On February 8, 1855, bewildered villagers observed the devil's hoofprints in the snow around eighteen communities in Devon, England. Appearing overnight, the prints covered 100 miles, including the jump over the River Exe's two-mile-wide estuary. Shaped like miniature horseshoes, the prints ran one directly behind the other as if made by a one-legged creature or a biped with a peculiar stride. The marks were always exactly eight and a half inches apart.
In Topsham, the village baker, George Fairly, saw the tracks go up to his shop door and then turn abruptly right. For a few feet they followed alongside a high brick wall, and then they simply vanished. In Lympstone, the hoofprints were found in practically all the gardens and courtyards of the town, sometimes walking up or through walls and over or along roofs. One time they entered a shed and came out the other side through a six-inch hole. They also went through a drainpipe and a tiny hole in a thick bramble hedge. In the ice in front of a church door, the tracks appeared to have been made by something sizzling hot. Near Dawlish, the trail led into some undergrowth, which left the village dogs howling in distress and refusing to go near it.
Several thousand people saw the tracks before a change of weather erased them. The event was covered by the Times of London. For weeks afterward, people stayed in after dark.
Only once before had such tracks been seen and recorded. Similar hoofprints were discovered by a surveying party on Kerguelen Island during an 1840 expedition of the southern polar regions, led by Captain Sir James Clark Ross.
Text from: Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored by Juanita Rose Violins, published by Weiser Books, 2009