Imagine that it is the dead of night. There is electricity in the air as the long-threatened storm finally breaks. You are alone in an eerie place, perhaps somewhere like a graveyard, or an old crossroads where many years ago, according to local legend, an executioner’s gallows used to stand.

Suddenly you feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up and you have the unpleasant feeling that you are being watched. You turn and there, right in the middle of the road, is the biggest dog you’ve ever seen. His fur is so black that you can only make out his form against the night and he stands silent, looking at you with his horrible glowing red eyes. The fear and the desire to run are almost unbearable, but even worse is the feeling of total despair.

You just got a visit from a Barghest.

That’s how this supernatural hound is known here in Yorkshire, and while the mythological creature’s name may change, its grisly legend remains remarkably similar from Scotland and the north of England to Wales, Cornwall and the Channel Islands.

Across the country since at least the 12th century, there have allegedly been sightings, usually at night, of monstrous black dogs the size of calves or even larger. They have huge teeth and claws, and eyes as big as saucers that can glow devilish red. Sometimes they attack and kill people immediately, at other times they are known to be omens of death, with either the person seeing the dog or one of the dog’s close relatives dying shortly after the sighting. In some accounts, only one person in a group sees the hound, and his fellow travelers see nothing there; evil will soon fall on the poor lonely victim.

The dog often vanishes from sight as the poor soul looks on in horror, or disappears as the marked person looks back. The animal is sometimes said to appear to members of the same family over generations, usually announcing the death of each person in turn.

It is said that if anyone dares to return to the site of the sighting, they may find the ground where the creature was scorched or burned. This lends credence to the theory that the Barghest is a being from the fire pit of Hell, who came to retrieve the soul of an evildoer from whence he came.

In Wakefield, the creature is called Padfoot, while the Welsh refer to him, and curiously the dog is always male, like Gwyllgi, the Dog of Darkness. In the Isle of Man it is known as the Mauthe Dog, and in Norfolk they will speak of the Black Shuck. Even the unlucky ones on the wrong side of the Pennines know about the creature. They call him Guytrash or Skriker. Whatever its name, the beast is always huge, black and terrifying.

Sightings have become rarer in these more enlightened days, but the Black Dog is still very familiar to us from the arts, and suspense literature in particular. Perhaps the most famous of all the Black Dogs in popular novels is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. In that famous Sherlock Holmes tale set in the mists of Dartmoor, a great black beast is said to haunt the Baskerville family as a result of a pact made with the Devil by one of his clan. The devil Mephistopheles first appears in Goethe’s Faust in the form of a black dog, albeit in the slightly less frightening form of a small black poodle, but even this seemingly harmless pup leaves fire in his wake. And what is the main character in Susan Hill’s classic novel and subsequent long-running play The Woman in Black if not a chilling human version of a Barghest? All black, silent, terrifying in the extreme, a harbinger of death but only visible to those upon whom calamity is about to fall; she is a Barghest through and through.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula tells how the vampire’s arrival at Whitby takes the form of a huge Black Dog leaping from his ship onto the shore. Whitby is particularly associated with the Barghest sightings, something Stoker would no doubt have been aware of when he incorporated it into his novel. The city’s ties to the spectral dog have long been celebrated by the recently revived Black Dog Brewery, whose flavorful

the products echo the alternative spelling of Barguest.

Many people have claimed to have seen the creature in our locality over the centuries: the bleak Troller’s Gill at Appletreewick, the old stone bridge over the River Swale where pallbearers would deposit their heavy loads on the way to Ivelet, a disused well in Slaughter Lane at Baildon – all have recorded appearances at Black Dog. Also Egton, Grassington, Nidderdale, Ilkley Moor, Sedbergh and Skipton. Even Sheffield’s Graves Park has reportedly been visited by the infamous goblin dog.

York also has its own special version of the legend, as several lone travelers spotted the unholy canine in the narrow alleyways that abounded in that ancient city, often with fatal consequences. It is highly unusual for the hellhound to be reported in an urban setting such as this. Historically, most sightings have been made on lonely moors, graveyards, or on roads outside of town.

Of course, the image of a Black Dog is also associated with depression, as in Winston Churchill’s famous quote from his “Black Dog on my shoulder.” However, this metaphor was not Winston’s own invention. The father of the English dictionary, Samuel Johnson (of whom Churchill was a fan), used the term in his letters in the 18th century, but its roots go back much further. Even the Greek classics feature tales of black dogs that seem to predict eternal death. Perhaps these stories were originally created as warnings against traveling alone through dangerous areas? Or maybe they were based on simple but dire coincidences. Or maybe, just maybe, there’s something to them after all?

Whatever the truth, be careful if you find yourself in lonely and desolate places. If you hear heavy paws and the snap of fierce claws following you, don’t look back. The Barghest can attack anywhere.

(c) Shaun Finnie 2011