EVERYDAY STRANGE - The Devil's Footprints

“Since the recent snow storms, some animal has left marks on the snow that have driven a great many inhabitants from their propriety, and caused an uproar of commotion among the inhabitants in general.”

- The Western Luminary & Family Newspaper for Devon, Cornwall, Somerset & Dorset. 13 February 1855

DEVON, UK - It was 160 years ago on this day, February 8, 1855 that one of the most enduring mysteries of the world took place. The people of Devon county, England awoke to find a mysterious track of seemingly bipedal footprints in the snow. The prints were spaced roughly eight to 16 inches apart and described as four inches in length and two and half to three inches wide. The tracks were uniformly single file. They were made by cloven hooves which led over top of buildings, through walls, haystacks, gates and enclosures stretching over a course of 100 miles from Exmouth to Topsham. Some apparently lucky villagers reported the tracks leading up to their front doors before retreating back again. They even continued across the two mile expanse of the River Exe estuary.

Kangaroos, badgers, otters, experimental balloons and freezing rain have all been offered as alternate explanations for the prints, but did this event even happen? Very little contemporary reports remain to this day, only a few survive, that there are contemporary accounts at all is encouraging.

River Exe estuary.

First mention of the mysterious case appeared in the February 13, 1855 edition of the Western Luminary in which local people were already ascribing the mysterious hoofmarks to the devil. But they did not cower in fear at the idea. Within hours of the discovery of the bizarre trail, searches were conducted to discover their cause, tracing the prints for miles. No one however, tracked the full 100 mile length of the marking. Had anybody even attempted to do so there wouldn’t have been enough time as the snow was not deep and fluctuating temperatures played havoc with the impressions. Initially, it was reported that the tracks covered an area of around 40 miles, which was deduced from various reports coming from several different towns in the county. After a few weeks interest in the story eventually died down and the Devil’s Footprints became something of a local legend and nothing more.

Interest in the story was revived by the ubiquitous Charles Fort in his 1919 work ‘The Book of the Damned’. By 1950 contemporary papers by Rev. H.T. Ellacombe were sent to the Devonshire Association which included tracings of the footprints and the draft of a letter to The Illustrated London News marked ‘Not for publication’ concerning the event. Ellacombe had even collected samples of the oblong globes of whitish excrement that had been found next to some of the tracks. He sent the samples off to naturalist Richard Owen without receiving a reply. The Ellacombe papers are the oldest surviving documents concerning the case. Another pivotal discovery was The Devil’s Footprints booklet published by G.A. Household which reprints many contemporary newspaper articles.

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It was an anonymous letter writer (signed ‘South Devon’) to The Illustrated Times of London who first put forth the idea that the tracks were uniform in size and shape, traveled in single file over the course of 100 miles, surmounted a 14 foot high wall, climbed roofs and crossed the river estuary. The letter writer claimed to be an experienced woodsman, skilled in animal tracking and identification and appeared befuddled as to an explanation for the tracks. According to Rev. Ellacombe’s now recovered papers, ‘South Devon’ was actually a ‘young D’Urban’, a 19-year old resident of Newport House, Countess Wear. Young D’Urban would grow up to be a respectable, reputable man, but youthful ‘enthusiasm’ seems to have gotten the better of him here. It is D’Urban’s falsified account of the events which colors them to this day.

So, was the devil really in Devon on this day 160 years ago? Some believe the entire story was a satirical fabrication, formulated to criticize the local church which had recently changed their standard prayer book. One thing is sure, the event now known as the Devil’s Footprints certainly happened, though not as mysteriously as it is remembered. It’s entirely possible that the prints really were made by unidentified animals, possibly migrating fowl. It seems that it was the unidentifiable nature of the prints that had captured the public’s collective imagination, not the tracks anomalous behavior.

In 2009 the mystery was revisited when a woman awoke to find a track of cloven footprints in her back garden. It would have been the perfect time to come up with a valid explanation for the 1855 case, an investigator looked into hares as the possible culprit. No follow up reports were found.

