experienced countryman with a great deal of experience in tracking wild animals and birds upon the snow, who had once spent five months hunting in the Canadian wilderness. The prints, they said, were like nothing on Earth they'd ever seen, and from there the theories of what had made the devil's footprints, as
they had by then become known, became even wilder. A former naval officer named Rupert Gould, who had a particular interest in the mysteries of the sea, noted with alarm how the so called devil's hoof marks had appeared on land close to the coast. He saw a parallel with a strange report that emerged from the Cagoulin Islands, also known as the Desolation Islands, located around eighteen hundred nautical
miles south of Madagascar. Back in eighteen forty. A member of the crew of the James Ross Antarctica expedition exploring the islands that year claimed to discover a series of small horse or donkey like tracks in the snow on one of the islands, made by some unidentified creature that, like something disturbing from the Lovecraft mythos, appeared to have come out of the sea. Some decades later, Edwardian ghost hunter Eliot O'Donnell claimed that he had once been told
a peculiar story by a man named mister Wilson. The man supposedly detailed a boyhood visit to the Devon seaside in the early nineteen hundred z when he discovered a single line of hoofmarks one morning on a deserted beach which also led directly into the sea. On this occasion, the marks were of whole cloven hoofs six feet apart, and were so deeply impressed in the sand that they were significantly deeper than the footprints left by Wilson himself,
who weighed sixteen stone. One of the more unusual attributions for the footprints was that they had secretly been made by Romany travelers. The main advocate of this theory was a man named Manfrey Wood, as described in his autobiography in the Life of a Romany Gypsy, published in nineteen seventy three. According to Wood, the Devil's footprints were the result of at least eighteen months of careful planning by
seven Romany tribes. Together, they had supposedly used more than four hundred pairs of specially made stilts in the shape of cloven hoofs fashioned from old step ladders to create the devilish marks. The aim of this elaborate plan was to ultimately scare away two rival groups of the Romanes, who were Pagans and fervent believers in the occult. A nineteen eighty three article in the UK's Daily Mirror newspaper, written by a so called traveling gentleman, Danny Smith, backed
up the theory. However, neither proponent could explain how between four hundred and five hundred travelers had managed to coordinate a long distance stilt walk in the dead of a snowy winter's night, traversing gardens and routots without once being spotted. Perhaps the most bizarre culprit of all was proposed by one s ke off North Street in Brighton in a letter published in the Brighton Guardian paper on the twenty
eighth of February eighteen fifty five. The writer asserted that the footprints were made by a strange creature known as a unipede, first identified by the Norse Icelandic navigator Bjarni Herelson during a visit to the coasts of Labrador in what is present day Canada in one thousand one. See Herelson is believed by some to be the first known European to set eyes on the mainland of the North American continent, having apparently done so as far back as
nine hundred eighty six. See in the Saga of the Greenlanders, which recounts the apparent Norse colonization of North America. Theres an account of Harelson setting sail from Norway to Iceland to visit his parents, only to find that his father had left to go to Greenland. Attempting to find his father with no map or compass, Hereolson and his crew were blown off course by a storm before glimpsing a land with tree covered mountains that was most definitely not Greenland.
