About 15 years ago I travelled to Spain with my best friend. We were both around 20 at the time, living the carefree young adult life. You know, just two guys having a great time.
We were in a warm country, no carefully filled itinerary whatsoever, just living in the moment, doing whatever we felt like. My friend, who originally came from Spain, still had family there, which made the month-long travel very affordable since they offered us free accommodation, a roof over our head, a working bathroom with fresh showers and three meals a day if we liked. They also gave us a spare key so we could come and go just as we liked.
During the day we often went swimming to keep us as cool as possible and during the evenings we often explored the city, went for drinks or went to a club.
On a certain day, somewhat more to the end of our month-long stay there, the father of our host family (my friend’s uncle) took us out for a fishing trip. We had a lot of fun out on the sea, although the trip was cut short because we had a bit too much fun consuming beers. The burning summer sun, too many beers and the wavy feeling of being out on the open sea made for a very bad case of sea sickness for both my friend and me. His uncle though it was funny though.
After having had an afternoon rest, or as they called it ‘siesta’ and a very fulfilling late-night dinner, we decided to go back out to the beach. We took a couple of cold beers with us, however we didn’t take many as we were still feeling a bit groggy from before. It was a beautiful night, open sky, no clouds, little to no light pollution, making the twinkling stars very visible and present.
Being on vacation, being young, on a still warm but comfortable summer night with a light breeze and a starry sky, it was the perfect moment to talk about the meaning of life. About what we liked to achieve one day, about what was worth it, or what wasn’t. If there were any other intelligent life out there, if we would live for another 1000 years or not…
The crashing of the waves against the sand of the beach and the rocks was very calming and was lulling us into a meditative state. Only that moment in that place seemed to exist. There was no outside world, no life with responsibilities, no obligations, no expectations, no working hard to get somewhere. It was that moment we noticed something was off…
The crashing of the sea against the sand of the beach sounded… different? Harder? Like something was moving in it? Under the waves a vague shape started to form. As it neared the shoreline it started to get the shape of a dog.
We both looked at each other and noticed we had been holding our breaths for about a minute it took the dog to crawl from the sea to the shoreline. The tension broke because we both burst out laughing because we had been so easily startled by something so innocent. But then my friend asked the question that made the newly regained light mood go away in an instant. “Where did that dog come from though? There’s no one around, and we never saw any dog go into the sea? Neither was there any dog swimming around, it came from UNDER the water…”
Now that he had worded it like that, it seemed rather curious, and actually that dog seemed pretty big for any existing dog I had ever seen… As it was crawling along the beach, solely illuminated by the first quarter moon, it looked the size of a small horse, but in the shape of a dog or wolf with matted fur. It had very present, bony joints in its knees and elbows and walked a bit awkwardly. My friend and I were debating if we should follow the beast and decided we did actually want to find out what exactly it was. I took out my phone and started to film it. (For as far as any 2008 smartphone could film in the dark). By the time we reached the place at the beach where it had left the water, it had already reached the sand dunes and disappeared in it.
We saw it had left a track and decided to follow that into the dunes. We weren’t prepared for what we saw next though. The beast had left a track in the wet sand in the form of individual hoof prints in a straight line instead of a crisscross pattern as with any four-legged animal. No horse could’ve walked in such a line, and even though it had looked like the size of a horse it hadn’t looked anything like the shape of a horse… Neither were horses aquatic animals…
We followed the track to the dunes and went over the first dune when we saw the beast standing about 10 meters from us, in a speck of moonlight. It didn’t look anything like a dog either. It looked like it had the lower half of a goat and the upper half of something like a werewolf or something. Just, the dimensions where off, the shapes were awkward, it was such a big animal neither of us could place under any existing animal we knew of, with matted fur and bony joints, that had just come out of nowhere from under the water, but clearly could walk and survive on the land as well, that left hoof marks in a straight line… Because we had just stumbled through the bushes closely behind the beast and had given away our presence, it slowly started to turn its head towards us. While it was turning towards us, it stood on its hind legs.
Not only was this an animal that came from under the water, as well as could survive on the land and walk on four legs. It could clearly stand and walk very well on two legs as well! The beast gained even more size by standing on its hind legs and must’ve been around 2,5 meters big. It stared at us with red glowing eyes. These were not to be mistaken with the eyes of any nocturnal animal with reflective eyes, these were actually glowing from within!
I felt stuck in my spot, completely frozen, but luckily my friend who was two steps behind me had the mind to run away and pull me with him. We ran for what felt like an hour, but must’ve been closer to 10 minutes because we reached the house of my friend’s family before we knew it. The beast hadn’t followed us, or at least not all the way. We went in and told the entire story to his uncle. Of course he thought we must’ve been still drunk and tired and had seen things that weren’t there. But when we showed him the recording, he went pale. He took a shovel (a gun would’ve been more impressive against a beast like that, but it’s not like the average European just has guns lying around) and asked us to show us where we had seen it.
We searched for almost two hours but didn’t find the beast again. However we did find the hoof marks, albeit a bit washed up because of the current of the sea. We went back home, trying to make something of what we had just seen, but couldn’t. We NEEDED to know what animal we had just seen. We started googling all kind of things. Of course with the lower half of the beast looking like a goat, we stumbled upon a lot of myths about the devil, which we discarded. We had seen an actual live beast that wasn’t known by humanity yet and wanted to know if any other people had ever seen anything like it.
It was only when we googled ‘hoof marks one straight line’ that we stumbled upon the term ‘the devils footprints’… So it was an actual thing, or at least something that had supposedly been seen before according to myths and stories. But they must have had some truth to them since they described exactly what we had just seen with our own eyes.
The few days we had left in Spain, we spent our nights out with my friends’ uncle trying to find the beast again, but to no purpose, as we never saw it again. When I came home a few days later I saved the recording on my hard drive, not sure what to do with it yet. I didn’t want to be the crazy guy that had seen the devil, because I still don’t believe I did. I just want to know what animal this was and how come we haven’t documented this beast yet.
I tried to forget about it, but couldn’t and a year later I decided I wanted to publish the recording in the hope anyone could make any sense of what we had seen that night. The uncle of my friend hadn’t seen the beast in all that time and had asked around in the town if anyone had ever seen it, which they didn’t. I had switched phones by then, but luckily I had the recording saved on my desktop, where I had replayed it at least a thousand times. I booted up my desktop and something was wrong. I had to restart my desktop a couple of times and after booting it up in safe mode I got the message my hard drive had crashed. I tried whatever was possible to try, but I couldn’t recover the recording in any way…
15 years later I’m still breaking my head over what the beast we encountered could have been, but by now it’s a story my friends believe to be for making conversation. Only that friend and his uncle are still branded by the experience as well. My friend even took it so far to go live in Spain again, near the beach where it all happened and still continues to actively look for the beast to this day. Maybe one day he’ll find it?