Devil's Tramping Ground

The three eyewitness descriptions do not agree about the shape, and the disagreement is measurable. In 1882 the correspondent gave a circle "about twenty-five feet in diameter" with one path across the middle. In 1905 Paschal gave "a circle of wire grass, one hundred and twenty five feet around" - about forty feet across - with two crossing paths "almost at right angles". By 1949 Harden had the forty-foot circle and no crossing paths at all, and the diametrical paths have never come back into the story. Whatever the ring was, it grew by half in twenty-three years and then lost the feature that Paschal thought pointed to a grave: "The ends of the diametrical paths mark roughly the four points of the compass." Paschal's own reasoning is still the best argument against the trampling explanations. He ruled out feet: "It is certain that no animal, human or brute, tramps regularly in these paths, or often enough to keep vegetation from springing up." He noted that the believers had not been there at night - "I have never heard that any of the defenders of this plausible theory ever in person investigated the matter" - and gave his reason for not going himself: "A midnight hour, a deep forest, and the presence of the devils, when taken together, are not favorable conditions for scientific work." Harden reported the same absence of witnesses in 1949, writing that "no person has ever spent the night there" to disprove the story. The soil chemistry that everyone repeats has been garbled in transmission, and the garbling can be dated. Harden had samples taken from the middle of the path by the Siler City newspaperman W. B. Morgan and analysed by W. A. Bridges, of the W. A. Bridges Laboratory at Wilson, and by Dr I. E. Miles, director of the Soil Testing Division of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. Bridges's report, as Harden quotes it, says nothing about salt: "Although there may be other factors of a physical nature that would make this a sterile soil, our findings show that plant life will not be supported on a soil that is so acid and so low in the necessary soil nutriments." Salt was a separate idea, and Harden labelled it: the "horse-back opinion" of Harry Davis, curator of the North Carolina State Museum, who had been in the area with the state geologist J. L. Stuckey testing wells for sodium chloride and had found old buffalo and deer licks. The two got welded together in the Encyclopedia of North Carolina in 2006, whose entry by Kimberly Hewitt states that samples "proved to be sterile due to an extremely high salt content" and cites Harden. The salt claim now attached to the site all over the web comes out of that sentence rather than out of any laboratory. The one modern test was inconclusive, and the reason is the campfires. Chris Palmer's geology paper for the Chatham County Historical Association records that "a North Carolina Department of Agriculture soil chemical test was conducted in 2008 on a soil sample taken in the circle. Results are inconclusive and repeated fires may have influenced soil chemistry results." The same paper puts the site inside the Bennett Flatwoods, an area labelled "worthless land" in pencil on the 1852 Map Shewing the Routes of the Central and Cape Fear and Yadkin Railroads, "where ancient volcanic ash deposits create water-impermeable soils unsuitable for agriculture". A sterile patch in a district that a railway surveyor had already written off is a smaller anomaly than a sterile patch anywhere else. The folklorists missed it. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore gathers what Duke University's collectors took down between 1912 and 1943, and volume one, Games and Rhymes, Beliefs and Customs, Riddles, Proverbs, Speech, Tales and Legends, contains no Tramping Ground: a case-insensitive count of the root tramp over its 276,671 words returns two occurrences, "trampled underfoot" and the title of a song, against 63 occurrences of Chatham and 122 of devil in the same file. Two of Brown's most productive contributors, Clara Hearne of Pittsboro and Lucille Cheek, were collecting in Chatham itself. Volumes six and seven, the popular beliefs and superstitions, give the same result. The best-known circle in the state is absent from the state's own folklore corpus. The photograph on this page is the last piece of evidence, and it is against the legend. It was taken by Jason Horne on 5 May 2007 and shows a broad trampled clearing with a burnt fire pit at the centre, litter at the edges and grass growing across the middle of the bare ground. The picture shows neither the ring nor the foot-wide path nor the island of wire grass. Palmer's paper says the ground "has been used for campfires by visitors", and that is what the picture shows: the thing the 1882 and 1905 letters described has been camped out of existence.