"A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delerious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog"

Conan Doyle masterfully rendered the tradition of the Black Dog in The Hound of the Baskervilles, but he did not invent it: for his inspiration, he had turned to the stories of demon dogs on Dartmoor which have been reputed to race along Abbots Way for untold years, leaving preturnatural howls in their wake and portending bad luck, ill health and death to all those unfortunates who encountered them.

Spectral hounds, alone or in packs, are a common feature of the north European mythological landscape. The packs are part of a spectral hunt - but here we consider the solitary variety in the very particular form the tradition takes in Northern Europe and Scandinavia, specifically the English form. Although those individuals' distribution and habits can vary, spectral black dogs are so similar that they can safely be thought as individuals within the same closely-related family.

Black Dogs are usually encountered on lonely tracks, ancient roads, crossroads, church yards, bridges and entrances - physically and symbolically the places of transition in human lives. Black Dogs are sometimes benign if left alone and are even rarely helpful, but more often than not they are chilling portenders of bad luck, ill health and disease. They usually menace passers-by and travellers, although there are also examples of ones attached to a specific family like displaced banshees. Occasionally spectral black dogs are said to guard an ancient treasure or a sacred place.

In European folklore dogs are often closely allied to death and its administrators such as Hecate (goddess of death and witchcraft), who stood at crossroads and portended death accompanied by her howling pack of hounds. A pack of spectral hounds accompanied by a huntsman which haunt the Meon Hills of South Warwickshire around the time of the pagan mid-winter feasts (modern Christmas and New Years Eve) are called night hounds, hell-hounds, or probably more accurately, Hel-hounds for the norse godess.

Even the local names of these canine spectres confirm their Teutonic origins. The term 'Bargest' was believed by Sir Walter Scott to derive from the German 'Beir-Geist', meaning ghost of the beir or death bed. 'Old Shuck', 'Black Shuck' and 'Old Shock' are thought to derive from the Anglo-Saxon 'scucca' which meant 'demon'. In Lancashire it is known as Trash, Gytrash or Skriker. The 'Trash' and 'Gytrash' names were reputed to have been derived from the splashing / squelching noises its great feet made as it padded over wet earth.

With the exception of injuries inflicted by a spectral black dog which has been touched or challenged, it's worth remembering that the creatures were usually said to forebode death rather than to cause it. A key clue to the origins of Black Dog folklore, especially in churches, lies properly with the idea of a guardian. An example is 'The Church Grimm' found in Yorkshire, a spectre which takes the form of a black dog and which protects the souls of the churchyard's dead. Reputedly, only a Church Minister could see the Grimm and remain unharmed. When a graveyard was first consecrated, it was thought that the first person to be interred would have the duty of guarding the others who followed. To avoid such an arduous and long fate befalling a human soul, black dogs were often killed and buried on the north side of a church before the first human corpse took its place (usually) on the south.

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