Speaker 1: Hello, it's Richard mccleinsmith here with a quick update before
Speaker 1: we dive into today's episode. Unexplained is very excited to
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Speaker 1: see you on board. Great flurries of snow spiraled around
Speaker 1: the church spire and settled heavily on the roofs of
Speaker 1: the nearby cottages, like a scene from a Victorian Christmas card.
Speaker 1: It was the night of February eighth, eighteen fifty five
Speaker 1: in the parish of Withercombe Rawley in the County of
Speaker 1: Devon in the southwest of England. But while the residents
Speaker 1: of the village and those across the county shivered in
Speaker 1: their beds, something was abroad, silently scurrying from house to house,
Speaker 1: across fields and over fences. By dawn the following morning,
Speaker 1: all about the land was carpeted with a sharp frost.
Speaker 1: It was an hour or so after daybreak when the
Speaker 1: Reverend George Musgrave, wrapped up in a heavy coat, left
Speaker 1: the comfort of his rectory parlor and made the short
Speaker 1: walk across to the church. Moments later he caught sight
Speaker 1: of some peculiar prints on the frosty ground. Musgrave dropped
Speaker 1: to his knees to inspect them closer. Transfixed by how
Speaker 1: odd they were, Trembling with wonder and excitement, he jumped
Speaker 1: up and hurried back into the rectory. Then swiftly reappeared,
Speaker 1: carrying some sheets of paper and a fountain pen. With
Speaker 1: great care, he knelt down once more onto the frozen ground.
Speaker 1: Then he placed a sheet of paper over some of
Speaker 1: the tracks and began to trace their outlines. Whatever they were,
Speaker 1: they were clearly footprints, only not in the double line
Speaker 1: that a four footed animal would make, but in one
Speaker 1: single row, like something with only two legs, and they
Speaker 1: looked to have been made by an unknown creature with
Speaker 1: cloven Who you're listening to unexplained, and I am Richard
Speaker 1: McLean Smith. The winter of eighteen fifty five was a
Speaker 1: bleak one, even by England's chili standards. Temperatures remained at
Speaker 1: or below freezing for weeks, making it colder than anything
Speaker 1: in living memory. The southwestern coastal county of Devon, which
Speaker 1: usually saw slightly milder weather than northern England, did not
Speaker 1: escape the Great Frieze. Two of the region's largest rivers,
Speaker 1: the ex and the Teen, had frozen over entirely in places.
Speaker 1: Night after night, icy flakes fell relentlessly, piling up in
Speaker 1: great drifts and blanketing the countryside. However, residents across the
Speaker 1: southern part of the county woke up on that morning
Speaker 1: of February ninth to find something much more chilling than
Speaker 1: frost and snow. Across a remarkably wide swathe of countryside
Speaker 1: from the town of Exeter to the coast, mile after
Speaker 1: mile of what appeared to be strange footprints had appeared
Speaker 1: like something from the pages of a Sherlock Holmes mystery.
Speaker 1: Numerous tracks of what were colloquially called footmarks were reported
Speaker 1: from more than thirty locations across Devon. If the tracks
Speaker 1: had been left by a single creature. Its total travel
Speaker 1: distance that one night would have been somewhere between forty
Speaker 1: and one hundred miles. The size and shape of the footprints,
Speaker 1: as well as the roots they followed, seemed to defy
Speaker 1: the laws of nature and physics. Typically measuring four inches
Speaker 1: long by three inches wide, many of the prints, as
Speaker 1: Reverend Musgrave had noticed, at the shape of a cloven hoof,
Speaker 1: not unlike a donkey's, except just like Musgraves, they progressed
Speaker 1: in a straight, single line, one after another, spaced about
Speaker 1: eight and sixteen inches apart. In the shallow snow, they
Speaker 1: were between half an inch and four inches deep, often
Speaker 1: meandering across gardens and through villages eerily. In places, they
Speaker 1: were said to do impossible things. In the countryside, as
Speaker 1: well as leaving trails across frozen lakes and rivers, they
Speaker 1: would stop at one side of a haystack, leaving its
Speaker 1: sides and top undisturbed, then recommence abruptly on the other
Speaker 1: side and vanish through small holes in thickets and hedges,
Speaker 1: only to appear again, impossibly, it seemed, on the other side.
