The county of Devonshire, which is located on the coast of Lyme Bay, carefully preserves a mystical history that began on February 8, 1885 in the town of Exmouth. In the early morning, residents of the city saw mysterious footprints on the freshly fallen snow, resembling prints of small hooves. Many especially superstitious were alarmed, believing that the Lord had turned away from them, since the devil himself had come to their land.
Riots and rumors quickly swept the county, and the traces immediately interested scientists. Each of them was ten centimeters long and seven wide, and the distance between two adjacent prints, which was exactly the same everywhere, was twenty centimeters. The tracks stretched in a perfectly straight line, and, therefore, only a creature moving on two legs could leave them, and nothing like this was ever found in the south of England.
The footprints were also distinguished by one more inexplicable feature: although the snow that fell the night before was very soft and fluffy, every print in it was covered with a thin ice crust, which made it especially clear. Such prints could only appear if the hooves (or what left these prints) were in the snow for a very short time and were abnormally hot at the same time. But the devilry didn't end there either.
When people decided to follow the route of the strange beast, they faced an even more complex riddle. The creature made its way through fences, rooftops, three-meter stacks of hay and other obstacles. An even chain of tracks did not deviate a centimeter from a straight trajectory, and the stride length remained equal to 20 cm.
This mysticism agitated even skeptics and the mysterious events were immediately covered in local newspapers, where they at least somehow tried to clarify the situation and calm the public. Some pages have survived to this day.
As it turned out further, passing through Exmouth, the unknown creature headed north, but then turned sharply to the west at a right angle and climbed over the mouth of the Aix River, which is about 3 km long. On the other side, the mysterious traveler turned sharply south again, reached the town of Teignmouth and came to the shore of the ice-covered Lyme Bay, where his trail was lost.
After a closer inspection of the area, the trackers again stumbled upon hoof prints on the other side of the bay. Once again on land, the creature headed south-west, passed several small settlements, passed through snow-covered fields and pastures, arrived at Bikton, one of the districts of the city of Totnes, where the tracks were finally cut off. The total length of this route was over 160 kilometers.
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In one of the church parishes, through the territory of which a two-legged hoofed ungulate made its way, the local pastor, Rev. J. M. Musgrave, calming the agitated parishioners, assured them that nothing special had happened, that a kangaroo who had escaped from the menagerie left footprints in the snow.
Only where did the kangaroo's hooves come from and how he managed to walk 160 kilometers in one night in frosty weather, while jumping over fences and climbing onto rooftops, the holy father could not explain. Local "experts" offered other, no more convincing explanations. They said that the tracks belong to a lame hare, toad, otter, a huge bird that flew from the continent, and other absurd guesses.
In the meantime, the press continued to discuss and sketch the devil's hoof prints, trying to get to the bottom of the truth.
Many years have passed since this mysterious incident, but its mystery has not yet been solved, and it still attracts the attention of scientists, professional researchers, writers, journalists and just inquisitive people. And often they find new documents - written testimonies of eyewitnesses, old newspaper publications - that help to get closer to the solution and give a reason for proposing new versions of what happened.
These enthusiasts include Robert Lesniakiewicz, a former career border guard officer, engineer, journalist, writer, one of the leading Polish ufologists and researchers of mysterious natural phenomena, as well as Dr. Milos Esenski, a Slovak journalist and writer who has devoted himself to studying the same problems. In a joint article "Devil's Footprints in Devonshire", prepared in 2002 for the Polish magazine Nieznany Swiat, Lesnyakevich and Yessensky analyze the data available today and put forward their own hypothesis of the appearance of the mentioned footprints. One of the most important documents related to the incident in question are fragments of the book "Riddles and Notes from Devon and Cornwall", written by the daughter of a pastor from the town of Dawlish, Henrietta Fasdon, and published at the turn of the 50-60s of the XIX century:
“The tracks appeared at night. Since my father was a pastor, other clergymen from our Anglican diocese came to him, and they all began to talk about these unusual footprints that could be seen throughout Dawlish. The tracks were in the shape of a small hoof, inside some of them, as it were, claw prints were visible. One line of footprints that stretched from the threshold of our house to the sacristy stood out especially sharply in the snow-covered church courtyard. Another approached the wall of the columbarium, broke off in front of it, and then continued on the other side. Many similar traces were also on the roofs of houses in different parts of the town … I still remember how clear these strange and somehow ominous traces were, how many of them there were and what fear they instilled in my soul. I then thought that such traces could have been left by huge wild cats, and I was very afraid,that the servant will forget to lock all the doors at night.
In the fall of 1957, an article by paranormal researcher Eric Dingwall titled "The Devil Walking Again" appeared in Tomorrow magazine. In it, in particular, the story of a certain Colin Wilson was cited about how in the summer of 1950, on one of the deserted sea beaches of Devonshire, he saw on the smooth and dense surface of wet sand, compacted by sea waves, strange prints, similar to the tracks of hooves. The prints looked fresh and very crisp, "as if they had been cut out with a razor or stamped with some sharpened instrument." The spacing between the prints was about 180 centimeters, and they were significantly deeper than those that remained in the sand of Wilson's bare feet. And he weighed over 80 kilograms.
