Devil’s Tramping Ground

Deep in the woods of western Chatham County, about ten miles from Siler City, a clearing near Harper’s Crossroads has been known for generations as the Devil’s Tramping Ground. The legend describes a perfect circle roughly forty feet across, with a foot-wide bare path around the edge, where nothing is supposed to have grown for a hundred years. Objects left in the circle overnight are said to be thrown out by morning, dogs refuse to enter, and people who camp there are said to have unsettling nights. The explanation locals tell is that the Devil comes on certain nights to walk the ring and plan fresh mischief for humanity.

The writer most responsible for spreading the story was John William Harden, a Greensboro newspaper editor, whose 1949 book The Devil’s Tramping Ground and Other North Carolina Mystery Stories gave the legend its title. Richard Walser’s North Carolina Legends (1980) also treated it. The Encyclopedia of North Carolina records other attempts to explain the circle: ceremonial dances by Native peoples, a link to the Croatan battle and the lost colony of Roanoke, or horses circling an old molasses mill, though comparisons with other mills did not support the last. Skeptoid’s 2023 investigation points out that claims of an ancient or Indigenous origin for the story are not backed by any source.

What the record does show is more modest. The earliest known print mention is a letter written on 6 January 1882 by a physician, H. T. Ivy, to a newspaper, the Weekly Star. Ivy described a circle of about twenty-five feet whose interior was covered in thick wire-grass, which is not at all what the legend says. A 1946 News and Observer report described the soil as acidic and sterile. State agriculture department tests cited by the encyclopedia found the path sterile because of high salt content, with traces of natural salt licks nearby. In later years a retired soil scientist, Richard Hayes, found raised pH, zinc, copper and sodium near the site’s fire pit, which Skeptoid attributes largely to campfire ash and burned debris from generations of campers.

In other words, the ground is bare where people have camped, built fires and walked, and the legend is kept alive by each new generation of campers and storytellers. The Tramping Ground has appeared in horror fiction, including the novels of Poppy Z. Brite. Because the site is rural and access is informal, anyone curious should stay on public roads, respect private land and leave nothing behind.

Reports describe a bare circle with a worn path where objects vanish overnight, dogs howl and refuse to enter, and campers feel watched or hear odd noises. In the legend the Devil himself walks the ring after dark.

A small clearing in woodland near Harper’s Crossroads, west of Siler City, mostly at night.

The site appears in North Carolina folklore collections, in Poppy Z. Brite’s horror novels Lost Souls and Drawing Blood. A 2015 UNC-TV Science segment and Skeptoid’s 2023 episode examined the evidence.