The Devil's Footprints | True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to another night of 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories.
On the night of February 8, 1855, snow fell over the villages along the River Exe in South Devon, England. The next morning, people in Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Woodbury, Starcross, Dawlish, and Teignmouth found a line of small hoof-shaped prints in the snow. They came in a single file, about eight and a half inches apart. They went up to doors, over tall walls, across rooftops, over haystacks, and through a drainpipe. They showed up on both sides of a two-mile-wide estuary.
Tonight we follow those tracks through the frightened villages, into the pages of The Times and the Illustrated London News, and into the sermons and notes of two local vicars, the Reverend G. M. Musgrave and the Reverend Henry Thomas Ellacombe. Then we look at the explanations people have offered ever since, from badgers and wood mice to a runaway balloon from the Devonport dockyard. Was it the Devil? Or something more benign?
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