DARK DOINGS IN BRAUNTON

My appeal for volunteers during the keynote speech at this year's Weird Weekend was answered by an enthusiastic young couple Tim and Graidi Taylor-Rose. Every other sunday they wind their way to Woolsery and do CFZstuff that has been long overdue to be done. This includes going through nearly a century's worth of the Transactions of the Devonshire Association which are on loan to the CFZ from our old pal Lionel Beer...

Transactions of the Devonshire Association 1953

Folklore 50th report.
Theo Brown
P220 BLACK MAGIC



Miss M. E. Abbott of Westward Ho! has sent these instances of ‘left-handed ’ magic:



Braunton. Perhaps three years ago. Told by an old inhabitant. A man had a grudge against another. He went to his enemy’s cottage. While he was talking to him, a young cockerel appeared in front of him, walking down the path. He only looked at it. The cock fluttered and fell dead.

A woman made a wax image of someone she did not like, stuck it full of pins, put it in the old fashioned chimney piece. The person it represented was seized with violent pains, and I think (am not sure) died as the image melted away.

To these may be added this remarkable case recorded by the Rev. H. Fulford Williams, M.A., B.D:

In 1896, a man at Sourton was committed to trial by the local magistrate for sheep stealing. His wife cursed the court, and told the magistrate " You black-nosed old devil. You’ll be dead in a week; and further, no one connected with the case shall die in their beds or live ten years."

Within a week one magistrate dropped dead talking to his bailiff in his own field, and was left to lie until the doctor came from Okehampton, who persuaded - with the local
constable’s help - three labourers to carry the body up to the manor.

The other magistrate committed suicide. The farmer who had prosecuted knocked over a lamp after market day and was burnt to death, and the clerk to the magistrates
dropped from his cycle outside Okehampton.

Note: Since reading this Report at Plymouth, I have received much information from relatives of the victims of this case and will quote this in a future Report.

EVIL CURSING IN BUCKS CROSS

My appeal for volunteers during the keynote speech at this year's Weird Weekend was answered by an enthusiastic young couple Tim and Graidi Taylor-Rose. Every other sunday they wind their way to Woolsery and do CFZstuff that has been long overdue to be done. This includes going through nearly a century's worth of the Transactions of the Devonshire Association which are on loan to the CFZ from our old pal Lionel Beer...

Transactions of the Devonshire Association 1953

Folklore 50th report.
Theo Brown
P220 BLACK MAGIC

Miss M. E. Abbott of Westward Ho! has sent these instances of ‘left-handed ’ magic:

Bucks Mills. Told me some years ago by a person who had lived for 15 years in Bucks Mills and it had happened in her lifetime. A woman - people were afraid of her had a strange power. If anyone annoyed her she went out on the cliff with a horn in her hand. When the person she had a grudge against appeared she blew her horn at him or her. Disaster always followed. Once a man who had the horn blown at him, woke up the next morning with a strange and obscure skin disease, rarely known in this country. The Specialist who, I think, cured it finally, was very puzzled.

These images of bygone Bucks Mills, by the way, have nothing much to do with the story but come courtesy of my adopted sister Kaye Braund-Phillips..

SORRY TO BE A LITTLE MISLEADING BUT...

We only actually started this blog a few weeks ago, and until this morning there was nothing on it. But, there are about thirty posts here, going back to early 2009. So there are dear reader, so there are, but until this motning they weren't here.

"But how can such a thing be?" I hear you ask, (the more superstitious of you clutching at talismans and muttering prayers beneath your breath, whilst wondering whether such chicanery is proof of dark forces at work). The answer, however, is simple.

We have been running a highly succesful CFZ Blog Network for some years, and when we decided to start this new addition to it, it seemed to make sense to copy sopme of the earlier entries from the main CFZ Blog which were partly or wholly about High Strangeness in North Devon. So we did, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that more will follow soon.....