Speaker 1: But most unnervingly, they seemed to go from door to door,
Speaker 1: venturing up to front steps before seemingly backing away. In
Speaker 1: some places, it was said that there was hardly a
Speaker 1: home that had not been visited. Most of the people
Speaker 1: who saw the bizarre tracks were country folk familiar with
Speaker 1: all manner of animal trails, but none of them had
Speaker 1: seen anything like this before. To many of the god
Speaker 1: fearing Devonians, the strange marks brought to mind sinister echoes
Speaker 1: of a bit biblical story from the Book of Exodus,
Speaker 1: chapter twelve, known as the Plague on the first Born.
Speaker 1: In the story, God addresses Moses and tells him that
Speaker 1: on an appointed night, he will visit Egypt and strike
Speaker 1: down every firstborn, be it human or other animal. But
Speaker 1: to others, the fact the prince were seemingly created by
Speaker 1: something with a cloven hoof they brought to mind something else,
Speaker 1: entirely the devil. Either way, whatever it was so unsettled
Speaker 1: one group of local tradesmen from the coastal town of Dawlish.
Speaker 1: They conspired to hunt it down and kill it. Seemingly
Speaker 1: undaunted by the prospect of it being Lucifer himself, the
Speaker 1: men took up guns and bludgeons and made their way
Speaker 1: to a local churchyard to begin their search, finding the
Speaker 1: tail end of some prince. There, they promptly began to
Speaker 1: follow them through the snow, while all about sparkled white
Speaker 1: under the mid morning sun. The prince first led them
Speaker 1: to the town of Luscombe and then Oakland, a total
Speaker 1: distance of around five miles, but the men found no
Speaker 1: sign of a culprit. At Cliffs Saint George, on the
Speaker 1: other side of the River ex two villagers were following
Speaker 1: a different set of tracks when they discovered what appeared
Speaker 1: to be a strange whitish excrement among the marks. Others
Speaker 1: from the same area followed a further set of tracks
Speaker 1: to the edge of a field, where they stopped abruptly,
Speaker 1: only to reappear again in the middle of the field,
Speaker 1: suggesting the perpetrator may have taken to the air before
Speaker 1: coming back down to continue its meandering. One man told
Speaker 1: a tale of a local fox hunt that attracted the
Speaker 1: prince down to a wood where whatever the thing was
Speaker 1: appeared to have been cornered, but when the hunt dogs
Speaker 1: rushed in to flush it out, they turned around and
Speaker 1: reappeared suddenly. Why in terror, too frightened to go back,
Speaker 1: not one person or group managed to track the mysterious
Speaker 1: prince for more than a few miles for a while.
Speaker 1: The belief that Satan had been among them drove some
Speaker 1: locals across the county to implement a self imposed curfew,
Speaker 1: refusing to venture outdoors after nightfall. On that strange night
Speaker 1: in February, also at the parish of Cliss Saint George,
Speaker 1: Reverend Henry Elcom had been woken in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night by his dog. The animal had clearly been
Speaker 1: spooped and was barking loudly and pouring at the back door.
Speaker 1: Having looked out into the night and seen nothing outside,
Speaker 1: the reverend finally managed to calm the dog down before
Speaker 1: returning to bed. The next morning, the reverend awoke, much
Speaker 1: like many others that day, to find the strange prince
Speaker 1: dotted about the grounds of his rectory. He later described
Speaker 1: the marks as being similar in shape, albeit varying a
Speaker 1: little in size, and constituted what to his eye was
Speaker 1: some kind of claw print. Elacum also interviewed people who
Speaker 1: attempted to track the creature and obtained samples of the
Speaker 1: excrement found alongside the trails. He forwarded the samples to
Speaker 1: renowned naturalist Richard Owen, a controversial figure in the world
Speaker 1: of naturalism. Owen is perhaps best known for coining the
Speaker 1: term dinosauria, from which we get the word dinosaur, meaning
Speaker 1: terrible reptile. His thoughts on the matter remain unknown. Perhaps
Speaker 1: less than impressed at receiving Reverend Elcom's scatological samples in
Speaker 1: the post, he neglected to send a reply. A few
Speaker 1: days later. Ellacum did receive a, however, from his colleague
Speaker 1: George Musgrave, who'd been so animated by his discovery of
Speaker 1: the prince he'd made the effort to preserve a record
Speaker 1: of them. Musgrave included a sample of one of his drawings,
Speaker 1: along with his own explanation for what it could be.
