Do you think a cryptid or something else made them? If you dont know what it is look on google.

Made what exactly?

Here's a link since the OP didn't provide one.

Thanks for the link Coldethyl, makes it easier to respond. I remember hearing about this years ago and was interested in it. The mouse explaination sounds most likely with all the obstacles it had to over and through.

A mouse traveling over 100 miles!?
Must have been Mighty Mouse.

^^ Correction, Its SPEEDY GONZALES!!

Thanks for the correction....I just realized Mighty Mouse flys.

It went over a 12 foot wall and didnt touch the snow on top.

well its spring heeled jack

Tag team mice?

Don't really consider the mouse explanation very likely for this case. While we have no physical proof, only word of mouth, the marks were said to have appeared overnight.

Bear in mind it was snowing, so the tracks can't have been made early in the night then this requires a quite incredible speed to have made the tracks over 100 miles of terrain.

Here is another link to the story, with some sketches made of the supposed marks. Can't really make my mind up about this, it seems quite puzzling.

Incredable speed to make them perhaps...but in keeping with that same mode of thinking....how were the "footprints" known to have covered 100 miles? who actually(at the time the phenomeneon was documented) walked/rode 100 miles to see how far the tracks went?

As the article in the link I pasted states



I don't know if there was a concerted effort to 'plot' the entire path of the tracks or marks, so much of what we know may be just hearsay.

Thanks for the quotes.....sounds like a bit of exaggeration to me....which we know NEVER occurs in stories such as these.

Nothing more than woodmice I reckon, which are actually more common than house mice, surprisingly. In the snow they tend to jump or hop sometimes, the shape of them landing looking like cloven hooves. Since mice are adept climbers, roofs and the like are all valid places for these things to be seen. As for disappearing into thin air? Well a mouse hopping all over the place is pretty conspicuous, especially to predators, especially predators with superb eyesight, especially owls!

Yes, but what if it's an evil and sinister woodmouse with a chip on it's tail?

Or several?

This story always scared me when I was a kid. It was in one of my Mysteries of the Unexplained books.

I wonder if some other anomaly occurred on that night to chase out mice from their usual hiding places?

That would be Devils Food cake.

How do we know these prints aren't left behind by demonic rodents?

We know this: it can somehow get over a wall without disturbing the snow on top, it leaves roundish prints, and it moves on one leg...

...must be Zebedee.

That is oddly disturbing....especially the mustache.

I like the hot air balloon trailing a rope with a horseshoe on the end theory. It could move 100 miles in the night. It could 'leap' over walls without disturbing the snow on top. At times it would be higher in the air, and the horseshoe wouldn't leave any marks, but at other times it would be closer to the ground, and the horseshoe would leave a mark.

It appeared in London too around the same time and there were reports from other regions of Britain of a similiar kind of creature leaving the same tracks. There was a particularly interesting report from Liverpool. Whatever it was it was never seen again.

It's the start of the Infernal Mouse invasion. I'll put the blame on the Biker Mice From Mars...

Seriously, I read this story almost a decade ago and still got fascinated until today!

I would be MORE afraid of anyone who had, not ONLY enough free time to perpetrate a hoax in that fashion, but also the very IDEA in the first place......than I would be of The Devil itself.

That's a brilliant idea! But devil mice are scarier.

I think someone could perpatrate a hoax like that with ease.

Yeah, I suppose, but the question would be "why would you WANT to?" Geeeeeeez, next thing you know people will making huge artificial feet to make people think that there's a.......... ............never mind.

I recall reading about this, or a similar phenomenon, many years ago in some book on the paranormal. I think it most likely that accounts of the incident have been greatly exagerrated or that many different shorter footprint trails were mistakenly thought to be part of the same sequence. I find the incident fascinating though.

If it was a hot air balloon, maybe it wasn't so much a hoax, as a balloon that got out of control somehow. That's how I always thought of it, anyway. Although, one would think that the person who lost control would come forward and confess, unless he was just too embarrassed, and then delighted by the confusion he had caused. Oh well.

What the bloody hell is THAT!?

ooOOOOooooo!!! There's a conspiracy afoot! A cunning ploy to steal all our cheese while we're preoccupied with their crazy nighttime antics! Clever!







You guys never heard of the Magic Roundabout!? Have any of you actually HAD a childhood?

Yeah, but it wasn't actually mine.

Wow! Spring-heeled Jack is re-born.

I don't believe the Magic Roundabout was ever screened in America.

My first post was on this. As I remember it wasnt very well received. That balloon theory is a good one.

My goodness! Poor people! You mean... no


Dougal!?

Actually, Magic Roundabout always reminds me of Bill Bailey... "I am Zebidee, Lord of the woodland realm! Bow down before me for I have dominion!!" As a child I was sent away to save the neighbours' stares, I returned, scorned "Father, embrace me!" "You're no son of mine you FREAK, you SPRING-BOY!!!"