HAUNTED SKIES: Triangular UFO over Woolsery

http://hauntedskies.blogspot.com/2011/04/triangular-ufo-over-woolsery-2010-still.html

LEOPARD HAIR UPDATE

On the 17th August I was happy to announce that Danish Zoologist Lars Thomas had examined hair samples found in Huddisford Woods near Woolsery, and pronounced them to be leopard. I offered the hairs (which were found by Lars, Jon McGowan and a team known as the Four-Teans) to any research group or academic institution who wanted to try and verify Lars's findings. The first person to contact me was Dr Ross Barnett from Durham University who has done DNA analysis on them, and has confirmed that they are Pantherine, probably leopard. He is carrying out further tests to establish the species and subspecies for certain and a full announcement will be made then.

OLL LEWIS: The Duerdon Tracks

If you were at Weird Weekend this year, or have read this blog in the past few days or even had much contact with anyone who attended the conference you’ll have heard about the leopard hairs that were identified by Lars. These were not the only evidence of leopards presented at the conference. You might recall that last January Graham and I were called to Duerdon Farm just outside Woolsery where the farmer had found a row of unusual tracks. As the light was fading when we got there the best we could do was take some photographs of the tracks and perform a preliminary examination of the tracks to see if they were potentially anything interesting. They were and we returned the next morning with the cameras once more and this time equipment for making plaster casts.

Before I set off however there was one problem to solve. The tracks may well be frozen in the snow but if I was to use room temperature water to make plaster casts of the tracks they would melt. In order to overcome this I used several large water bottles half filled with ice and snow from our water butts and toped up the remainder of the bottle with cold almost frozen water from deeper in the butts. This worked a treat and meant that the plaster would not melt the prints so I could take extremely accurate and detailed casts.

As well as taking the casts I decided to follow the tracks to see where they led and check any possible places where hair might have come off the animal, while Graham took photographs of the tracks and our casts in situ. Sadly, I was unable to find any hair but I was able to follow the tracks over three fields before they became lost among a well trampled field of sheep. All around the tracks was undisturbed virgin snow save for the occasional bird tracks, a single fox track and the tracks made by the wheals of the tractor when the farmer who had discovered the tracks had come off the road for a closer look.

Upon examination of the prints, tracks and subsequent casts in the daylight I can say with certainty that they were definitely made by a big cat of some sort. There were no claws on any of the prints, the shape of the pad and toes is feline, you cannot draw the typical X shape you can between the toes and pad you can with canines, the foot prints themselves were arranged in groups rather than being equally spaced and there were several prints where the animal’s hind paw had stepped in the same position as the front paw had. All these things are diagnostic of cat prints and all were present.

The fore paws of the animal measured 8 by 9 cm and the hind paws measured 5 by 6 cm and the stride length was 71 cm. These measurements are within the range that you would expect to see from a leopard.

NEIL ARNOLD: The Beast of Bideford!

Quite often local stories containing the word ‘beast’ in the headline are explained by domestic animals or on occasion, the local ‘big cat’. However, a good friend of mine, a Mr Vic Harris, who lives near Bristol, and who I consider to be a very sane person, had a peculiar sighting of a creature I hope the readers of this blog may be able to identify. His report reads as follows:

'Somewhere on the A39 between Bideford and Bucks Cross, 20/08/08 - 5pm
I don't really like driving, so on holiday I let my wife do all the driving and I get to look around and see if I can spot any interesting animals !!!

We were going pretty slow due to traffic, probably only 10 miles an hour , I was scanning the fields to my left , the field we were level with was empty and quite small only a few hundred yards wide. In the middle of the field was what appeared to be a furry red hump, as I drew level with it I got a pretty good look at it. It was definitely unlike anything I had ever seen roaming about our countryside before.

Overall length - tip of tail to tip of nose 6 to 7 feet

Height - 2 to 3 feet at the top of the hump.

Huge bushy tail.

Long thin face.

Colour was red, but not like a fox more like maroon, like the cushion below, but it also had some rusty brown around the shoulders and head.

The fur was short and course.

The creature seemed to be digging with really thick front legs.

My kids saw it as well and got quite excited as it looked so strange! I know the above description sounds pretty crazy but as you know I've spent a lot of time in the countryside and spent most of my child hood roaming the wilds around the river Wye, so I know what our wild life looks like and I'm very observant and take in visual details well and retain them easily, I usually know what I'm looking at when I see an animal and this was not a fleeting glimpse, I had a really good look at it, so I had time to dismiss any mistaken identities'.

