In Brief
Off a back road outside Bath, North Carolina, the oldest town in the state, sit four saucer-shaped depressions a horse is said to have stamped in 1813. Grass won't grow in them. Corn, leaves, bark left inside all vanish. The locals call them the devil's hoofprints.
The Full Story
A few miles west of Bath, North Carolina, off N.C. 1334, the ground holds a set of hoofprints that won't fill in. They're saucer-shaped depressions, four or five inches deep, and the story goes that nothing stays in them. Grass refuses to grow inside. Corn kernels, leaves, bark scattered into them turn up gone, and by one account no bird will touch the seeds dropped there.
The story behind them belongs to a young gambler named Jesse Elliott. On a Sunday morning near church time, the way it's told, Elliott had agreed to race a stranger and put his horse to the line, shouting, "Take me in a winner or take me to Hell." The horse dug its hooves into the dirt instead of running, threw him into a tree, and killed him on the spot. The prints, locals say, are where the animal planted its feet. They've been there since 1813, by most tellings, though a few set it earlier. One account has a newspaperman filling them with corn to settle the matter, and the chickens pecking the ground all around the holes without once stepping inside.
Bath is the oldest incorporated town in the state, chartered in 1705 on a neck of land near the Pamlico River. For a few decades it was the closest thing the colony had to a city, with the first library and the first church. Then it stopped growing. By 1708 it had 12 houses and about 50 people. The 2020 census counted 245.
It also kept a pirate. Edward Teach, the one they called Blackbeard, came to Bath around 1718, took the King's Pardon, and settled at Plum Point across the creek. The pardon didn't hold him long. He was killed that November at Ocracoke Inlet, beheaded by a Royal Navy lieutenant who sailed home with the head hung off his bowsprit. On bad summer nights, the Bonner family used to report a fireball the size of a man's head moving back and forth over the water between Plum Point and Archbell Point, all night long.
The locals will tell you it was cursed. The traveling evangelist George Whitefield came through four times between 1747 and 1762, found himself unwelcome, and on his way out shook the dust from his shoes and damned the place to stay forgotten. The curse is remembered word for word: that Bath should remain "forgotten by men" until God turned His light back on it.
Whether any of it happened is another matter. There's no record Whitefield was actually run out of town, and the simplest reason the port never grew is that nearby Washington outgrew it after the 1770s. The curse is folklore, not history.
The hoofprints are harder to wave off. They're out there yet, four shallow saucers in the dirt by a back road, and people drive out to check whether the grass has finally come back in.
