On the night of 8-9 February 1855 (and on one or two nights thereafter) trails, resembling those of a donkey, were laid across large areas of Devon. They appeared in shallow snow, between half an inch and four inches deep, meandering through villages and gardens. Sometimes, it was said, they did 'impossible' things, such as crossing roofs, leaping tall walls, disappearing through small holes in hedges, or stopping dead on one side of a haystack, leaving its sides and top undisturbed, and commencing abruptly once more on the other side. 

I covered this remarkable topic in considerable depth in a fully-footnoted paper published by Fortean Studies back in 1994, and while it's horribly arrogant of me to say so, mere lack of follow-up by other authors means this paper does probably still represent 'the current state of scholarship' in this tiny corner of the academic universe. You can read the whole thing here if you want the extra-detailed take, or to see where I got some of the following information from. But to keep things more to the sort of length encouraged here at AH, we can focus the discussion on the main anomalies associated with the prints – the things that, it is generally charged by those who see them as a mystery, render them hard to explain in conventional terms. There are essentially six of these:

The ubiquity of the prints

First, the marks were ubiquitous. They were 'vast' in number; one contemporary wrote that 'there was hardly a garden in Lympstone where these footprints were not observable, and in this parish he appears to have gamboled with inexpressible activity'. In Dawlish, 'his footprints were traced through the greater part of the town', and in other parts of the county prints were found in 'fields, gardens, roads, housetops, & other likely and unlikely places'. In all, the tracks 'extended over a tract of country of 30 or 40 miles, probably more ... Now, when we consider the distance that must have been gone over to have left these marks - I may say in almost every garden, or doorstep, through the extensive woods of Luscombe, in enclosures and farms - the actual progress must have exceeded a hundred miles.'

This, if executed in a single night, by a single entity, was certainly a feat worthy of the Devil himself. Indeed - as Rupert Gould, who published an essay on the subject in the 1920s, pointed out, to cross even 40 miles, supposing steady progress and a generous 14 hours of darkness, with the generally-reported stride of around eight inches, would require the perpetrator to move at the rate of six steps per second. But the supposition that the hoofmarks were the work of one creature is a dangerous one. The greatest distance we can say with confidence that a set of tracks was followed was about five miles - a long way, particularly if the marks were made by a single animal, but not an impossible journey for some animals to make in a night, and not necessarily a problem if what witnesses were seeing was a mixed trail left by a number of animals. Several accounts make it clear that the trail was not continuous. A local vicar, H.T. Ellacombe, wrote: 'At Exmouth I have been informed by those that saw them there were marks in the middle of a field, insulated - without any apparent approach or retreat' - while - also in Exmouth - one W. Courthope Forman recalled that 'the footprints came up the front garden to within a few feet of the house, stopped abruptly, and began again at the back within a few feet of the building'. Some tracks, at least, did not lead into thin air; in Torquay, a gentleman followed a trail from his garden to a tree stump, under which he discovered 'a very large toad'.

The length of time it took to lay the trail is also open to serious question. While it appears that the great majority of the tracks were first seen on the morning of 9 February, several accounts suggest that some were discovered at other times. The Western Luminary, writing perhaps three or four days afterwards, noted simply that the prints had been made 'since the recent snow storms', while more explicity the Western Times referred to the appearance, in Topsham, of tracks laid on 13 February.

Prints found in anomalous locations 

The alarming ubiquity of the Hoofmarks was not the most puzzling feature of the phenomenon. Their appearance in many bizarre and unlikely places aroused even greater comment. Prints were said to have appeared on a second-floor window sill, in a garden guarded by a 14-foot wall, and, as we have seen, on either side of a foot-high hole in a hedge, of a drainpipe and a haystack. In addition, several reports refer to the appearance of tracks on rooftops. While these apparently well-attested reports allow us to assert that a few of the main animal suspects - notably the donkey -could not have made all the prints, a surprising number of animals can climb well enough to have been responsible for the bizarre trails. These include cats, rats, and mice. Birds are even more obvious candidates, if one assumes that their feet could have iced up into horseshoe shapes – and, as my original paper showed, there is some evidence this is the case. Taken together, the reports of prints found in anomalous locations suggest that a very small animal - one small enough to enter a 6" pipe or pass through a foot-high hedge-hole - made some of the prints. Alternatively, it is of course possible that these marks were made by human hoaxers anxious to make it appear that only a devil could have been responsible. The discovery - reported by the Reverend Musgrave - of prints which led to a haystack which had no marks on its surface, and commenced again on the other side, is perhaps the most difficult incident to explain using an animal hypothesis. However, we have it only at second hand and it is impossible to know how carefully the surface of the haystack was examined.

Indeed, the problem with assessing all the reports of prints found in strange places is a lack of full descriptions of their precise situation. It is not at all clear, for example, how carefully witnesses checked the alignment of hoofmarks leading to high walls with any trail found within them. It is therefore still possible that the marks found outside a wall were made by one animal and those discovered inside by another. Similarly, the suggestion that the trail crossed the river Exe and began again on the other side is nowhere supported by evidence that anyone tracked the hoofmarks right to the shore on one bank and then located the point at which they emerged from the river on the other; on the contrary, the fact that no report mentions investigators following a trail across the iced-up river strongly suggests that no-one tried. All we can say with certainty is that hoof-marks were found on both sides of the Exe estuary. 

The similarity of the prints

Perhaps the most peculiar of all the mysteries associated with the Devil's Hoofmarks is the suggestion that prints found in many different locations were absolutely identical both in size and stride. The Reverend Musgrave, for example - on the evidence an exceedingly careful observer - wrote that he and a fellow-clergyman measured the distance between hoofmarks found in Withecombe Raleigh with a ruler, and 'the interval between each impression was found to be undeviatingly eight inches and a half. On the same day a mutual acquaintance ... measured the intervals between similar prints in his garden, above a mile and a half distant from the rectory, and found it to be exactly eight inches and a half. This, in my opinion, is one of the most remarkable and confounding circumstances we have to deal with'. In addition, 'South Devon', in the Illustrated London News, gives the measurements of the hoofmarks themselves as 4 inches by 2.75, and asserts that 'the foot-marks in every parish [were] exactly the same size and the step the same length.'

Unfortunately, most of the other surviving descriptions of the hoofmarks are not as precise as these. Where measurements are given, however, they often differ considerably, as the table of descriptions given in my original paper shows. The prints themselves varied in size from 3.5" to 4" long and from 1.5 to 2.75" wide, and the stride from 8" to 16". In my opinion, these variations strongly suggest that the great majority of the Devil's Hoofmarks were made by animals, rather than by human hoaxers for whom a uniform shape and stride would have been important. The difference in the reported size of the hoofmarks themselves further suggests that a number of different animals were responsible for the tracks. Nevertheless, it still seems remarkable that the size of the prints should vary so little while the distance between them varied so much.