It looked hospitable, but Byani was eager to see his parents, and so despite the entreaties of his crew, who wanted to go ashore, he turned the ship around and eventually arrived in Greenland. However, it seems that the adventurous Icelander went back to have another look. On a supposed later trip to the Labrador coast, Herelson described seeing a bizarre animal that had one leg and wings which appeared to radiate from the middle of its back and spread out
like a peacock's tail. When this fantastical creature was alarmed or excited, it erected a single crest of feathers above its head in such a way that Harelson believed previous observers had mistaken it for a unicorn. Bianni Herelson is said to have named the peculiar creature the unipede. It was said to emit a hideous cry, unlike that of any other creature, and was also said to be able to part run, part fly incredibly fast, touching the ground
frequently at equal distances, leaving footprints in a single line. Crucially, the icelander claimed that the one legged creature's single limb resembled that of a quadruped rather than a bird with a hoof like foot, a description which greatly resembled pictures of the so called devil's footprints that had been published in the papers, and thus the correspondent to the Brighton Guardian concluded the Devon tracts were almost certainly that of
the mythical unipede. In nineteen fifty two, a collection of manuscripts and letters were found by a local historian named Major Anthony Gibbs in the parish church of Cliss Saint George. They were the papers of the Reverend Elcum, which had lain preserved in the parish box at the church for
all that time. When folk historian Theo Brown gained access to the Elegent papers that same year, she uncovered the true identity of the mysterious South Devon, who had so caused a stir with his controversial proclamations about the apparent creator of the Prince. As it turned out, South Devon was a nineteen year old named William Durban who had simply made up his accounts. All in all, there are three candidates most firmly in the frame for making the
Devil's footprints that wintry night in eighteen fifty five. Perhaps the most intriguing is the balloon theory, which was not considered at the time, but has been proposed more recently. The suggestion is that the hoofmarks were in fact made by a rope with a horseshoe shaped weight that had been left dangling from an errant balloon, perhaps explaining how the marks were left in straight lines for mile after
mile as the balloon drifted across the countryside. But if so, why were no scuff marks from other trailing portions of the rope found, and who would be so suicidal as to be aloft in a balloon on such a freezing night.
The most common mammals that might have been out on that winter's night are rats, mice, and squirrels, which are all known to leave hopping tracks in which all four feet held together can form a pattern similar to a hoof mark and appear on a singular line, an effect that will be enhanced if the snow in which there left melts and then refreezes, as it did that February night.
But it's highly unlikely that so many such creatures that would be required to make all the markings would each have hopped for such long distances, sometimes up to five miles, something that would be unusual if only one had done it. It would seem then that if we were looking for a material culprit, birds would seem to be the most likely capable of covering long distances and landing on high walls, rooftops, and haystacks. But how would a bird's foot, webbed or
clawed come to resemble a cloven hoof. There is one candidate, remarked on by one astute observer back in eighteen fifty five, known as the Great Bustard. Weighing anywhere between thirteen and forty pounds, it is one of the heaviest living flying animals, looking a bit like a cross between a wild turkey and a large grouse. Bustard ceased to breed in Britain in eighteen thirty two, when they were hunted to extinction, but they were still seen in the countryside until around
eighteen seventy three. Bustard's feet make a heel mark and three distinct toe marks, so it's possible that the donkey like cloven hoof prints were in fact the imprints of these birds. It would certainly explain why the footprints appeared across a relatively large area in a short space of time, including in places that could only be reached by flight. Inexplicable, diabolical looking hoof marks are by no means an exclusively
nineteenth century phenomenon. In nineteen fifty seven, a missus Linda Hansen, saw footprints of what appeared to be cloven hoofs in her back garden in Humberside, Northeast England. The cloven prints, four inches across and spaced twelve inches apart, were sharply defined and stopped suddenly in the middle of the garden.
More recently, in two thousand nine, Jilled Wade, a resident of North day woke up to find that overnight, a snow covered back garden had been inexplicably imprinted by single hoof prints which ran for almost seventy feet in a single linear direction. Their shape and size were eerily similar to the Prince in Devon one hundred and seventy years earlier. Graham Ingalls from the Center for forty in Zoology went
to investigate. He concurred that the footprints were a match to those from eighteen fifty five, and although he surmised the most likely cause to be a mouse, he admitted that he had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps instead the devil had simply returned. Either way, whatever it was that caused the Prince in Jill Wade's garden, and indeed those that appeared across southern Devon on that wintry February night of eighteen fifty five, remains to this day unexplained.
This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by Richard mclin smith. Diane is an audio producer and sound recordist in her own right. You can find out more about her work at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram at in the sound Field. Thank You as ever for listening. Unexplained is an Avy Club production. The podcast created by Richard mclin smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard mc clan smith.
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