Spectral beasts and hounds of hell: a spooky history of Britain's ghost dogs
From infernal black dogs attacking churches to ravening, red-eyed brutes on remote roads, Britain has long been haunted by fearsome canine phantoms. Karen R Jones explores what these stories can tell us about societies past
On the morning of 4 August 1577, the good Christian folk of Bungay assembled in St Mary’s Church for their regular Sunday service. But more sinister forces were also gathering in the Suffolk town. Dark clouds massed above, then “there fell from heaven an exceeding great and terrible tempest… not simply of raine but also of lightening and thunder”.
This storm was only the prelude to a “straunge and terrible Wunder” described by Abraham Fleming in a pamphlet published soon after the event. For the church was plunged into darkness and a “black dog, or the divel in such a likenesse” burst in. It wrung the necks of two worshippers then “passing by an other man of the congregation… gave him such a gripe on the back, that therewith all he was presently drawen togither and shrunk up, as it were a peece of lether scorched in a hot fire”.
The story of the Black Dog of Bungay is extraordinary, but far from unique in the region – East Anglia is the primary hunting ground of the spectral beast named Black Shuck – and, indeed, across the country.
Britain is, famously, a nation of animal lovers, with 36 per cent of households having at least one dog. The UK canine consumer market is worth around £10bn a year, while millions of us tune in to watch dog-centric television programmes. These animals have become our trusted aides and loyal companions since domesticated dogs arrived on this island with the first human migrants during the Stone Age.
It’s not surprising, then, that Britain’s population of paranormal pups is more diverse and widespread than anywhere else in the world, according to Mark Norman, a folklorist specialising in black dog apparitions. Such creatures reputedly stalk villages and lonely roads from Aberdeen to Penzance, and the British landscape echoes with their chilling howls.
Hellhound is round the corner
Dogs and humans have lived and travelled together in Britain since the Mesolithic age. Archaeological surveys place dogs at the UK’s oldest excavated house – at Star Carr, Yorkshire, dating from around 9000 BC – and at the oldest site of journeying, a camp at Blick Mead near Stonehenge. Dogs accompanied pastoralists rounding up sheep in grasslands and joined hunters tracking deer in forests, before settling down to snooze in front of the communal fire. No wonder they also populated ghostly tales.
In story and song, from whispered yarn to local gazetteer, ghost dogs bound across the folkloric and literary record, with perhaps the most famous fictional example being the Hound of the Baskervilles investigated by Sherlock Holmes. In many reported cases, a factual explanation remains deliciously elusive.
All manner of spirit dogs have been reported. Some are devoted pets pining for lost masters and mistresses, padding eternally along the walks they took in life, carrying with them the textured reportage of hearsay, tradition and family fortunes. Some are seen as portents of doom, some relate particular cultural coordinates of injustice, wrongdoing or violent ends, and others just are.
Some people who are convinced by such tales claim that these are beasts appearing to us from ancient days – messengers demonstrating the existence of a time-slip or a ‘thin place’. The unconvinced retort airily that we like to tell tales – Booker Prize-winning author Graham Swift called humans “storytelling animals” – and that of course those yarns frequently invoke our long-standing companions of homestead and hearthside.
Most of Britain’s ghost dogs are connected to specific sites of historical significance where long-standing relationships between humans and canines have been written repeatedly into the material and imagined environment. They haunt village streets, ancient camps, burial mounds and graveyards, historic houses and castles.
Road ragers
Ancient trackways, roads and paths seem to attract a special breed of spectral beast – black dogs that leap out at unsuspecting travellers on dark, lonely nights. These are the most prolific canine apparitions, accounting for about a third of British sightings. Most of them are large and sport flaming eyes; some clank chains, while others can talk. All are fearsome.
One of the most striking highway hauntings was reported on the road between Tavistock and Okehampton on Dartmoor. Here, on dark nights, the ghost of Lady Howard rode out from her home at Fitzford House in a grisly coach made from the bones of her dead husbands, heading to Okehampton Castle. Running ahead was a hellhound with blazing eyes and a demonic disposition. Sometimes she offered a lift to lost travellers: accept at your peril.
Also on Dartmoor, you might encounter the Wisht Hounds kennelled by the devil in Wistman’s Wood. And at the East Dart Hotel, a former coaching inn near Postbridge, a ghostly bloodhound appears each night at 3am to snuffle eagerly at the road outside, hoping to lap up the remnants of discarded booze poured into the gutter by the guilt-ridden landlord, John Webb, over a century ago. The dipsomaniac dog follows the road down the hill to a clapper bridge, eternally searching for the long-discarded grog in the early hours.
Dartmoor epitomises the kind of place where ghost dogs congregate: bleak, lonesome spots where the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Dark copses. Craggy peaks. Desolate moors. These are environments that inspire awe and even fear. No wonder they host such beastly apparitions as the Gytrash – a massive dog-spirit frequenting the remote highways of the West Riding of Yorkshire – and the Barghest, a demonic hound with huge teeth and claws roving the darker stretches of the Yorkshire Dales. One Barghest near Whitby sometimes dragged chains behind it, and could vanish into thin air by walking backwards. All were best avoided, auguring bad fortune or death – though they reputedly could not cross rivers.
