Belief in the 'Wild Hunt' or 'Furious Host' was at one time widespread all over northern Europe, specifically Germany, northern France and Great Britain. This distribution suggests it is Teutonic in character, an assertion is borne out by its seasonality: it quite often appears in the spring or autumn, but most often appears at Yule - twelve day pagan midwinter feast and a time of supernatural visitation in Germanic folklore. The Furious Host is known by many names: it is called the Herlathing in England after the mythical King Herla, and the Yeth or Wish Hounds in Durham. In Iceland it is called the Yule Host, the Raging or Furious Host in Germany, the Chasse Maccabei, the Chasse Artu and the Mesnée d'Hellequin (from the goddess of death Hel) in France and the Oskorei in Norway. In North Yorkshire the calamitous procession consists of the ghosts of the dead accompanied by human headed dogs called 'Gabriel Hounds' or 'Gabbel Ratchets' or 'Retchets', which literally means 'corpse hounds'. The hounds of Annwfn in Wales come to fetch the dead: they are white with red ears.
Descriptions of the Wild Hunt are broadly the same: the Hunt is preceeded by the sound of baying, barking and shouting. Then a rider on a horse erupts onto the scene, thundering through the air followed by a host of strange spirits. The rider is often black, sometimes headless and sometimes (especially in Germany) bears the battle-wounds that would have caused his mortal demise. Fire spurts from the mouths and noses of the phantom horses and hounds which are often only two or three legged. And sometimes, the spirits of the recently dead are seen in the infernal train.
Mortals who saw the Host were in grave danger: at the very least it was bad luck and it more often caused instant death or madness. In some story variants, the hunt directly acheives its end by chasing people 'til they expire. In some cases, unfortunate humans were said to have been picked up by the spectral rampage and dropped many miles from home.
The leader of the Wild Hunt is generally thought to have originally been the Norse god, Wodin/Odin. Odin, who like his Viking devotees relished battle, would certainly fit the visual bill, replete with battle scars and injuries. Odin was said to prefer the fierce winds of winter in which to hunt and the peasants carefully left the last sheaf of grain to this antecedent of Father Christmas, so he would have something to feed his horse. But as the pagan religion died away, Odin's place in Wild Hunt folklore was taken by others who were notable for their great or bad deeds. Theodoric the Great (6th century king of the Ostrogoths), Charlemagne (King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor), King Wenzel (Wenceslas) of Bohemia, Hugh Capet (10th century King of France), Barbarossa (15/16th century Turkish pirate) and even King Herod have at one time or another been credited as leader of the Host. In a Christian variant, the leader of the host was predictably Satan, and the hounds were the unfortunate souls of unbaptised children.
There is also a smaller but signifcant sub-category of Wild Hunt, where the leader is female. She leads a train of souls which importantly, often includes young children. She frequently gives gifts to children (another aspect of Teutonic Yule tradition which must have contributed to the Father Christmas character), but she steals the children too, embodying the same contrast of benign and malign qualities as the Pied Piper.
Later versions of the Wild Hunt have the Host led by a nobleman who had been punished for his sins: hunting on a Sunday when he should have been at Church is a common theme. Later still, the motif was developed to include spectral coaches which came to collect the spirits of the dead. In the Okehampton district, the spirit of death rode in a carraige made of human bones, preceeded by a one-eyed black dog. One of the earliest of these ghosts, that of Sir Francis Drake, made repeated journeys over Dartmoor in a black coach driven by headless horses and accompanied by a pack of hounds whose baying killed every dog within earshot. Drake occupied the usurped ecclesiastical lands of Buckland Abbey within his natural lifetime, so the development of this ghost story may have received impetus from those who judged the status of his ownership.
In many of these stories, from the Wild Hunt of Odin to the spectral coach, the theme of headlessness is present. Henry the Eighth's allegedly adulterous second wife Anne Boleyn was said to travel in a coach on the anniversary of her execution at Blickling Hall in Norfolk. The disgraced queen sits in a carriage drawn by four headless horses and driven by a headless coachman carrying her own head in her lap. Many other areas have a spectral coach which stops to collect the spirits of the dead; it is made clear that such a ghastly form of transport to the other world is not for the virtuous or those bound for heaven!
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