LOCATION: USA – NORTH CAROLINA – CHATHAM COUNTY
LOCATION TYPE: OUTDOOR AREA
PHENOMENA: STRANGE ANOMALY

Ask any old-timer in Chatham County about the Devil’s Tramping Ground, and you’ll see their eyes take on a distant look. They might glance over their shoulder before telling you about the barren circle in the woods south of Siler City where nothing has grown for centuries. It’s not a big space – just forty feet across – but there’s something about it that makes the hair on your neck stand up, even in broad daylight.

A Circle of Mystery

Nobody really knows when people first started talking about the circle. The earliest written stories go back to 1882, but folks in the area will tell you their great-grandparents knew about it long before that. What makes it so strange isn’t just that nothing grows there – it’s the perfect roundness of it, like something carved it out of the Carolina pines with impossible precision.

The surrounding forest is exactly what you’d expect in this part of North Carolina: thick with vegetation, alive with the sounds of birds and small animals. But step into that circle, and everything changes. The ground is bare, stubborn in its refusal to support even the hardiest weeds. People have tried planting things there over the years, but it’s no use. Whatever goes into that soil dies, as if the earth itself is poisoned.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

“Ever since we was little boys, we always heard about the Devil’s Tramping Ground,” Tommy Hussey told WFMY News 2 in 2015, his voice dropping slightly as he speaks. “But until I was 16 years old, my momma and daddy and them didn’t want to talk about it, wouldn’t go to it, had nothing to do with it. That was something we didn’t talk about.”

The stories people tell about the circle would fill a book by themselves. Most folks around here know someone who’s tried leaving something in the circle overnight. It doesn’t matter what it is – camping gear, rocks, even heavy equipment. By morning, it’s always been thrown outside the circle’s boundaries, like something got angry at the intrusion.

Dogs won’t go near it. Bring your most well-trained hunting dog to the edge of that circle, and watch what happens. They’ll whimper, pull back, dig their paws into the dirt – anything to avoid crossing that invisible line. It’s like they see something we can’t.

A few years back, a reporter from Greensboro decided he’d had enough of the stories. He was going to spend the night right in the middle of the circle and prove once and for all there was nothing to fear. He made it through till morning, but the story he told afterward wasn’t quite what anyone expected. All night long, he said, he could hear footsteps circling his tent. Slow, deliberate steps, going round and round in the darkness. Some say if you visit late at night, you might catch a glimpse of red eyes watching from the shadows. Most folks don’t stick around long enough to find out if that part’s true.

Science Meets the Supernatural

When soil scientist Richard Hayes first came out to study the circle, he figured he’d find a simple explanation – maybe too much copper in the soil, or high salt concentrations. Something ordinary that would explain why nothing would grow there. What he found instead just made everything more confusing.

“I’m stumped,” he admitted to WFMY News 2 after running all his tests. The soil samples showed nothing that should prevent plants from growing. In fact, the dirt inside the circle turned out to be more fertile than the surrounding forest floor, probably from all the campfires people have built there over the years. But still, nothing grows.

“There’s a reason other than soil fertility for why nothing’s growing there,” Hayes said, shaking his head. Sometimes science just raises more questions than answers.

Keeping the Legend Alive

These days, the land belongs to the Dowd family – has for over a hundred years. They’ve watched generations of curious visitors come and go, leaving their empty beer bottles and campfire ashes behind. But they’ve also seen how the stories get passed down, how each new generation discovers the mystery for themselves.

“I think the mystery adds to the legend for sure,” says Tamara Dowd Owens, who grew up hearing all the stories. “It’s been around for so long, and I think it’s something that we can pass down to the kids. And they’ll carry it forward.”

The family wants to clean up the site, make it more presentable for visitors. But they’re careful about it. As Bob Dowd puts it, they don’t want to “take away the historical value.” Some things are better left a little rough around the edges.

Maybe there’s a perfectly logical explanation for the Devil’s Tramping Ground. Maybe someday someone will figure out why nothing grows in that perfect circle in the woods. But until then, it stands as a reminder that some mysteries don’t want to be solved. And maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly how it should be.

Works Cited

Image: Devil’s Tamping Grounds in 2007 By Jason Horne, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10597767

Atlas Obscura. Devil’s tramping ground. From https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/devils-stomping-ground

Foster, G. W. (2024). True ghost stories of North Carolina. Reedsy.

NC Ghosts. The Devil’s tramping ground. From https://northcarolinaghosts.com/piedmont/devils-tramping-ground/

Visit NC. Haunted places in North Carolina. From https://www.visitnc.com/story/xZiP/haunted-places-in-north-carolina

WFMY News 2. (Oct 30, 2015). Digging for truth: NC’s Devil’s tramping ground mystery. From https://www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/digging-for-truth-ncs-devils-tramping-ground-mystery/83-223511221