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Devil's Footprints / Hoofprints

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ogopogo3

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I always thought one of the strangest instances of Forteana was the case of the mysterious footprints appearing after a dense snowfall on February 7 and 8, 1855, in Devonshire, England.

Then I see this occured in America a few years ago:

http://www.theunexplainedsite.com/deborahsdevil.shtml

My question is, why didn't the locals recognize these as rabbit tracks 140 years ago? And why did it take 140 years for the tracks to appear the same way? Surely, melting snow isn't that fickle.
 
I've read lots of old reports of devil's footprints, many of them are recorded as going across roofs, surety not rabbits?
 
Originally posted by brian ellwood
I've read lots of old reports of devil's footprints, many of them are recorded as going across roofs, surety not rabbits?


You're right,the Devonshire Devil prints didn't go around obstacles,it went over them.There are many reports of this phenomenon,especially in the arctic.I recall there was a fine article on this subject in one of the"Fortean Studies"volumes.
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There was much discussion of the Devon case on this earlier thread

The possible cause was much more interesting than rabbits, though - it was an airship! Enjoy
 
My bf visited a supposedly haunted church one afternoon with a group of friends. They found footprints in the show which walked up to a rickety old fence put then never continued on. While these are not devil footprints I just thought it was an interesting related tale :D
 
well...i'm pretty sure they ain't rabbit tracks...
these tracks were reported to go up walls and fences, and only appeared to have one foot.

i am sure it's a hoax...i mean, there was this one guy admitted making rhino footprints go into a lake...same kinda thing, i reckon.

if no1 knows wat i'm waffling on about, plz feel free 2 tell me...i am not quite sure what i am saying myself:confused:
 
vampira said:
i am sure it's a hoax...i mean, there was this one guy admitted making rhino footprints go into a lake...same kinda thing, i reckon.

if no1 knows wat i'm waffling on about, plz feel free 2 tell me...i am not quite sure what i am saying myself:confused:
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Nope!!!!!

I know what you mean & agree with you!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
During the Jersey Devil hysteria during a week in 1909, thousands of mysterious and very similar footprints were discovered all over the state and its surrounding areas. many people of course blamed the Jersey Devil, a winged phantom that appeared as a mutation of horse and kangaroo. However, many of these prints slipped under small fences which certainly didn't suggest a large animal, but more rationally there is the possibility that migrating sand-hill cranes were to blame. Their shrill cries and the fact that thousands settled in an area could have explained prints on roof-tops etc, so could some bird-like creature have made the prints in Devon ? Or, maybe some Spring-Heeled Jack-like phenomenon! Or a mystery feline!
 
I was

under the impression it had been connected to Spring Heeled jack.

It was during the Crimean War as well, and apart from the Jersey case, I've never come across another similar case.
 
Footprints

The current theory as to the origin of the 1855 Phantom Footprints, as mentioned above, is that they were made by a horseshoe-weighted rope trailing as a dragline behind and below an airship. (Though "airship" seems a rather Fancy Dan description to apply to the crude balloons of the period.)

But surely such a line dragging across the English countryside or even repeatedly bouncing up and down would not have made such clean, sharp and well-delineated impressions nor would those impressions have been so evenly spaced. There WOULD have been numerous smears, gouges and drag marks, NONE of which were reported.

Moreover, that horseshoe-weighted line would almost certainly have become entangled with houses, fences, barns, trees and so on, trapping the airship until the line could be hacked through and abandoned. And in that case the weighted line would have remained behind, which it did not.

P. S. Or maybe it's just that I tend to be deeply suspicious of "explanations" which suddenly arise, like Athena from the head of Zeus, nearly 150 years after the fact.
 
152 years ago today!!!

Ok Just looking at the date, and then outside at the current weather conditions it occurs to me... my god it was 152 years ago today!!!

So do we have any eagle eyed forteans in south Devon waking up to little hoofy prints all over the place this morning?

Any one who doesnt know of this most fortean of events can get up to speed HERE

Mr P
 
The airship explanation is highly imaginative, but it falls down because the footprints were not in one continuous line but had several different branches.

IIRC, the most accepted explanation was that it was part of a hoax carried out by some gypsies, presumably involving relieving some gullible people of their money. (It's a bit more advanced than the old 'buy my lucky heather or be cursed forever, good sir' )
 
I'd never heard the gypsy explanation before. So how did said gypsies carry it out, then?
mrpoultice said:
So do we have any eagle eyed forteans in south Devon waking up to little hoofy prints all over the place this morning?
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I've emailed my cousin in Shaldon to ask him to keep an eye out. Not sure if it's actually snowed that far down, though...
 
Well I’m in Devon, but there’s no sodding snow just miserable rain. Will, um, keep an eye out for devils nonetheless…
 
wembley8 said:
IIRC, the most accepted explanation was that it was part of a hoax carried out by some gypsies, presumably involving relieving some gullible people of their money. (It's a bit more advanced than the old 'buy my lucky heather or be cursed forever, good sir' )
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Did, or did not, the hoofmarks continue across rooftops? And for 80 miles?

