So. February 8th, 1855. Heavy snow overnight across Devon, England. Morning comes, and from Exmouth to Topsham, about a hundred miles, there's a single line of tracks in the fresh snow. Shaped like cloven hooves. One line. Like something walking on two legs, putting one foot directly in front of the other.
And I mean everywhere. Over rooftops. Across fourteen-foot walls. Straight through rivers. The tracks come out the other side. Up one side of a haystack and down the other.
A hundred miles, and not one person saw a thing. That's the part that gets me. Not the tracks. The silence.
The theories came in like weather. A kangaroo escaped from somewhere. There is always, in England, a theory involving an escaped kangaroo. A balloon dragging a rope. Badgers. Mass hysteria, which is the theory people use when they've run out of animals and weather.
None of them walk a hundred miles over rooftops. I'll grant you the balloon people were trying.
Selene loves this one because it's the devil, obviously. I love it because it's the best mystery I've ever seen where the evidence is perfect and the explanation is nowhere. Sometimes the lesson isn't that there's always a solution. Sometimes the lesson is that a hundred miles of footprints can just be there in the morning, and nobody knows, and that's the whole story.