In Wales, the Cŵn Annwn, or ‘hounds of the underworld’, were often seen or heard before a funeral, baying mournfully. Typically, they sported glowing red eyes but their appearance otherwise varied depending on where they were seen: they might be huge and white, small and liver-coloured, or even red-coated, dripping with blood. They might rove lonely roads in a pack but sometimes travelled singly, often accompanied by Arawn, Lord of the Underworld and leader of the ‘wild hunt’. They were particularly associated with crossroads, enjoyed haunting graves, and often frequented mountains.
These examples reveal much about our complex relationship with wild spaces. Sure, today we seek out these places for forest bathing, wild camping and an escape from modernity. And yet the vestigial unease they inspire in some people is a psychological throwback to our ancient past, when wolves and bears dwelt in uncharted spaces, and when wilderness connoted chaos, a descent into feral madness and devilry. They are places where Canis familiaris might revert to its lupine ancestor, Canis lupus, transforming from strong and trusty aide into a savage, malevolent assailant.
Not all ghost hounds are out for blood, though. Though most tales about Black Shuck portray his appearance as an omen auguring imminent death or ill fortune, on occasion he struck fenland folk as friendly, and even had a penchant for helping women travellers. And the Gurt Dog of Somerset’s Quantock Hills was an entirely affable apparition: a shaggy Samaritan that appeared from the fog to guide lost children safely to their homes.
Good or bad omens?
Inhabited places, too, harbour their share of spectral hounds. Not one but two black dogs are said to wander the grounds of Leeds Castle, Kent (coincidentally home to the world’s largest collection of dog collars). One, a portent of doom, first appeared in the 1440s, after Eleanor Cobham, Henry VI’s aunt, was tried for witchcraft and incarcerated in the castle. The second, a more benign spectre, is said to bring good luck, and once reputedly saved a visitor from falling out of a window, having attracted their attention by barking. Both are curly coated retriever types, so anyone encountering such a spectre here might struggle to determine whether it is a good or bad omen.
The story of the Black Dog of Newgate was popularised in a sensational 1596 pamphlet describing a canine phantom that stalked the notorious prison. During the reign of Henry III, the yarn goes, inmates of the prison were so hungry that they killed a new arrival, a scholar, and devoured his body. His ghost then wandered the confines of the prison – as did the spectre of a huge black dog. Some prisoners died of fright upon seeing the beast. Others were ripped to pieces by its fearsome jaws in retribution. Even those who escaped the prison were pursued by the avenging animal.
Friend or foe?
Why are dogs the creatures most commonly cited in accounts of animal apparitions? Partly, it’s because of their long relationship with and proximity to humans. The dog’s alter ego, the wolf, also adds that sense of the fearsome wild into the psychological scare-scape.
There is also a biological factor at play: an awareness that dogs are gifted with extraordinary sensory powers. A dog’s nose is equipped with about 300 million olfactory receptors – far more than a human’s paltry 5–6 million. Their hearing, too, is vastly superior to our own. These endow them with almost ‘supernatural’ abilities, reflected in their roles in the beliefs and legends of various cultures worldwide.
The Aztecs believed that their Xoloitzcuintli dogs could ‘smell’ ghosts, and thus protect their owners from spirits. In Norse mythology, Freya, a god linked with death, rode a chariot pulled by huge cats – thus a household dog might alert the residents to her approach by howling and barking, potentially averting a fatal incident. And in ancient Greek legend, the three-headed hound Cerberus guarded the entrance to Hades, suggesting that dogs were equipped to patrol the boundary between the living and the dead. Such beliefs in the extrasensory abilities of animals persist: in a 2019 survey for the Blue Cross animal charity, 63 per cent of owners said they believed that their pet had seen (or had the capacity to see) a ghost or other supernatural presence.
Indeed, perhaps the most intriguing part of spectral dog stories is the fact that in many places they are still thriving today. Ghost dogs are seen through the windscreens of cars, stalking major roads just as happily as they did ancient trackways.
Take that infernal assailant in Bungay in 1577. Black Shuck became – and still is – a widespread legend across East Anglia, written into regional folklore by Reverend ES Taylor in a 1850 issue of Notes and Queries, describing “Shuck the Dog-fiend… this phantom I have heard many persons in east Norfolk, and even Cambridgeshire, describe as having seen as a black shaggy dog, with fiery eyes and of immense size, and who visits churchyards at midnight”.
- Read more | When a Victorian ghost hunter investigated Britain’s most haunted house, this is what he found
Paranormal investigators documenting reports of Shuck sightings found that the majority of alleged encounters occurred after 1900 – so, in fact, his presence in the regional psyche appears to have burgeoned rather than receded in the modern age.
Reflecting the continuing salience of this legend, and a broader revival of interest in all matters folkloric, in 2022 a Black Shuck Festival was launched in Bungay to celebrate the town’s famous fiendish beast. Perhaps these tales of Shuck and his phantom canine kin have even more relevance in our polarised and fractured society today. They speak of the importance of roots, of the storied pasts that bind humans to other species. And in a time when anthropogenic change threatens us in far-reaching and fundamental ways, they speak of the importance of acknowledging the limits of what we, as humans, can know and control in the natural (or supernatural) world.
Karen R Jones is professor of environmental and cultural history at the University of Kent. Her latest book, Beastly Britain: An Animal History, was published in May by Yale University Press
This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine