Folklore of Yorkshire (16 page)

It is even unclear exactly what
sort
of entity the phantom hound is supposed to represent. Is it a ghostly apparition, a demonic fiend or an anomalous, but nonetheless, physical beast? At times it seems to be able to interact with the corporeal world, at other times it cannot. In some places, the thing seems to have a definite purpose, whilst elsewhere it merely lurks in the shadows of the local psyche, a nebulous bogeyman which crudely embodies all the terrors of the night. The only thing that seems certain is that its presence was universally regarded as ominous; a source of nocturnal terror across Yorkshire in earlier centuries.

The archetype of the phenomenon is an unnaturally large black dog, with long, shaggy hair and glowing eyes ‘as large as tea plates’. For instance, in his influential 1879 work,
Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders
, William Henderson describes the padfoot around Leeds as ‘the size of a small donkey, black with shaggy hair and large eyes like saucers’ and many other accounts feature a similar depiction. The fiend was also supposed to ‘utter a roar totally unlike the voice of any known animal’ and walk with a distinctive ‘shog … shog … shog’ sound. In some places it appeared with a long, rattling chain attached to its legs. Doubtless, it was these aural attributes that earned it names such a skriker and padfoot.

However, even this model varies considerably. The taxonomy of ‘phantom black dogs’ is very much the product of Victorian folklorists, who, in thrall to the natural sciences’ mania for classification in the nineteenth century, were ever eager to shoehorn a diverse array of phenomena into a single unwieldy category. As a result, it is unclear if the name given to individual examples – whether it be barguest, guytrash, padfoot or skriker – was the common local term, or simply the preferred category of the folklorist who collected the story.

Similarly, it is hard to tell whether the phantom hound was the most common manifestation of this being, or merely the classification it most closely fitted in the mind of the collector. For in several stories, the same names are used to refer to things which take other forms, animal or otherwise. In an unpublished work, Branwell Brontë refers to the guytrash as ‘a spectre not at all similar to the ghosts of those who were once alive, nor to fairies, nor to demons … (mostly) a black dog dragging a chain, a dusky calf, nay, even a rolling stone.’ Meanwhile, as the folklorist Jeremy Harte observes, ‘Behind the standard phrases which describe these apparitions – “as large as a donkey”, “as big as a calf”, “shaggy as a bear” – there are traces of earlier stories in which they had actually been bears, calves and donkeys.’

In some instances, the phenomenon was actually multiform. For example, one story from Almondbury tells of a man who encountered the padfoot ‘like a hound dog, all white; he tried to coax it but it turned into a calf … When he got below it turned into a bear and began to roll all the way down.’ Even more bizarrely, the Holden Rag, which haunted the moorlands of upper Calderdale around the West Yorkshire/Lancashire border, ‘was said to appear sometimes in the form of a great black dog and at other times as a rag of white linen on a thorn … which always eluded the grasp of mortal hands, shrivelling up and vanishing in a flash.’

It seems that Branwell Brontë’s interpretation was influenced by a tradition attached to Ponden Hall at Stanbury, a few miles from his family home in Haworth. This spirit variously took the form of a ‘shadowy greybeard carrying a lantern’ or ‘a flaming barrel which rolled down the fields and past the house’ and was regarded as an omen of ill-potent.

In this respect, the phantom hound and its relatives seem to be a corrupted descendant of the shape-changing apparitions which were a common motif of medieval superstition. In the early fifteenth century, an anonymous monk at Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire recorded some notable examples of such revenants from around the region. One manifestation went through a series of transformations from a crow into a ‘dog with a chain on its neck’; next into ‘a shape of flame, transparent, and words came not from its lips but from its centre’; then into a ‘goat which went round … moaning’; and finally became ‘the shape of a man of great stature, lean and spine-chilling to look at.’

Taking these various concerns into account, it is perhaps more fruitful to look for commonalities in the function of these apparitions, rather than their formal characteristics. As previously mentioned, the only universal attribute of phantom hounds is that they were once widely feared and it was generally held that to encounter one was a very risky business, although once again the reasons for this dread can differ. Sometimes the terror seems to have derived from the physical harm the entity could inflict, whilst on other occasions it was because such an encounter was an augury of disaster for the witness, his loved ones or his neighbourhood.

Perhaps the best-known example of the phantom hound in Yorkshire was certainly capable of causing bodily injury. This fearsome barguest was supposed to dwell in a deep and treacherous limestone ravine known as Trollers Gill, in Wharfedale. A local ballad, first recorded by William Hone in 1827, relates that after a good many drinks, the sceptical John Lambert of Skyreholme vowed to confront the fiend. He made his way to the gorge at midnight and called on the demon dog. At this, a storm brewed up, then suddenly:

A dreadful thing from the cliff did spring

And its wild bark thrilled around –

Its eyes had the glow of the fires below

‘Twas the form of the spectral hound.

The following morning Lambert’s corpse was discovered at the bottom of the gill:

And marks were impressed on the dead man’s breast

But they seemed not by mortal hand.