Speaker 1: Unlike many of his parishioners, who feared the devil might
Speaker 1: be among them, it was Musgrave's theory that the creature
Speaker 1: was in fact a kangaroo that had perhaps escaped from
Speaker 1: a zoo or some kind of traveling show. Within a fortnight,
Speaker 1: the story of the mysterious footprints was being reported in
Speaker 1: the national press, including the Illustrated London News and enormously
Speaker 1: popular Weekly It broadcasted the story to a wide audience
Speaker 1: and included images of the apparent footprints. This was the
Speaker 1: great age of the Victorian gentleman naturalist, typically a man
Speaker 1: from the upper or middle class with the financial means
Speaker 1: and social standing to pursue a passion for natural history,
Speaker 1: and so the floodgates were opened, and a host of
Speaker 1: unusual theories were proposed, ranging from the rational to the bazaar.
Speaker 1: At the more rational end were that the footprints belonged
Speaker 1: to mice, rats, squirrels or otters, and had been enlarged
Speaker 1: in size by a freeze thor action, in much the
Speaker 1: same way that bare footprints in the Himalayas can become
Speaker 1: distorted and enlarged, only to be mistaken for yety tracts,
Speaker 1: as discussed in Unexplained, Season seven, episode eight, Walking on Snow.
Speaker 1: Other suggestions verged increasingly toward the ridiculous, including the suggestion
Speaker 1: that the tracks had been made by the hindfoot of
Speaker 1: a badger that had somehow hopped its way across large
Speaker 1: parts of South Devon. In the weeks that follow the
Speaker 1: appearance of the unusual markings in the snow, an intriguing
Speaker 1: series of letters was published in the Illustrated London News
Speaker 1: by a correspondent signing himself enigmatically as South Devon. The
Speaker 1: so called South Devon started by listing the primary places
Speaker 1: in which the footmarks were discovered, then made a series
Speaker 1: of assertive claims. One such claim was that the marks
Speaker 1: in every parish were in fact exactly the same size
Speaker 1: and the step distance the same length, contrary to what
Speaker 1: had previously been reported. The writer also noted that the
Speaker 1: Prince at one point appeared to have vaulted a fourteen
Speaker 1: foot war and appeared on the roofs of houses. They
Speaker 1: also dismissed the idea that thawing and refreezing could have
Speaker 1: distorted the marks, noting that other animal prints made the
Speaker 1: same night remained perfectly recognizable. In total, he claimed that
Speaker 1: the marks formed a trail at least one hundred miles
Speaker 1: in length, and were all in a straight line, and
Speaker 1: had even at one point crossed the two mile wide river.
Speaker 1: Ex South Devon claimed to be an experienced countryman with
Speaker 1: a great deal of experience in tracking wild animals and
Speaker 1: birds upon the snow, who had once spent five months
Speaker 1: hunting in the Canadian wilderness. The prints, they said, were
Speaker 1: like nothing on Earth they'd ever seen, and from there
Speaker 1: the theories of what had made the devil's footprints, as
Speaker 1: they had by then become known, became even wilder. A
Speaker 1: former naval officer named Rupert Gould, who had a particular
Speaker 1: interest in the mysteries of the sea, noted with alarm
Speaker 1: how the so called devil's hoof marks had appeared on
Speaker 1: land close to the coast. He saw a parallel with
Speaker 1: a strange report that emerged from the Cagoulin Islands, also
Speaker 1: known as the Desolation Islands, located around eighteen hundred nautical
Speaker 1: miles south of Madagascar. Back in eighteen forty. A member
Speaker 1: of the crew of the James Ross Antarctica expedition exploring
Speaker 1: the islands that year claimed to discover a series of
Speaker 1: small horse or donkey like tracks in the snow on
Speaker 1: one of the islands, made by some unidentified creature that,
Speaker 1: like something disturbing from the Lovecraft mythos, appeared to have
Speaker 1: come out of the sea. Some decades later, Edwardian ghost
Speaker 1: hunter Eliot O'Donnell claimed that he had once been told
Speaker 1: a peculiar story by a man named mister Wilson. The
Speaker 1: man supposedly detailed a boyhood visit to the Devon seaside
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen hundred z when he discovered a
Speaker 1: single line of hoofmarks one morning on a deserted beach
Speaker 1: which also led directly into the sea. On this occasion,
Speaker 1: the marks were of whole cloven hoofs six feet apart,
Speaker 1: and were so deeply impressed in the sand that they
Speaker 1: were significantly deeper than the footprints left by Wilson himself,
Speaker 1: who weighed sixteen stone. One of the more unusual attributions
Speaker 1: for the footprints was that they had secretly been made
Speaker 1: by Romany travelers. The main advocate of this theory was
Speaker 1: a man named Manfrey Wood, as described in his autobiography
Speaker 1: in the Life of a Romany Gypsy, published in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three. According to Wood, the Devil's footprints were the
Speaker 1: result of at least eighteen months of careful planning by
Speaker 1: seven Romany tribes. Together, they had supposedly used more than
Speaker 1: four hundred pairs of specially made stilts in the shape
Speaker 1: of cloven hoofs fashioned from old step ladders to create
Speaker 1: the devilish marks. The aim of this elaborate plan was
Speaker 1: to ultimately scare away two rival groups of the Romanes,
Speaker 1: who were Pagans and fervent believers in the occult. A
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three article in the UK's Daily Mirror newspaper,
Speaker 1: written by a so called traveling gentleman, Danny Smith, backed
Speaker 1: up the theory. However, neither proponent could explain how between
Speaker 1: four hundred and five hundred travelers had managed to coordinate
Speaker 1: a long distance stilt walk in the dead of a
Speaker 1: snowy winter's night, traversing gardens and routots without once being spotted.