Anybody who could carry off either one of those probably deserved all the money they could get.

P. S. But it still makes more sense than the "horseshoe trailed by a balloon" theory, since this would have left long drag trails, not neat plop! plop! plop! horseshoe marks. And the horseshoe would have become caught on almost every bush, shrub, tree, barn, house and steeple along the route.
 
stuneville said:
I'd never heard the gypsy explanation before. So how did said gypsies carry it out, then?
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Easy....well as far as making it look like someone's walked through a wall anyway.
Carve something that will give you the desired 'footprint' and wear it on your feet. Walk up to the wall leaving prints, then, when you can go no further, walk backwards making sure to place your feet exactly in the same tracks that you've just made. Then go around the other side of the wall, walk backwards towards the wall until you come up against it, then walk forwards again away from the wall, placing your feet exactly in the tracks you've just made again.
And there you go, you've just made footprints that look like someone's walked through a wall.
Me and my mates used to do it all the time as kids when it snowed, only without the 'carved' footprint, we just did it in our shoes. Gripless was best because you didn't have to match any tread patterns up when you re-traced your steps, but it can be done with any footwear really, all it takes is carefulness, patience and a bit of practice.
 
Heh...when my children were young, after they had gone to bed on Christmas Eve, I used to make a potato cut of what I imagined a reindeer hoof must look like (yer basic cloven hoof - I know they weren't very accurate now, but bear with me), and using shoe polish, I'd make hoofprints along the garden path and up to the doorstep.

One Christmas, we were staying at my Mum's, and I did this; half an hour later, my brother, who's very interested in the occult, turned up. White as a sheet, and before even saying "hello", he stood just inside the front door and demanded to know if I'd made cloven hoofprints all over the path. When I said I had, he relaxed visibly, saying, "Don't DO that to me!!"
 
QuaziWashboard said:
Easy....well as far as making it look like someone's walked through a wall anyway.
Carve something that will give you the desired 'footprint' and wear it on your feet. Walk up to the wall leaving prints, then, when you can go no further, walk backwards making sure to place your feet exactly in the same tracks that you've just made. Then go around the other side of the wall, walk backwards towards the wall until you come up against it, then walk forwards again away from the wall, placing your feet exactly in the tracks you've just made again.
And there you go, you've just made footprints that look like someone's walked through a wall.
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For EIGHTY MILES?

Me and my mates used to do it all the time as kids when it snowed, only without the 'carved' footprint, we just did it in our shoes. Gripless was best because you didn't have to match any tread patterns up when you re-traced your steps, but it can be done with any footwear really, all it takes is carefulness, patience and a bit of practice.
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So did I and so did any other kid worth of the name. But we didn't do it for mile after mile, not in all the years of our childhoods combined.

And if Gypsies actually did this on both sides of house after house, hundreds or even thousands of houses, wouldn't somebody have noticed and reported these highly-suspicious activities to the nearest constable? In fact, why did no constable see them in the act?

In addition this sort of pranksterism is extrenely time-consuming. How did they ever manage to do it in a single night? Use every Gypsy in the British Isles? And, again, nobody noticed?

And to what purpose?

Sorry, if that was the explanation for the hoofmarks they wouldn't remain a major Fortean mystery 152 years later.

Remember, just two years back everybody KNEW that the marks were left by a balloon's trailing line.

P. S. Eventually we're going to have more "explanations" than there were hoofmarks. <g>
 
OldTimeRadio said:
QuaziWashboard said:
Easy....well as far as making it look like someone's walked through a wall anyway.
Carve something that will give you the desired 'footprint' and wear it on your feet. Walk up to the wall leaving prints, then, when you can go no further, walk backwards making sure to place your feet exactly in the same tracks that you've just made. Then go around the other side of the wall, walk backwards towards the wall until you come up against it, then walk forwards again away from the wall, placing your feet exactly in the tracks you've just made again.
And there you go, you've just made footprints that look like someone's walked through a wall.
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For EIGHTY MILES?
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Hey...we were just kids...our mums wouldn't let us go and play 80miles away, but the point I'm making is that it's not impossible to walk 80miles leaving prints behind from a specialy carved shoe sole, infact at the average walking speed of 4 mph it'd take a little less than a day, infact, if it was a team effort and you had someone set off from 80 miles away with identicaly carved shoe soles but set backwards on the shoe, then you could both meet at the halfway point at 40 miles after walking for around 10 hours, only 2 hours longer than the average working day.
Sounds Implausable? I'm a practical joker myself and you wouldn't believe how far someone who's obsessed with creating the perfect practical joke will go and how much effort they put into it in order to make it seem real. Look at the guys who do crop circles, up all night, tramping around with a board of wood all night in a field in the middle of nowhere....why? Because they get a kick out of seeing their creations in the newspaper and watching all the new-agers walking around them saying things like 'Oooooh, I'm getting karmic vibes from it!' or 'This is obviously the work of aliens!'
So why would someone want to create a track that kept going for 80 miles? Because they know that guys like you are gonna say;
For EIGHTY MILES?
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OldTimeRadio said:
Did, or did not, the hoofmarks continue across rooftops? And for 80 miles?
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Maybe, maybe not. No photos...The story is much more important than what's actually there - I'm note sure if anyone actually checked whether they really went across rooftops, and the rumour is very easy to improve when it starts. So long as one roof is done, people can take the others on trust.

