The Grade I listed church of All Saints at Odell is a largely 15th century building with a massive west tower. Its porch carries the local legend. Five marks on the stone jamb are said to be the Devil's claw marks. The explanation given is that Sir Rowland Alston of Odell sold his soul to the Devil, and when the time came to pay he took sanctuary in the church. The Devil, who in tradition is often imagined as gigantic, shook the building in frustration and left the scratches behind.
British Folklore records a second, less conventional version that it attributes to Betty Puttick's book Ghosts of Bedfordshire (1996), where Sir Rowland is called "wicked" and the black sheep of his family. In that telling there is no soul-selling at all. Sir Rowland haunted the house on the site of Odell Castle so badly that he was exorcised and laid in a pond for a hundred years. When he came out again, meaning to resume his haunting, the Devil was waiting and chased him to the church. Sir Rowland slipped in through the keyhole and the Devil, shut out, shook the building and scored the porch.
Both versions agree that his ghost returns on a phantom black horse every hundred years, and the dates given are those ending in 44, so 2044 is the next. Wikipedia cites Russell Ash's Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain (1973) for the legend. There were several men called Rowland Alston in the family, who held Odell from the early 17th century and are commemorated by monuments in the church, and the sources do not say which of them the story is about. British Folklore notes that why the diabolic contract motif attached to him seems to have gone unrecorded.
The marks themselves are reported to have been removed during church renovations, so there is now nothing to see on the porch. Treat this as a traditional legend with a named family behind it but no dated incident.
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