The hell hounds

Dogs, cats and horses have always been associated with the spirit world. They are said to sense, even see, ghosts which are invisible to the human eye. But some animals exist as four-legged phantoms themselves. The most terrifying are the giant black hounds of hell.

Almost every part of Britain has such legends: fiendish harbingers of doom with blazing eyes and snarling teeth. The Yorkshire version, the Padfoot, is said to be as big as a donkey. The Welsh call theirs Gwyllgi, and the Lancashire dog is known as Trash or Shriker. On the Isle of Man, the Mauthe or Moddey Dhoo is said to haunt Peel Castle, and soldiers once refused to patrol the battlements there alone.

One sentry who dared to serve solo was found gibbering next morning, and died three days later.

The most frequently documented hell hound is Black Shuck, whose name is derived from Scucca, the Saxon word for the Devil. Hundreds of people claim to have seen him at night in the lonely fenlands of East Anglia, the one eye in the centre of his head blazing scarlet or yellow.

He has been reported on the coast near Cromer, loping along lances near the Norfolk Broads at Neatishead, and at Wicken Fen, near Newmarket. In Suffolk, people living near the heathland of Walberswick and Dunwich call him the Galley Trot. And it was in this area, during World War Two, that he gave an American airman and his wife a night they would never forget.

The couple had rented a flat-topped hut on the edge of Walberswick marsh while the husband served at a nearby air base. One stormy evening they were startled by a violent pounding on the door. The airman peeped through a window and saw a huge black beast battering their home.

The terrified couple piled what little furniture they had against the door, then cowered as the attacker hurled his body against first one wall, then another, then leapt on to the roof. The ordeal lasted several hours before the noise faded away. The couple waited anxiously for daylight, and at dawn crept outside to inspect the damage. There was no sign of the attack, and no paw or claw marks in the soft mud around the hut.

The West Country is said to have a pack of wild black dogs, whose blood-curdling howls have been heard several times across the vast wastes of Dartmoor.

But a different phantom beast worried hundreds of people in five Devon towns when they woke one winter’s morning in February, 1855. Clearly visible in the heavy overnight snow were animal footprints four inches long and almost three inches wide - footprints which, it was later discovered, stretched in a zig-zag trail for nearly 100 miles from Totnes to Littleham. Dogs brought in to track the mystery creature through undergrowth at Dawlish backed off, howling dismally. Baffled investigators found that at one stage, the trail went into a shed through a six-inch hole. In another place, the prints indicated that the animal had squeezed through a long narrow drainpipe. Next night, local people bolted their doors and refused to venture outside. They were convinced the Devil himself had walked through Devon.

Journalist and ghost-collector WT Stead told of a letter sent to him in 1902 by an Englishman who went hunting in the South African Transvaal. The man claimed he was riding back to camp when an eerie white horse carrying an unearthly rider emerged from a thicket of trees, and pursued him. That night, one of the hunter’s guides told him of an earlier safari, when an Englishman shot seven elephants in the thicket. He returned next morning to collect the ivory tusks - and was never seen again. His white horse returned to camp alone, but died 24 hours later. The guide added, "I would no go into that bush for all the ivory in the land."