"I saw those those foot prints, they must have gone for at least twenty miles."

"Fifity miles, I heard. Or was it eighty?"

"And they went right by houses."

"Right over the roofs, I heard. And over sleeping cows and sheep sometimes too. "

"Really?"

"You saw them footprints yourself, didn't you? Mine's another pint..."


It's a lot like modern crop circles that supposedly 'baffle scientists' (curiously, there don't seem to be any actual baffled scientists on record), along with about 150 years of spin and exageration.
 
"It seems that most of the Southern villages of Devon, from Totnes to Topsham, had been inundated with the prints in all manner of absurdities. Some stopped abruptly and continued after a large break, others stopped at walls as high as 14 feet, only to continue on the other side, leaving untouched snow on the top of the wall. Some were even said to have travelled through narrow apertures such as drainpipes. "
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http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/fort ... _foot.html

Easy enough tricks for fakers to pull off, but no mention of roofs...
 
So our hoaxer approarches the near side of House A, walking Indian-style, one foot in front of the other, until he "walks into the wall.".

Now he goes around to the far side of House A and repeats the entire process to House B and so on.

Question: How did he manage the "go around" without leaving footprints? If your answer is that he also carried snowshoes I'll have to remind you that all this was carried out in a single night, and that by adding such complications you're strangling the dear life out of poor Occam.

In addition, any person attempting to leave such "mystery tracks" in the snow by using tiny horseshoes attached to his regular shoes is occasionally going to leave SHOE prints, especially when he accidentally steps into softer snow. Why were such marks not found?

P. S. I think I can assure you that if I tried such a stunt the police would be questioning me personally before I got to the fifth house.

"It's all right, officers - I'm a Gypsy" probably wouldn't satisfy them
 
wembley8 said:
Easy enough tricks for fakers to pull off...
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Yes, but why even bother to pull off a complicated hoax, in cold whether to boot, where the likelihood (in advance) was that nobody would pay any attention?

"I don't know - kids playin', I reckon."

Kids were making "mystery" snow-track a long time before 1855. Neanderthals young'uns probably did it.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
So our hoaxer approarches the near side of House A, walking Indian-style, one foot in front of the other, until he "walks into the wall.".

Now he goes around to the far side of House A and repeats the entire process to House B and so on.

Question: How did he manage the "go around" without leaving footprints? If your answer is that he also carried snowshoes I'll have to remind you that all this was carried out in a single night, and that by adding such complications you're strangling the dear life out of poor Occam.

In addition, any person attempting to leave such "mystery tracks" in the snow by using tiny horseshoes attached to his regular shoes is occasionally going to leave SHOE prints, especially when he accidentally steps into softer snow. Why were such marks not found?

P. S. I think I can assure you that if I tried such a stunt the police would be questioning me personally before I got to the fifth house.

"It's all right, officers - I'm a Gypsy" probably wouldn't satisfy them
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Yeah, your right....whatever it was must obviously have just walked right through the wall yet remained solid enough to leave footprints. :roll: ;)

So, where you live, it's illegal to leave footprints in the snow? :shock:
 
Yeah, your right....whatever it was must obviously have just walked right through the wall yet remained solid enough to leave footprints. :roll: ;)
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I think the implication was that whatever it was had gone over the wall…
 
Sthenno said:
Yeah, your right....whatever it was must obviously have just walked right through the wall yet remained solid enough to leave footprints. :roll: ;)
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I think the implication was that whatever it was had gone over the wall…
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No, the implication was that it went over, or through houses. ;)
 
OldTimeRadio said:
wembley8 said:
Easy enough tricks for fakers to pull off...
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Yes, but why even bother to pull off a complicated hoax, in cold whether to boot, where the likelihood (in advance) was that nobody would pay any attention?

"I don't know - kids playin', I reckon."

Kids were making "mystery" snow-track a long time before 1855. Neanderthals young'uns probably did it.
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But this one was on a big enough scale to grab lots of attention. And if it's foretold in advance (say, by a gipsy fortuneteller) or taken advantage of after the event there are plenty of money-making opportunities. The usual scam is along the lines of the punter just needing a little investment to come into a great treasure.
 
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