CFZ IN THE PRESS

Fortean zoologists on snow footprint trail
This is North Devon

THE 150-YEAR-OLD mystery of what caused a long trail of hoof-like marks could be solved — thanks to the latest batch of snow.

In February 1855, after a fall of snow, footprints were discovered in Devon, stretching 100 miles from Exmouth to Teignmouth.

For the greater part of their course they followed straight lines. Houses, rivers, haystacks and other obstacles were travelled straight over, and footprints appeared on the tops of snow-covered roofs and high walls.

The prints were dubbed The Devil's Footprints. Then in March last year, similar footprints appeared in a Woolsery garden after a fall of snow.

Read On

CFZ IN THE PRESS

Fortean zoologists on snow footprint trail
This is North Devon

THE 150-YEAR-OLD mystery of what caused a long trail of hoof-like marks could be solved — thanks to the latest batch of snow.

In February 1855, after a fall of snow, footprints were discovered in Devon, stretching 100 miles from Exmouth to Teignmouth.

For the greater part of their course they followed straight lines. Houses, rivers, haystacks and other obstacles were travelled straight over, and footprints appeared on the tops of snow-covered roofs and high walls.

The prints were dubbed The Devil's Footprints. Then in March last year, similar footprints appeared in a Woolsery garden after a fall of snow.

Read On

OLL LEWIS: On the track of Unusual Tracks

When the current cold snap started about ten days ago, Jon and I were talking about things that we might investigate this month, and the subject of the report of the devil’s footprints we had investigated in the village this time last year came up. Our conclusion had been that a rabbit lolloping around in the snow in an unusual manner most likely made them but, Jon hoped, it would be interesting to see if similar tracks turned up in the snow this year in order that we could compare them. I said, “I don’t know about that, but I’d be interested in seeing if anyone sees any tracks from the Hartland cat.”

Several witnesses have seen the Hartland cat in the woods and farmland around the areas of Hartland and Woolsery for a number of years. (And yes, these sightings date from long before we moved into Woolsery before some armchair pundit with half the facts decides to act like an internet tough guy and accuse us of making the whole thing up). If local rumours are to be believed there is more than one of them too. Jon is currently making a film about the big cat sightings in the area and our friend Emily’s investigation of those in the locality that she began after hearing of a sighting of the cat by her uncle.

Around this time of year, two years ago, we received a ‘phone call from Roger Heywood from Duerdon farm just outside Woolsery about a sheep kill. He had seen the sheep happily frolicking about in the field the afternoon before, but the next morning found the animal skinned with most of the flesh removed. Roger did the sensible thing and called his local mystery animal investigation team and we sent Richard Freeman to take a look. After examining the corpse Richard was left in no doubt that a big cat had dispatched the unfortunate sheep.

Today (the 13th of January) Roger made another ‘phone call; he had some unusual prints in the snow. As the light was fading Graham and I quickly grabbed a tape-measure, my notepad, a torch, digital camera and film camera and hot-footed it (well ‘hot-four-wheel-drived it’ technically but lets not split hairs here) to Duerdon Farm, where Roger was waiting. We then followed Roger’s tractor to the field where the tracks had been found. By the time we reached the field, twilight had set in, but in the powerful headlights of the tractor we could see a line of tracks stretching from one end of the field to the other. Most of the tracks were in the deep, otherwise unbroken virgin snow that covered the field but when they reached tracks from a previous visit of the tractor they followed this track for a few paces. When I asked Roger when the tractor track had been made he said it was from yesterday evening and because he found the animal’s tracks when he had been out at about 2pm this means the tracks must have been made between around 5pm and lunchtime the next day. Not wanting to disturb the line of animal tracks, I walked down the existing tractor tracks to get a closer look at the animal tracks.