Sources:

Anybody interested in this mystery event owes a huge debt of gratitude to Mike Dash whose exhaustive 1994 survey of research materials has been an invaluable resource into the study of The Devil’s Footprints.

The Devil’s Hoofmarks (white paper by Mike Dash)

The Complete Books of Charles Fort, pp.305-10.

The Daily Mail

The London Telegraph

BBC

EVERYDAY STRANGE - Cacti's Revenge

No matter how ignorant we may be to the secret life of cacti, we rarely think of the plant as capable of revenge.

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LAKE PLEASANT, AZ - “Cactus plugging” is the act of using cacti for target practice. It seems harmless enough, the cactus doesn’t truly seem to be alive. Their branches resemble arms making the plant appear like the bizarrely gorganized remains of dried out desert travelers who didn’t quite make it out. It is a symbol of the desert, an area to beware, an area of death. In many ways the cactus, like the vulture, are symbols of death. But no matter how ignorant we may be to the secret life of cacti, we rarely think of the plant as capable of revenge.

On February 5, 1982 David Grundman, 24-27 (reports vary) was cactus plugging with friend Jim Suchochi, a couple miles into the desert from the highway, west of Lake Pleasant. Grundman started off slowly that winter day, felling a couple lightweight cacti with a few shotgun blasts. Before long however, a more impressive specimen caught his attention.

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Saguaro cacti are endemic to the Sonoma desert spread between the Arizona and Mexico border. They can grow up to 60 feet high and live to about 200 years, though some specimens have been known to be 300 years old. The arm-like branches of the cacti don’t grow until 75 years into the life of the plants. When Grundman locked his targets onto a 27-foot tall, 100 year old saguaro, he was targeting a plant that had lived to roughly half of its potential, but it was more than enough time for it to sprout massive 1000 pound limbs.

It seems Grundman’s fatal mistake was getting too close to the living thing as he blasted it to smithereens. After plugging it twice, Grundman turned and called out to his friend Jim, before a massive branch fell on him, crushing him to death. Early reports stated he had uttered the partial word “tim-” as in “timber” before the fatal moment.

It’s a story that seems too good to be true, and debunkers flock to it hoping for an easy target, but like Grundman himself, those debunkers find that the target is not so easy after all, and much more prickly than first imagined. It’s a cautionary tale, one that tells all who hear it to respect life, all forms of life, no matter how immobile. The general tone of many of the articles you will find on this incident is mocking and carry the sentiment that Grundman deserved what he got. He was immortalized in the 1984 Austin Lounge Lizards mock hero-ballad “Saguaro” where he is referred to as a “noxious little twerp”.

For the record, saguaro plugging is illegal.

Sources:

Sources are abundant on the web. I wasn’t able to track down the two original articles that mentioned the story. The first appeared in the now defunct Phoenix Gazette newspaper, the second appeared in the Arizona Republic before being picked up by the Associated Press. But I did find an AZ Republic article that made mention of the story and seemed to confirm the truth of it.

Arizona Republic

The Desert News - December 1, 1987

Phoenix New Times

Snopes

EVERYDAY STRANGE - Rain of Snakes

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If you read through the Rain of Rice edition of Everyday Strange then you may remember the lengthy (and incomplete) list of organic and inorganic objects that have been observed or reported to have fallen from the skies over the past 300 or so years, one of them being snakes. You may also remember my solution for the Rain of Rice mystery having to do with waterspouts and atmospheric convection. Well, how would that explain a rain of snakes?

THE STORY GOES LIKE THIS

Memphis, TN - At 10:35 in the morning of January 15, 1877 a sudden 15-minute torrential downpour of rain abruptly stopped. After the deluge, people reported seeing masses of snakes lining the streets, in yards and even on the sidewalk. It wasn't just a couple of them that were spotted, or even a few hundred of them, it was thousands of dark brown, almost black snakes splayed about in a two block radius surrounding Vance Street, between Lauderdale and Goslee (Vance and Goslee appear to have been renamed or redeveloped in the ensuing 138 years).

