The Devil’s Footprints

Sleepy Hollow Country is steeped in folklore, but few tales are as peculiar as the story of the devil’s footprints in the village of Croton-on-Hudson. We stumbled across this geological phenomenon while sifting through newspaper archives for information on the Black Horse Tavern, a notorious Revolutionary War era public house on the bank of the Croton River. Below the headline “The Devil’s Footprints” ran the lede “Mysterious footprints in the solid rock on the east and west banks of the Hudson at Croton have puzzled the scientists, who believe them to have been made by a primeval man before the Stone Age.”

We thought we had a pretty good handle on local lore but mysterious footprints in solid rock was a new one. The Black Horse would have to wait for another day!

The Croton footprints are an example of a petrosomatoglyph, which is an imprint of a human or animal body part in a stone surface. They are not unique in this regard, as there are examples around the world of supposed foot, hand, or other body part impressed into solid rock. Here in the northeast United States there are numerous purported petrosomatoglyphs, including several “devil’s footprints” in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

Closer to home, there are legends of devil’s footprints at Hogencamp Mountain in Harriman State Park, and in Pelham and Eastchester. If, as the Apostle Peter said, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour, it’s no wonder he left behind an abundance of footprints!

Earliest Reference to the Devil’s Footprints

After an exhaustive search of our usual archival resources, the earliest reference we found to the Croton-on-Hudson devil’s footprints appeared in the August 5, 1895 edition of the New-York Daily Tribune. The full page article, titled “The Charms of Tarrytown”, explored landmarks in and around the village like William Rockefeller’s Rockwood Hall, Washington Irving’s Sunnyside, and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Thankfully for the purposes of this article the Tribune’s reporter took liberties with geography, stretching the village limits of Tarrytown 12 miles north to encompass the hamlet of Oscawana.

It was on the road from Croton-on-Hudson to Oscawana that the reporter’s guide pointed out a place known among locals as “Devil’s Track” on the side of Hessian Hill. This, said the reporter, is “where the imprint of two human feet can be seen in the rock. ‘That’s where he stood when he jumped across the river,’ so goes the story, ‘and on the other side, near Haverstraw, you can see the footprints in the rock to correspond with these.’ As the river is about four miles wide here, no one argues the point when the native says: ‘It was a pretty good jump.’“

Alfred P. Gardiner Acquires Hessian Hill

A decade later the western face of Hessian Hill changed hands. In January 1906 The New York Times reported the sale, apparently including the boulder containing the devil’s footprints: “A. P. Gardiner has bought the Hessian Hill farm at Croton-on-Hudson from the Cockroft estate. It has frontage on the Hudson and extends back for over a mile. Hessian Hill has an elevation of 600 feet and commands a fine view of the river. Mr. Gardiner will improve the property extensively and make it his country home.”

Gardiner was aware of the devil’s footprints on his land. According to the Croton Historical Society, he published a small booklet about his Hessian Hill estate in which he included a description and sketch of the prints, referring to it as Devil’s Rock. “At the base of the hill near the Post Road is a large rock which has attracted sightseers from far and near. It is called the Devil’s Rock on account of the legend which has been handed down from one generation to another.”

The map above overlays a 1908 map over present day Croton-on-Hudson. Based on Gardiner’s description, the rock bearing the devil’s footprints would have been near his frontage on the Albany Post Road. Modern day Prickly Pear Hill Road is a rough proxy for Gardiner’s driveway.

The 1912-1913 Articles

Perhaps inspired by Gardiner’s self-published booklet, syndicated articles about the devil’s footprints appeared in newspapers across the country from autumn 1912 through the spring of 1913. The author offered several fanciful legends on their origin.

The primary theory expanded on the theme of the 1895 New-York Daily Tribune article in which the devil, chained up in Connecticut for a number of years, escaped and fled to New York dragging his chain behind. Pausing rest on the east bank of the Hudson River, his feet pressed into the solid rock while the chain scored row upon row of indentations into the rock further up Hessian Hill. After a break, the devil leaped across the Hudson leaving matching prints on the top of High Tor hill. The reporter asserted, “by actual measurement the footprints on both sides of the river correspond in every particular and were undoubtedly made by the same pair of feet.”

“Mysterious footprints in the solid rock on the east and west banks of the Hudson at Croton, N. Y., have puzzled the scientists, who believe them to have been made by a primeval man before the Stone Age. On the east shore, along the old Albany post-road and at the bottom of a steep hill belonging to the A. P. Gardiner estate, lies a huge bowlder shadowed by tall trees. Its smooth surface bears the imprint of a pair of human feet placed side by side, as if a barefooted man had walked down the hill and stood on the spot while the stone was still soft and yielding from nature’s crucible.”

An alternate theory advanced was that a cave man, standing on the Hessian Hill boulder was crept up on by a “terrible many-legged serpent. So frightened was this cave man that he leaped clear across the Hudson River. In this telling the indentations further up the hill are the marks of the serpent’s legs.

Lastly, a “famous professor” advanced a theory that the prints were left by the “missing link” of human evolution “before he shed his caudal appendage, which trailed in the prehistoric clay behind him while he scanned the surrounding landscape for something good for breakfast. This accounted for the indentations and scored one for the Darwinian theory.” Considering the rock in question is metamorphic, not sedimentary, and that no proto-human has ever been found with a tail, the famous professor was wise to withhold his name from publication.

In the author’s telling, the devil won out in public opinion as evidenced by Croton locals referring to the boulder as “Devil’s Rock” and amplified by “the strange fact that nothing will grow in the unholy footprints.”

Gardiner Sells Hessian Hills

Gardiner sold his estate in 1926 to Milton J. Gordon for redevelopment as a country club. Before the project was abandoned in the 1930s, Hessian Hills Golf Club had a stone club house and a 9-hole course. Fires in 1930 and 1938 ravaged the club house. In the 1990s Hudson National Golf Club picked up 260 acres of the property and created a course that consistently ranks among the top 100 in the country. The 4th hole at Hudson National features the ruins of the old Hessian Hills club house.

The Devil’s Footprints Today

The devil’s footprints seem to have been lost to time. Writing in the Spring 2023 issue of The Croton Historian, village historian Marc Cheshire observed, “Unfortunately, the exact location doesn’t seem to have been passed down to the present generation. It’s also possible that the footprints were destroyed when a house was built. At least one modern home, which still has part of the old stone-walled road to Gardiner’s estate in the backyard, is built on large rock outcroppings.”

Perhaps the devil’s footprints will one day be rediscovered. As of this writing in December 2024 the former guest house on the Gardiner estate is available as a vacation cottage rental, with the owner advertising its association with the prints. The location, just south of Prickly Pear Hill Road, is not far from where Gardiner’s driveway once intersected Albany Post Road.

“Holiday cozy country cottage! A bit of history comes with this house – the tale of the Devil’s Footprint and so far no one has been able to find it. Contact us for information and clues about where it might be.”

-Croton-On-Hudson vacation home listing on Vrbo

About Alfred P. Gardiner

According to his obituary in the New York Times, Gardiner was born in Quebec and moved to New York City around 1885 where he entered the publishing business, eventually heading his own publishing house. He continued as a publisher of trade magazines until 1901, the year he married Alice Troup, the niece of John Radway, a manufacturer of patent medicines. That same year Gardiner became president of Radway & Co., a position he held until his retirement in 1928.

Radway’s Ready Relief was the company’s major product. It was an elixir of undisclosed ingredients available without prescription that the company touted as a cure-all. It was a liniment for topical application to relieve rheumatism, muscle aches, bruises, cuts, strains, sprains, burns, scalds, sciatica, gout, toothache and nearly every other sort of inflammation or pain. Taken internally, it purported to relieve indigestion, gas, chills, cramps, diarrhea, headaches and hangovers, cholera, fevers and agues, dysentery. Even asthma.

Used as a preventive and in conjunction with the company’s Radway’s Regulating Pills, Ready Relief claimed to ward off a host of ailments and contagious diseases. The company claimed: “All complaints caused by unhealthy air, such as small-pox, scarlet fever, measles, fever and ague, yellow fever, cholera, dysentery, pneumonia, &c., are prevented by its occasional use.”

While the ingredients were a trade secret at the time, The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History provides this analysis of its active ingredients: alcohol 27%, oleoresin capsicum, ammonia, camphor, potassium carbonate, Castile soap. The high alcohol content may have been temporarily soothing. However, ammonia and camphor are toxic and oleoresin capsicum, of course, is the main ingredient in pepper spray. Powerful stuff, that Radway’s Ready Relief, use with caution!

With such a miraculous product as Radway’s Ready Relief in his portfolio it is little wonder Gardiner had the means to purchase half a mountain and construct an elaborate country estate. In his leisure time, Gardiner was a founder and member of New York Athletic Club, a member of the literary Lotos Club, and the fine arts Salmagundi Club.

In his retirement Gardiner appears to have scaled back his lifestyle, downsizing to a home in North Tarrytown while devoting himself to developing talents as an amateur painter. His landscapes were often of the Hudson River, Cape Cod, and Florida. An obituary in the Tarrytown Daily News notes “He became well known among Westchester art lovers through his exhibits at the County Center in White Plains and at the Tarrytown Art School on McKeel Avenue here.”

Gardiner died at his home at 115 Harwood Avenue in North Tarrytown (today’s Sleepy Hollow), half a block from the main gate to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. He is buried in his parents’ lot at Elmwood Cemetery in Fort Covington, New York near the border with Canada.

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Editor’s note. Let’s point out what should be obvious to any reader: the footprints-in-rock photo at the head of this article is Photoshopped. Moreover, this particular rock is located on Iona Island, not Croton-on-Hudson. The area in Croton where the devil’s footprints were located are now private land, do not trespass in search of them!