Mack Maloney's Military X-Files - The Day The Devil Came to Devon England

In the winter of 1855, a line of strange marks appeared in the snow across Devon, England, covering up to 100 miles in a single night. They looked like donkey hoofprints, but they were made by something walking on two legs, and they passed straight through walls, over rooftops, through six-inch pipes, and across rivers without breaking the ice. The locals called them the devil’s hoofmarks, and more than 170 years later, nobody has a satisfactory explanation.

The tracks themselves: what made them so strange

The marks were found after a night of unusual weather—bitter cold followed by a thaw that created an icy crust, then a fresh dusting of powder. The prints were roughly four inches long and three inches wide, resembling small horseshoes, with a stride that measured almost exactly eight inches in most places. What baffled observers was the behavior of the trail. The tracks approached the wall of a house and then continued on the opposite side as if whatever made them had walked straight through. They appeared on windowsills and rooftops, then resumed on the ground. At one point, they led to a wall with a six-inch pipe, stopped at the pipe, and started again below it on the other side. In open fields, the prints sometimes stopped at the center and resumed a mile away. The distance covered—up to 100 miles in one night—made it unlikely that a single animal or person could ha