One important feature of the event is that there were no eyewitnesses to the snakes actually falling with the rain. They were there alright, at ground level, but none were found on rooftops, in cisterns or any other elevated areas. And in the Monthly Weather Report it is stated that "Vance Street is comparatively new, has no pavements, gutters merely trenches"

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The snakes were between 12 and 18 inches long. Some of them were all tangled together, while others, according to witness Sgt. McElroy of the U.S. Signal Corps, exhibited bizarre behavior, stating that they didn't move like snakes. They would thrust their heads forward, then draw their rear up in a horseshoe shape, rather than slither and they would raise their bodies up as though seeking support. One witness put a couple of the snakes in a jar and brought them to the Memphis Weekly Public Ledger newspaper and they ran the story about the incident.

THE INVESTIGATION
After the Ledger published their account, the story hit the newswire where it was picked up by the New York Times (see picture above) and the Scientific American Supplement. Scientific American considered a hurricane as a possible explanation for the snakes, but remained puzzled as to where such a large collection of snakes could have been taken from.

Charles Fort rightly points out that a hurricane of such magnitude as capable of scooping up thousands of snakes would likely have deposited other debris such as twigs and leaves. Also, snakes are dormant in January, like other reptiles, their cold-blooded nature leaves them with no source of warmth during the winter months so they usually gather in a burrow or hibernacula until the weather turns again. A typical hibernaculum will have as many as a hundred snakes in it, but to find one with thousands in it is extremely rare.

It should also be noted that Memphis has never experienced a hurricane because it is too far away from sea. A severe derecho with hurricane force winds blasted through Memphis in 2003 and was known by locals as "Hurricane Elvis". Hurricane Elvis left hundreds of thousands of homes without power and killed seven people, dwarfing the 15-minute downpour preposterously. In other words: it wasn't a hurricane.

Well what was it then? Charles Fort believed that the snakes had traveled to earth on warm air currents from outer space. But we can assume that the snakes didn't actually fall from the sky because there were no witnesses to that and the snakes were mostly, if not all alive and uninjured on the ground. So if they didn't come from the sky, can we assume they came up from under the ground?

It's an elegant solution to the problem but snakes don't behave that way. They stay in their hibernaculum until it's time for their snake orgies and summer barbecues. So, what kind of creature does come up from the ground after a hard and heavy rain? (Even a bird would know the answer to this one ...)

CONCLUSIONS

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In the 1980's a local psychologist named Gregory Little took the story to Memphis State University biologists who concluded that it was most likely misidentified horsehair worms behind the mystery, not snakes at all.

It seems that the larvae of horsehair worms are parasitic. They live off of arthropods such as large insects and shellfish. They are free moving in their mature form. When exposed to water mature worms will exit the host and apparently, in this instance, had nowhere else to go but up.

And that's that!

Right?

Not quite. As is often the case when confronted with the mysterious, the university scientist(s) seem to have rushed to an easy conclusion. How can two whole city blocks worth of people misidentify horsehair thin parasitic worms for snakes? It's possible, but you'd figure someone would be able to spot the difference. What's more, horsehair worms don't behave in the ways described by witnesses, if they're to be believed.

So if it wasn't snakes and it wasn't worms, then what was it? Little believed it was leeches taken by a waterspout from a lake of the Mississippi River. It's the same opinion that was taken by the editor of the original Public Ledger article way back in 1877.

SOURCES
Monthly weather report to House of Representatives for 2nd session of the 45th congress, 1877-78
or this alternate link
Unnatural Phenomena: A Guide to the Bizarre Wonders of North America
On This Day in Memphis History
The Complete Books of Charles Fort pgs. 93-4

*Note: Even though two different versions are available online I couldn't find the original Scientific American article from February 10, 1877 in the table of contents or perusing the actual content which led me to believe that either the event was simply mentioned in an article about some other thing or that the version I read through is incomplete. Here it is.