No they didn't show that in the States when we were kids, but I was living over in England when the movie came out, didn't Robbie Williams do the voice of the doggie?

Does that springy man make pizzas?

No.. there wasn't anything like that for us American kids, but we DID have Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans!!

I vaguely remember Dougal, so I think that was an import..

As for the Devil's Footprints... i have a theory.. It was Santa's mischievous reindeer.. Actually, I remember hearing about this years ago.. Wasn't it on Unsolved Mysteries? Anyway, it's always been one of my favorite Unexplained stories..

Captain Kangaroo lived in a town not from from my childhood home. In fact, one kid from my first grade class couldn't come to my birthday party because he was going to be on the show that day. Remember Bunny Rabbit? And yes, I know this is OT............

No, he does NOT. in the original TV series, he sort of bounces around and says 'Time for bed' every ten seconds. In the movie, he is voiced by Sir Ian McKellen, has an evil alter ego called Zebad, shoots fire from his moustache (go figure), and lives in a rainbow bubble thingy.

I like Dougal more. 'Hector's House burned down? Barbar gone back to Africa?' If you don't know what Hector's House or Barbar is, you haven't lived.

Well it says right here that Robbie Williams does the voice of Dougal. ???

edited because I see you mean Ian Mckellan did the voice for the springy man.

And, umm, I believe you mean BABAR.?

O RLY?

Yes, I probably do mean Babar, but seeing as I have never had anything to do with the Babar franchise, I don't know how to spell it.

isn't it wonderful that this thread has deviated from the Devil's Footprints to the Magic Roundabout and how to spell Barbar correctly. And all thanks to me.

"The Devil's Footprints was the name given to a peculiar phenomenon that occurred in Devon, England on 8 February 1855. After a light snowfall, during the night, a series of hoof-like marks appeared in the snow ..."
--- From the link provided early in this post

1855!
People ... people ... people ...
You should remember the sorry state of journalism back then, and through the 1920s.
The most outlandish stories were fabricated solely to sell newspapers.
If you think today's media is bad at fabricating or sensationalizing, go into the morgue of a major newspaper that's been publishing since the 1880s or before. You'll be amazed at the wild stories often found in them.
I picked up a 1903 newspaper at a yard sale years ago. In it was an article about the Army's new rifle (the 1903 Springfield, which was used as late as the Korean War and was famous for its accuracy). That article describes how it is so powerful it would shoot through more than 40 enemy soldiers if they were lined up, and how it can accurately be aimed to hit a man at 5 miles!
The truth is, the 1903 Springfield's cartridge (.30-06) would be hard-pressed to penetrate more than two men. In the hands of a good marksman, he might hit a man out to 1,000 yards but that's about it.

If the news was slow, way back when, newspapers fabricated strange stories to keep their readers buying issues. Thus, you will find all manner of stories about strange airships, ghosts, phantom trains and carriages and so on. The readers loved it. They didn't care if it was true.
Alas, many of these reports have been passed down as fact.
I suspect that the Devil's Footprints is just a hoax, perpetrated by a newspaper.
The other newspapers, seeing their competitor get a greater share of the readership, begin to report the same thing --- and embellish it to gain an edge over their competitor.
Pretty soon, you've got newspapers all over the region reporting on the same phenomenon, making all kinds of wild claims about what was discovered, seen or heard.
And 100 years later, people read about the phenomenon and claim it must be true because so many different newspapers reported it.
T'ain't necessarily so.
I was a newspaper reporter for 12 years before I wised up and got out of the biz. I grieve at what today's journalism has become --- but it's still a damnsight better than it was 100 years or more ago.

That is the best explanation yet. Thanks Gatofeo. Mystery solved I would say.

Just want to bring a new thought out there: why would the devil bother to leave his footprints behind when it serves him no use whatsoever?

Satan owned stock in the newspapers of the day. It was merely good business.
Though Satan owns stock in newspapers, He outright owns law schools from Calcutta to Cheyenne, around the world.
This explains the aggravating, sorry state of Justice and Politics today.
Remember, light one flame and you can change the world. Burn down the law school of your choice today!

What about Harvard?

Very Interesting... I'm going to assume that parts of this story have become exaggerated over time and maybe it wasn't 100 miles and such. That's the only "logical" explanation that I could come up with. It could easily be faked, but not at 100 miles in snow. To look at it in a truth sense, I wonder however, why the devil or any other demonic being would travel in the snow. I'm assuming now that this "being" traveled at night so it wouldnt be noticed and thats why the snow is perculiar.

particularly since they are only solid when they want to be. Kind of makes you wonder why they would want to leave footprints behind.