Speaker 1: Perhaps the most bizarre culprit of all was proposed by
Speaker 1: one s ke off North Street in Brighton in a
Speaker 1: letter published in the Brighton Guardian paper on the twenty
Speaker 1: eighth of February eighteen fifty five. The writer asserted that
Speaker 1: the footprints were made by a strange creature known as
Speaker 1: a unipede, first identified by the Norse Icelandic navigator Bjarni
Speaker 1: Herelson during a visit to the coasts of Labrador in
Speaker 1: what is present day Canada in one thousand one. See
Speaker 1: Herelson is believed by some to be the first known
Speaker 1: European to set eyes on the mainland of the North
Speaker 1: American continent, having apparently done so as far back as
Speaker 1: nine hundred eighty six. See in the Saga of the Greenlanders,
Speaker 1: which recounts the apparent Norse colonization of North America. Theres
Speaker 1: an account of Harelson setting sail from Norway to Iceland
Speaker 1: to visit his parents, only to find that his father
Speaker 1: had left to go to Greenland. Attempting to find his
Speaker 1: father with no map or compass, Hereolson and his crew
Speaker 1: were blown off course by a storm before glimpsing a
Speaker 1: land with tree covered mountains that was most definitely not Greenland.
Speaker 1: It looked hospitable, but Byani was eager to see his parents,
Speaker 1: and so despite the entreaties of his crew, who wanted
Speaker 1: to go ashore, he turned the ship around and eventually
Speaker 1: arrived in Greenland. However, it seems that the adventurous Icelander
Speaker 1: went back to have another look. On a supposed later
Speaker 1: trip to the Labrador coast, Herelson described seeing a bizarre
Speaker 1: animal that had one leg and wings which appeared to
Speaker 1: radiate from the middle of its back and spread out
Speaker 1: like a peacock's tail. When this fantastical creature was alarmed
Speaker 1: or excited, it erected a single crest of feathers above
Speaker 1: its head in such a way that Harelson believed previous
Speaker 1: observers had mistaken it for a unicorn. Bianni Herelson is
Speaker 1: said to have named the peculiar creature the unipede. It
Speaker 1: was said to emit a hideous cry, unlike that of
Speaker 1: any other creature, and was also said to be able
Speaker 1: to part run, part fly incredibly fast, touching the ground
Speaker 1: frequently at equal distances, leaving footprints in a single line. Crucially,
Speaker 1: the icelander claimed that the one legged creature's single limb
Speaker 1: resembled that of a quadruped rather than a bird with
Speaker 1: a hoof like foot, a description which greatly resembled pictures
Speaker 1: of the so called devil's footprints that had been published
Speaker 1: in the papers, and thus the correspondent to the Brighton
Speaker 1: Guardian concluded the Devon tracts were almost certainly that of
Speaker 1: the mythical unipede. In nineteen fifty two, a collection of
Speaker 1: manuscripts and letters were found by a local historian named
Speaker 1: Major Anthony Gibbs in the parish church of Cliss Saint George.
Speaker 1: They were the papers of the Reverend Elcum, which had
Speaker 1: lain preserved in the parish box at the church for
Speaker 1: all that time. When folk historian Theo Brown gained access
Speaker 1: to the Elegent papers that same year, she uncovered the
Speaker 1: true identity of the mysterious South Devon, who had so
Speaker 1: caused a stir with his controversial proclamations about the apparent
Speaker 1: creator of the Prince. As it turned out, South Devon
Speaker 1: was a nineteen year old named William Durban who had
Speaker 1: simply made up his accounts. All in all, there are
Speaker 1: three candidates most firmly in the frame for making the
Speaker 1: Devil's footprints that wintry night in eighteen fifty five. Perhaps
Speaker 1: the most intriguing is the balloon theory, which was not
Speaker 1: considered at the time, but has been proposed more recently.