The tracks themselves were very interesting. One set in deep snow that I examined closely showed that the animal was placing its back paw in the imprint of the forepaw; this is not something canines do when they walk so that, along with the shape of the prints, meant that I could eliminate dogs and foxes from my list of possible culprits. There was no sign of webbing between the toes either, which was a good indication that the tracks were not made by otters. I hesitate slightly to say that these prints were definitely made by a big cat though because of the toes; there are five of them. However, a number of big cat researchers have found anomalies in the paw prints they’ve found in their area, including things like apparently non-retractable claws or polydactylism, which might be consistent with interbreeding among a very small group of individuals over several generations. Keeping it in the family can play havoc with feline Hox genes it would seem and polydactylism in felines it is not all that uncommon; my childhood pet cat, Tigger, started off life as part of a family of stray moggies on a farm and had more than her fair share of digits for example. As well as the possibility of it being a big cat, I would also consider the possibility of the prints having been made by a badger but there are one or two problems with this theory too as none of the tracks show evidence of claws as one would expect to see in a badger track. And then there is the size of the prints.

The print from the forepaw measures about 8cm by 9cm and the back paw print measures 5cm by 6 cm with a stride length of 71cm. This is rather larger than a badger where the forepaws would be expected to be around 4-5 cm and the stride would be about 50cm, so if it is a badger then it would have to be huge and such a large badger could perhaps be considered a cryptid in itself. As well as taking a number of photographs, Graham also made use of the digger scoop of Roger’s tractor in order to be lifted aloft to get some photographs of the tracks stretching across the field. Once we had obtained as many photographs as was possible in the fading light, we returned to Roger’s house where I filmed an interview with him and then it was home to Myrtle Cottage to inform Jon of what we had found.

If the snow hasn’t thawed by tomorrow morning we hope to be able to get plaster casts of some of the prints, but in the meantime take a look at the photos, what do you think? Is it a big cat, an abnormally large super badger, or something else entirely?

Here we should note that Dale had a look at them last night and wrote "Composite Kittycat tracks. Stepping in the same track makes the prints look bigger and with more toes. Last track in picture most accurate one of set." Time will, I hope, tell JD

ONE LEGGED SNOW-CASSOWARY STALKING THE WOODS AT POWLER'S PIECE

Yesterday I told you about Powler's Piece - the strange and rather creepy forest a couple of miles south of the village in which we live.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was working on the new book by Carl Portman (more of which soon), Corinna, Shosh and Gavin took Biggles for an afternoon stroll.

They were in another part of the woods to that where they found the snow dryad on Friday, and they had been looking for footprints.

Amongst the myriad of deer, dogs and smaller creatures was this.

WTF? (as I am sure my younger stepdaughter, and probably Max would say)

I know that it looks like the single print of a cassowary, or maybe a small dinosaur, but it obviously isn't. But what is it?

It is the fact that it is a single imprint in the snow that intrigues me. It probably isn't even a footprint. My best guess is that it is what happens when a bird of prey momentarily lands to capture some poor hapless rodent, but that is only a guess.

It is over to you guys and I, for one, am hoping that it is a giant, one-legged snow cassowary. If it is, then I propose the name Casuarius corinna-and-bigglesi. C'mon boys and girls, don't let a fat cryptozoologist's dreams fail to come true (again).

SNOW DRYAD?

Woolsery is a very strange place at times. About a mile and a half south of the village is an area of Forestry Commission woodland called Powler's Peice.

I have always liked it down there; there are deer a-plenty; both roe and red (and the occasional muntjac); and there are several small ponds that are chocker with palmated newts every spring. But it is undoubtedly freaky.

It has a very strange atmosphere, and Corinna has always refused to ever go there on her own. On several occasions when she has been walking the dog down there with the girls she has felt the sensation of "being watched" and the dog has stopped dead in his tracks in exactly the same place.

Yesterday afternoon she, Shosh and Gavin were taking the dog for his afternoon run (it is far too slippery for me to even risk it) and deep in the woods on one of the rides, traversed only by the occasional Forestry Commission worker and the most intrepid of dog walkers, she found a small, squat, and very ritualistic looking snowman. Or rather snow-woman, because her above-the-waist secondary sexual characteristics were clearly visible. It is only the lack of anything below the waist that stops me labelling her a snowy sheela-na-gig.

