I read this a while ago, like at least 10-15 years. I don’t even know if it was on the internet, it might have been in a real book.
The story was done from the POV of almost like a reporter reporting on facts. In some small sleepy town, maybe in the present or the distant, simpler past, the townspeople find what they could only describe as the footprints of Satan walking through their town.
A snow had fallen the night before, and when they awoke, they spotted a peculiar set of prints in the fresh snow. The prints were of a cloven hoof, goat-like, hopping from one end of town to the other. They were always spaced exactly apart (lets say 3 feet), and depressed into the snow a similarly homogenous few inches. More curious about the prints was that there was only one single file, as if the creator were hopping, and somehow its spacing was unaltered even though it appeared to go through an 8 foot wall, on roofs, etc.
Sound familiar to anyone? I have a vague recollection that it might have been in one of those horror stories for kids books that I used to read
I read that in grade school (7th?) in one of those, “you get stars or some other reward for reading this stuff” There were levels like bronze, silver and gold and you read like 50 short stories to go up a level.
As for the OP, the Devon Devil shows up in a lot of Fortean-type “STRANGER THAN FICTION!!!1!” collections. I’ve never actually seen it done up in short story format.