Speaker 1: The suggestion is that the hoofmarks were in fact made
Speaker 1: by a rope with a horseshoe shaped weight that had
Speaker 1: been left dangling from an errant balloon, perhaps explaining how
Speaker 1: the marks were left in straight lines for mile after
Speaker 1: mile as the balloon drifted across the countryside. But if so,
Speaker 1: why were no scuff marks from other trailing portions of
Speaker 1: the rope found, and who would be so suicidal as
Speaker 1: to be aloft in a balloon on such a freezing night.
Speaker 1: The most common mammals that might have been out on
Speaker 1: that winter's night are rats, mice, and squirrels, which are
Speaker 1: all known to leave hopping tracks in which all four
Speaker 1: feet held together can form a pattern similar to a
Speaker 1: hoof mark and appear on a singular line, an effect
Speaker 1: that will be enhanced if the snow in which there
Speaker 1: left melts and then refreezes, as it did that February night.
Speaker 1: But it's highly unlikely that so many such creatures that
Speaker 1: would be required to make all the markings would each
Speaker 1: have hopped for such long distances, sometimes up to five miles,
Speaker 1: something that would be unusual if only one had done it.
Speaker 1: It would seem then that if we were looking for
Speaker 1: a material culprit, birds would seem to be the most
Speaker 1: likely capable of covering long distances and landing on high walls, rooftops,
Speaker 1: and haystacks. But how would a bird's foot, webbed or
Speaker 1: clawed come to resemble a cloven hoof. There is one candidate,
Speaker 1: remarked on by one astute observer back in eighteen fifty five,
Speaker 1: known as the Great Bustard. Weighing anywhere between thirteen and
Speaker 1: forty pounds, it is one of the heaviest living flying animals,
Speaker 1: looking a bit like a cross between a wild turkey
Speaker 1: and a large grouse. Bustard ceased to breed in Britain
Speaker 1: in eighteen thirty two, when they were hunted to extinction,
Speaker 1: but they were still seen in the countryside until around
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy three. Bustard's feet make a heel mark and
Speaker 1: three distinct toe marks, so it's possible that the donkey
Speaker 1: like cloven hoof prints were in fact the imprints of
Speaker 1: these birds. It would certainly explain why the footprints appeared
Speaker 1: across a relatively large area in a short space of time,
Speaker 1: including in places that could only be reached by flight. Inexplicable,
Speaker 1: diabolical looking hoof marks are by no means an exclusively
Speaker 1: nineteenth century phenomenon. In nineteen fifty seven, a missus Linda Hansen,
Speaker 1: saw footprints of what appeared to be cloven hoofs in
Speaker 1: her back garden in Humberside, Northeast England. The cloven prints,
Speaker 1: four inches across and spaced twelve inches apart, were sharply
Speaker 1: defined and stopped suddenly in the middle of the garden.
Speaker 1: More recently, in two thousand nine, Jilled Wade, a resident
Speaker 1: of North day woke up to find that overnight, a
Speaker 1: snow covered back garden had been inexplicably imprinted by single
Speaker 1: hoof prints which ran for almost seventy feet in a
Speaker 1: single linear direction. Their shape and size were eerily similar
Speaker 1: to the Prince in Devon one hundred and seventy years earlier.
Speaker 1: Graham Ingalls from the Center for forty in Zoology went
Speaker 1: to investigate. He concurred that the footprints were a match
Speaker 1: to those from eighteen fifty five, and although he surmised
Speaker 1: the most likely cause to be a mouse, he admitted
Speaker 1: that he had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps
Speaker 1: instead the devil had simply returned. Either way, whatever it
Speaker 1: was that caused the Prince in Jill Wade's garden, and
Speaker 1: indeed those that appeared across southern Devon on that wintry
Speaker 1: February night of eighteen fifty five, remains to this day unexplained.
Speaker 1: This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by
Speaker 1: Richard mclin smith. Diane is an audio producer and sound
Speaker 1: recordist in her own right. You can find out more
Speaker 1: about her work at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram
Speaker 1: at in the sound Field. Thank You as ever for listening.
Speaker 1: Unexplained is an Avy Club production. The podcast created by
Speaker 1: Richard mclin smith. All other elements of the podcast, including
Speaker 1: the music, are also produced by me Richard mc clan smith.
Speaker 1: Unexplained the book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide.
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