The Devil's Hoofmarks
‘On the night of 8–9 February 1855 (and on one or two nights thereafter), trails, resembling those of a donkey, were laid across large areas of Devon…’
The case of the Devil’s Hoofmarks is a classic Fortean mystery, one that was discussed by Fort himself in The Book of the Damned. Mike’s paper on the subject, a commentary on a large collection of source material on the mystery, has been acclaimed as one of the most significant contributions ever made to the journal Fortean Studies. While offering no definitive solutions, it is by far the most comprehensive and thoughtful discussion of the mystery in print, and explodes several popular myths concerning the Hoofmarks: the prints were not uniform in size, were not laid in the course of a single night, and did not run in a straight line across the county of Devon.
The paper was written so long ago that the original digital files have since been lost. The pdf available from this site consists of scans of the published pages of the paper together with a short afterword added two years later as the result of some further research.
First published in Fortean Studies 1 (1994) and Fortean Studies 3 (1996).