UPDATE: I actually posted this to the wrong blog. But I’ll leave it up as a reminder that October has started, and as a taste of what’s happening over at the Month of Halloween 2018 for the rest of the month.  Thanks for your patience!

The story tells of a chilly February morning in 1855. Smoke from the night’s fires puffing up through chimneys. Villagers across the countryside of Southern England woke up to a strange sight: trails of large hoofprints in the thick snow, in single file. These trails crossed the county back and forth, making about a hundred mile journey. The tracks crossed rivers, wound through cities, and most disconcertingly were seen going straight up houses, across the roofs, and going down the other side, without a break. What or who would have left this one-legged gait?

This text and image is reproduced from Mysteries of the Unexplained, a 1982 publication of The Reader’s Digest Association

This is the first of a few Month of Halloween treats you’ll see drawn from Mysteries of the Unexplained. An early childhood staple of mine (originally making its appearance in my elementary school library), it contains a vast variety of mysterious news reports and anecdotes on a variety of subjects. The concept and some of the entries were borrowed wholesale from Charles Fort, a 1930’s writer who collected such stories as well and knit them together with his own bizarre philosophies. Mysteries of the Unexplained may be less original, but it at least pretends to maintain some objectivity, so there’s that.

(I’ve skimmed over some snippets of Fort’s writing and it reads like 1910’s newspaper journalism mixed with an advertisement for a salt lamp that purifies WiFi – which is to say, delightful.)

So as per everything that comes out of Fort and Mysteries of the Unexplained, I must clarify that this story possibly isn’t real. All of these accounts in this book came from someone and are written down as if infallible, and probably a large number of them were invented wholesale. Or are at least garbled versions of something real. We know that drawings and a description of the event were published in a London newspaper in 1855, and evidence was collected by a vicar in the area around the same time.

It was certainly enough to scare me in middle school. And it’s a good story, right?