It is hard not to see her as a depiction of one of the tree spirits who guard the wood and make visitors feel so uncomfortable.

Very strange.

Even Biggles felt compelled to make several offerings to this snowy dryad (note the lower picture and the yellow stains on her right hand side in the upper).

NEIL ARNOLD: What Happened To Me At The ‘Weird Weekend’!

I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a mod schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...

Being a full-time monster hunter should be about traipsing through forests in search of strange creatures. Large, exotic cats in local woods. Elusive critters in remote lakes. Peculiar insects. Escaped wallabies. A bit of ‘Nessie’ here, and giant birds there. Yet what happened to me at this years ‘Weird Weekend’, was the most terrifying moment of my life.

Myself and my girlfriend Jemma were put up by Jon and co at the lovely Braund-Phillips household at Bucks Cross. The night I lectured on weird zooform creatures – from the female-molesting ‘green underpants’, to London vampires – we retired to our room and nodded off. At 3:00 am I woke up and was fully aware that an enormous snake was in the bedroom. It was pale in colour with beige blotches over its head. The head of this thing suggested a snake around twenty-five feet in length, as its head was the size of a flattened football. Its beady eyes peered at me in the gloom and then it struck. It was a constricting snake, for when its jaws clamped on my right arm, there was no venom excreted, merely a heavy weight. I leapt up in absolute horror, screaming. I yanked my arm from its vice-like grip but then it proceeded to coil around my right leg. At this point Jemma was yelling my name, unaware of the horror that had coiled around me. I made for the door, but it dragged me back, heavily grazing my knees as they made contact with the carpet. I wrenched my leg from its grasp only to see it coil around Jemma’s legs. I pulled at her, and also attempted to open the door. Suddenly the horror dissipated and it was over. Jemma never saw the spectral snake, but recalled how she’d felt constricted in the night and smothered.

Now, people will tell me it was a dream. However, Richard Freeman and Jon both know that in the past I’ve been attacked in my bed by several vampyric amorphous blobs. On these occasions I was awake. This time I may well have drifted into some astral place, but that thing was huge and next day I showed Richard, his girlfriend Lisa and Nick Redfern the cuts on my knees. Strangely, Richard’s girlfriend Lisa recalled how a couple of years previous whilst staying at the B&B, she’d felt constricted in the night and woke to find bruises down her arms. Now, I know there’s no giant snake on the loose in Bideford, and I believe that what I saw had something to do with my lecture. It’s happened before it will probably happen again. But where these things come from I do not know, but in every case of being attacked I’ve either been drained of energy or blood. True vampires ? Who knows, but if anyone debates as to whether psychic backlash is for real, I had the marks to prove it.

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/10/devil-rides-out.html

This afternoon we are expecting a visit from a bloke called Nick Flintoff who is making a film about the Great Devon Mystery - the events that happened in early 1855 when something left a long series of footprints in the snow across great swathes of south Devon.

It is popularly believed to have been the Hornėd One himself, although when similar things happened in Woolsery earlier this year (despite overwhelming pictorial evidence that a demonic entity had visited with his violin) we were involved in a massive cover-up financed by those who are loth to accept the awful truth that He can take on many guises, including that of a roly-poly Welshman clutching my stepdaughter's violin, and told the world's press that we believed that it was somthing made by a horny rabbit.

No.

We don't mean a jackalope, we mean a male rabbit or hare filled with testosterone and hopping strangely. But of course it was the Dark Lord Himself. And we shall be telling Mr Flintoff that this afternoon, of course.

And then we shall be having tea and biscuits, and if I am lucky, my lovely wife will have made cake. And then my nephew and I will play Command and Conquer. It is going to be a nice day.

RICHARD FREEMAN: Other historical accounts of "The Devil's Fooptprints"

THE DEVIL’S OTHER FOOTPRINTS

Though the 1855 case in Devon is the best known phenomena akin to the Devil’s Foot prints are known from other places and times.

Ralph of Coggeshall, was a monk then abbot as well as proto-Fortean who recorded all manner of odd occurrences in the 13th century (including the Merman of Orford Ness). He tells us that on June 19th of 1205 a hoof print appeared in the earth after a violent electrical storm.

The Times of March 14th 1840 reports…

Among the high mountains of that elevated district where Glenorchy, Glenlyon and Glenochay are contiguous, there have been met with several times, during this and also the former winter, upon the snow, the tracks of an animal seemingly unknown at present in Scotland. The print, in every respect, is an exact resemblance to that of a foal of considerable size, with this small difference, perhaps, that the sole seems a little longer, or not so round; but as no one has had the good fortune as yet to have obtained a glimpse of this creature, nothing more can be said of its shape or dimensions; only it has been remarked, from the depth to which the feet sank in the snow, that it must be a beast of considerable size. It has been observed also that its walk is not like that of the generality of quadrupeds, but that it is more like the bounding or leaping of a horse when scared or pursued. It is not in one locality that its tracks have been met with, but through a range of at least twelve miles.

Commander Rupert T, Gould, another early Fortean who wrote books on the Loch Ness Monster and sea serpents also unearthed an account from Kerguelen Island in the sub-Antartic. The original account was written up in May 1840, by Captain Sir James Clarke Ross, when his ships, the Erebus and Terror, were lying off Kerguelen.

'Of land animals we saw none; and the only traces we could discover of there being any on this island were the singular foot-steps of a pony or ass, found by the party detached for surveying purposes, under the command of Lieutenant Bird, and described by Doctor Robertson as "being three inches in length and two and a half in breadth, having a small and deeper depression on each side, and shaped like a horseshoe".

Both the following reports come from Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned.

In the Illustrated London News, March 17, 1855, a correspondent from Heidelberg wrote, "upon the authority of a Polish Doctor in Medicine," that on the Piaskowa-góra (Sand Hill) a small elevation on the border of Galicia, but in Russian Poland, such marks are to be seen in the snow every year, and sometimes in the sand of this hill, and "are attributed by the inhabitants to supernatural influences."

There have been many incidents of strange footprints with cloven hoofs appearing without an obvious cause. Most occur during or after a fierce electrical storm. Some of these are linked to the legend of Kui found in the Shanhaijing. This is a 2000 year old book recording the culture and geography of China prior to the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC) The Shanhaijing say the Kui is a mythical monster with one leg like cloven hoof that looks kind of like a cow, except with one foot. Fierce electrical storms heralded its presence.

The Daoist Zhuangzi, who lived c. 3rd-2nd BC, mentions Kui in two chapters of the book "Autumn Floods" in which he describes Kui as a one-legged creature.

The K'uei envies the millipede, the millipede envies the snake, the snake envies the wind, the wind envies the eye, and the eye envies the mind. The K'uei said to the millipede, "I have this one leg that I hop along on, though I make little progress. Now how in the world do you manage to work all those ten thousand legs of yours?" The millipede said, "You don't understand. Haven't you ever watched a man spit? He just gives a hawk and out it comes, some drops as big as pearls, some as fine as mist, raining down in a jumble of countless particles. Now all I do is put in motion the heavenly mechanism in me ‑ I'm not aware of how the thing works."

The Jersey Devil is reputed to be a horse-headed ,bat-winged, fork-tailed horror with cloven hooves. It has supposedly terrorized the Pine Barrens of New Jersy since colonial times. The most intense flap of sightings came in January 1909 when thousands of reports of a winged monster in no less than thirty towns. In Burlington the creature left hoofprints on the rooftops and back yards in a manner akin to the Devon case of 1855. Whatever made he tracks seem to have an intrest in rubbish bins suggesting it was some kind of animal searching for food.

The residence of nearby Bristol also found hoofprints in the snow after the Post Master saw a huge bird like beast and awful screams were heard. Two local trackers said that they had never seen anything like them. Later the tracks turned up at Camden and Riverside. In Trenton, Councilman E.P. Weeden heard the flapping of wings and then found hoof prints outside his door. The prints were also found at the arsenal in Trenton. As the day wore on the Trolleys in Trenton and New Brunswick had armed drivers to ward off attacks.

It has been suggested that the Jersey Devil flap of 1909 was a newspaper hoax. If it was then it was a remarkably well-organized and far-reaching one.

On January 10th 1945 weird tracks were found in the snow in Belgium. Eric Frank Russell wrote the following in issue 15 of Doubt the magazine of the now defunct Fortean Society.

(The prints) were spotted on a snow-covered hill behind the Chateau de Morveau, near Everberg, part-way between Brussels and Louvain, Belgium, at 10 a.m on January 10th 1945. The snow varied from two to four feet in depth and I traced the prints for half a mile in a north-westerly direction until they entered a tiny wood or copse, where abruptly they disappeared A thorough search of the copse revealed no hole, lair or tree where anything might have concealed itself with-out leaving some evidence in the snow. I then traced the prints in the opposite direction, south-easterly, for nearly two miles, crossing several fields and a small stream, until they faded out on a hillside thick with windblown snow which had drifted over the prints for an unknown distance. But the sign did not reappear on the crest of the bill, nor was there any indication on the opposite sheltered side.

The prints measured about two and a half inches in length by one and a half wide, were spaced in pairs one behind the other to form a single file. the distance between prints of one pair being about nine inches, and between pairs twelve to fifteen inches. (This means they were not regularly spaced print by print, but alternated in nine and twelve-fifteen inch gaps.) They ran in a dead straight line, one print immediately behind the other without slightest misplacement to left or right. Judging by their depth whatever made them was at least the weight of a good medium-sized creature such as an Airedale.

Due to heavy frost and lack of further snow, the prints remained visible for two days, during which time I drew the attention of several people to them, including one Arthur Davies of Sheffield, and Victor Beha of London, as well as some local Belgians. Unfortunately all were singularly lacking in curiosity, Beha jesting that they must have been made by a gyroscopic rat - probably as good a guess as that of any dogmatic expert.

The Belgians could not think what they might be, never having seen the like before. Three cameras were available, all empty, and not a film to be got for love or money, otherwise I could have recorded this phenomenon for all time.

The tracks looked to me somewhat like those of a large goat, and there were goats aplenty in that part of Belgium, but goats don't step leaving single-line spoor.

Unfortunately, the prints were not as dramatic as the ones seen in Devon - they didn't run for miles and they didn't traverse rooftops.'

LOOK WHAT HELEN SENT US....

It's sunday morning, at this point in time,
everyone seems to be talking in rhyme,
so rather than commit some bad social sin
I suppose that I had better join in
Helen Lester email'd me last night
with the URL of this website
No Jokes about the License Fee,
'cos the CFZ have made the BBC!



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/7942954.stm

LINDSAY SELBY: The Devil Went Down to Woolsery

The devil went down to Woolsery
Jon Downes and co were in hot pursuit
They sought it here, they sought it there
Following the devil's boots

The trail went on for yards
Prints dotted here and yon
A hoax was on the cards
I think I know the answer cried Jon

A fox, a deer, followed by a rabbit or two
Gave the appearance of the devil's shoe
With that he and his band of Fortean types
Went back to the pub and had a few pints.

A bit of bad poetry to lighten the weekend lol


Tabitca/Lindsayx

THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO WOOLSERY: More Press News

This is all very gratifying, but why don't we get this sort of coverage when we have a PROPER news story?: We had practically no coverage of the Russia expedition, for example. Ah well....

http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=h1&oq=&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_en-GBGB302GB302&q=devil%27s+footprints+woolsery

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1161765/Ancient-mystery-returns-Satans-hoofprints-spotted-Devon-garden.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10195871-71.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4983344/Ancient-legend-of-Satans-visit-reawakened-by-footprints-in-the-snow.html

http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/world-news/devon-once-again-spooked-by-satans-footprints_100165937.html

http://www.thisisnorthdevon.co.uk/news/paid-visit-Woolsery-snow-8212-possibly-wasn-t-Satan/article-763209-detail/article.html

THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO WOOLSERY: We're in The Sun!!!

Bloody Hell!

(Makes you proud to be a journalist dunn'it?)

THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO WOOLSERY: Today's Press Coverage (1)

North Devon Journal (12th March 2009)