Strange traces went from the very edge of the water, but there were no traces back to the water. At the same time, it seemed that the traces appeared literally a few minutes before Wilson's arrival. Had he come to the beach a little earlier, then, perhaps, he would have met face to face with the Devonshire devil himself. Later, Wilson joined the ranks of the researchers on the mystery of the "devil", and in 1979 his book The Occult Mysteries was published in London, where, in a chapter on the Devonshire devil, the author writes:
“The tracks looked as if this creature was looking for something. It wandered in the backyards, and it seemed that he was completely unfamiliar with the human way of life. " And then Wilson reports a real sensation “One of the correspondents of the Illustrated London News quotes a fragment from the notes of the famous British polar explorer James Ross, dated May 1840. When the Ross ships anchored near one of the islands of the Antarctic Kerguelen archipelago, the members of the expedition were surprised to see hoofprints on the snow-covered coast. They went in the direction where the tracks led, but soon reached a rocky hill, free of snow, where the tracks were no longer visible. The appearance of hoof prints in these places seemed completely inexplicable, since no hoofed animals were found on these islands."
Already in our time, the events described above have received an unexpected and surprising continuation. It turned out that one of the members of the Ross expedition, a certain Clark Perry, after being fired from the British Navy, settled in Devonshire, in the already mentioned coastal town of Teignmouth, located ten kilometers south-west of Exmouth. In 1980, among the papers of the late Clark, he was found a diary and a daguerreotype (old photograph), which depicted Clarke himself, holding in his hand some incomprehensible spherical object. As for the diary, the following picture of events was formed from its regular and lengthy entries.
The item Clarke is photographed with is a metal ball he brought back from Kerguelen. According to Clarke, James Ross deliberately kept silent about the fact that on the island, in addition to inexplicable footprints in the snow, two strange metal balls were found, one of them intact and the other broken into pieces. Moreover, the hoof prints began just from the ball and led from it in a perfectly straight line to a rocky hill. According to Clark, the balls they found fell from the sky, while he adds that during his stay on the island he did not leave the feeling of the constant presence of an invisible spy near the members of the expedition, who did not take his eyes off them.
When the ships of the expedition headed for the island of Tasmania, both mysterious balls - both whole and broken - lay in Clark Perry's sailor's trunk. However, when the other sailors found out what souvenirs Clark was carrying from Kerguelen, they were seized by superstitious fear, and they began to persuade him to throw the balloons overboard. However, he did not obey, and then the sailors demanded that Clark, along with his balloons, leave the ship as soon as they arrived in Hobart, the main city and port of Tasmania. This time Clark obeyed, and after a while he was hired as a sailor on another passing ship, on which he safely arrived in England in the fall of 1842. This time, during the entire voyage, he did not say a word to anyone about what lay at the very bottom of his trunk.
Clark settled in Teignmouth, found a job there on the shore, and hid the chest with mysterious souvenirs in the basement of the house, where they lay for thirteen years, until February 3, 1855. That ill-fated evening, Clark returned home with several friends, and they all were very tipsy. The libations were continued, and on the "drunken business" Clark let his friends about the balls. Those wished to immediately inspect the overseas curiosity. Everyone went down to the basement, Clark retrieved the balls from the chest. According to the unanimous opinion, it was decided to open the whole and unharmed ball. Everyone in turn began to hit the ball with a heavy hammer with all their might. After one of the blows from the inside of the ball, there was a grinding sound, and a crack appeared on its surface. Clark instantly sobered up, escorted his friends out of the house and went to bed.
Going to work the next morning, Clark saw that the crack on the surface of the ball had grown noticeably, and realized that the "souvenir" could crack at any moment. Thereafter, contrary to custom, no records appeared for several days, and then, on February 7, 1855, only one phrase was recorded, stating that on that day Clark would throw balloons into the sea on the beach at Teignmouth, and then go to Exmouth. where he will spend the weekend with his friend. At this, Clark Perry's diary broke off …
Clark's relatives who live to this day in Teignmouth were able to find out that he died on the night of February 8-9, 1855 in Bickton, that is, where the 160-kilometer journey of the Devonshire Devil, which began on the beach in Exmouth, ended. Does this mean that the devil was really looking for something, as Colin Wilson claims in his book? And he was looking for Clark Perry with the intention of killing him. After all, Clark was the only person who died in Devonshire that night …
But why and how did the creature from the ball kill the former sailor, and what then happened to this creature itself? It can be assumed that the answer to the first part of the question is that the creature needed to get rid of an unwanted witness who opened the veil of secrecy of an unusual object bursting into his hands. The answer to the second part contains a death certificate, which says that Clark Perry died of a heart attack (as in ancient times myocardial infarction was called) caused by a strong mental shock. Perhaps the shock was the horror that gripped Clark when the devil visited him at night.
It is possible that both in 1855 and in 1950, people saw traces of the same creature, only in the past 95 years it has grown and matured. By the way, at different times in the press it was reported about the appearance of traces of mysterious bipedal ungulates - on the snow or on sandy beaches - not only in Devonshire and on Kerguelen: in Scotland in the winter of 1839-1840 (Times newspaper dated March 13, 1840), in Poland in 1855 (Illustrated London News, March 17, 1885), Belgium in 1945 (Doubt magazine No. 20, 1945), Brazil in 1954 (Bernard Huvelmans' book "In the footsteps of unseen animals").