Moddey Dhoo of Peel Castle
In the days when Charles II was King in England, and Charles, Earl of Derby, was King in Mann, Peel Castle was always garrisoned by soldiers. The guard room was just inside the great entrance of the castle and a passage used to lead from it, through one of the old churches, to the Captain...
Spectral Dogs
Neither Brand in his Popular Antiquities, nor Sir Walter Scott in his Witchcraft and Demonology, mentions spectre-dogs as a peculiar class of apparitions, yet they seem to occupy a distinct branch of English mythology. They are supposed to exist in one form or another in almost every county, and few kinds of superstition have more...
Black Dog Sightings
The Devil Dog One night nearly eight years ago, my sister and I had decided to get rid of our “evil” relics that we might have had hanging around our houses. She was heavy into a new age religion and I agreed to be supportive. Anyway, I walked less than a quarter mile to my...
Headless Dog of Manchester
Just thought I would e-mail you with something inexplicable which happened recently and which left myself and my partner feeling a little unnerved to say the least! We decided to go to the cinema last minute, and were driving through Manchester to get to the Odeon Cinema in Peter/Oxford Street. We were driving along Gloucester...
Lyme Regis Black Dog
Near the town of Lyme stands a farm-house which once formed part of an old mansion that was demolished in the Parliamentary war, except the small part still existing. The sitting room now used by the farmer, and also by his predecessors for a century or two, retains the large old-fashioned fireplace with a fixed...
Derbyshire Gabriel Hound
No district in England has afforded such a stronghold for superstitious notions, such omens of family calamity, and tokens of death, as the High Peak of Derbyshire. There, in the secluded valleys, and among the mountain fastnesses, the soul-absorbing vampire-superstition, found an abiding place, long after its expulsion from other parts of the kingdom, by...
The Hull Black Dog
An interesting modern encounter with a Black Dog – a sighting from Debbie in Hull, these experiences would have occurred in 1981. “One winter night I took my cross mongrel/Labrador Bob, for his nightly walk, it had been snowing really heavy and it seemed to have done the worst that it could. So out Bob...
The Wise Woman and the Black Dog
The Wise woman of Littondale In Hone’s ‘Table Book’ is to be found the following legendary story: ‘In the year 17__, in a lonely gill not far from Arncliffe, stood a solitary cottage. A more wretched habitation the imagination cannot picture. It contained a single apartment, inhabited by an old woman called Bertha, who was...
The Grassington Barguest
‘His blood did freeze, his brain did burn, ‘Twas feared his mind would ne’er return; For he was speechless, ghastly, wan, Like him of whom the story ran, Who spoke the spectre-hound in Man.’ - Lay of the Last Minstrel Mr Joseph Lucas, F.G.S., in his ‘Studies in Niidderdale,’ quotes the following racy account, as...
Barguest of Troller’s Gill
This legend belongs to the same neighbourhood as those of ‘The Devil’s Bridge’ and ‘The Devil’s Apronful,’ viz., to that of the wild gills, or ravines, which intersect the bleak moorlands forming up the watershed between the head waters of the tributaries of the Wharfe and the Nidd. Following up one of the streams, which...