Belief in the barguest of Trollers Gill was still clearly common in Wharfedale a century after this ballad was chronicled by Hone. Writing in 1929, Halliwell Sutcliffe – a resident of nearby Linton – relates the experience of a cobbler from Fountains who met the barguest, when he stumbled into Trollers Gill after losing his way over Greenhow Hill one night. The wayfarer told how, ‘the dog came out into the moonlight, big as a littlish bear … with great eyes like saucers. He’d a shaggy sort of smell as he went by, and I counted myself for dead. But he chanced not to glimpse me, praise all the saints that ever were.’

Trollers Gill in Wharfedale, haunt of a fearsome barguest. (Kai Roberts)

Less terminal traditions are also recorded. Henderson writes of the widespread belief that ‘if anyone came in its way, the barguest would strike out and inflict a wound that would never heal’. Meanwhile, a close encounter with the Almondbury padfoot was thought to cause paralysis of the arms. If one wished to escape unharmed, it seems to have been prudent to ignore the padfoot as far as possible, for one source claimed, ‘A word or blow gave the creature power over you; a story is told of a man who … kicked the thing and was forthwith dragged along through the hedge and ditch to his home and left under the window.’

Evading a barguest or padfoot was invariably a difficult feat and Halliwell Sutcliffe’s cobbler is a rare example of someone who succeeded. They moved with uncanny speed and agility, ‘padding lightly at the rear of a person and within a stretch of thought would be in front of them or at their side.’ Keeping an eye on the brute was similarly challenging. The prolific West Riding historian, J. Horsfall Turner, recorded that the guytrash, ‘when followed by an individual … begins to walk backwards with his eyes fixed full on his pursuer and vanished at the slightest momentary inattention.’

Moreover, attempting to escape a phantom hound that had already marked you for its attention seems to have been a futile endeavour, as fate would always intervene. Reverend J.C. Atkinson relates the story of a young man who was walking home drunk one night and chanced upon the donkey-shaped barguest that haunted the vicinity of St Hilda’s Church in Egton. Seeking to cross the cemetery on his route, he found the way blocked by the fiend, who thwarted his every attempt to pass through the gate. The youth proceeded to evade the thing by following a nearby lane and climbing into the churchyard from there. Yet all his cunning proved in vain, for as he crossed the hallowed ground in darkness, he stumbled into an open grave and broke his neck.

The old cemetery at Egton, where a donkey-shaped barguest once lurked. (Kai Roberts)

It seems that if the barguest did not do harm itself, then it often presaged death or ‘betokened evil’. The tragedy it foretold did not necessarily have to befall the witness or his family, but often appeared to folk upon the death of some local worthy. This was certainly the case with the guytrash at Horton near Bradford. Victorian antiquary, William Cudworth, relates the story of a man who encountered the fiend ‘jumping at his heels’ as he walked past the gates of the now-demolished Horton Hall in the ‘witching hour’. At the sight of the hound, the man fled home as fast he could and collapsed into a faint. The following day, he learnt that the master of Horton Hall had died around the same time as he had seen the guytrash.

In some stories, the appearance of such a fiend coincides with the death of a particularly hated figure in the community. Whilst this might seem like a positive omen for the local populace, the resultant manifestation often went on to terrorise the neighbourhood every bit as much as their lately deceased persecutor – such as in the story of the guytrash which appeared in the guise of a black goat following the demise of the reviled Julian of Goathland. In another instance, a barguest in the shape of a black pig was witnessed in York following the execution of the notorious witch and poisoner, Mary Bateman, in 1809.

The association with death can also be found in the tendency of phantom hounds to haunt the vicinity of graveyards or the route of old corpse ways. Some Victorian etymologists even suggested that the word ‘barguest’ might derive from the German
bahre geist
, meaning ‘spirit of the bier’ (a bier being the stand on which a corpse or coffin was situated). The nineteenth-century fondness for comparative mythology also connected phantom hounds with the Scandinavian ‘church-grim’, a guardian spirit thought to have been derived from a dog buried alive as a foundation sacrifice when the church was built.

There are also pronounced similarities to a superstition known as the Gabble Ratchets (sometimes referred to as the Gabriel Hounds), thought to be an airborne pack of hideous and sometimes human-headed spectral dogs, whose ‘gabbling’ cry was once a source of great terror throughout the northern counties of England. The sound was variously described as ‘a great number of whelps barking and howling’ and like ‘the questing of a dozen beagles on the foot of a race.’ To hear their cacophony passing over your house was widely regarded as a sure harbinger of disaster.

Belief in the Gabble Ratchets seems to have persisted for many centuries, even in the more industrialised areas of the county. The nonconformist firebrand and prolific diarist, Reverend Oliver Heywood, recorded the tradition around Halifax in 1664, and more than two centuries later, in 1879, William Henderson found it was still current amongst the denizens of Sheffield and Leeds. He also noted that around the latter city, the Gabble Ratchets were thought to be the unhappy souls of babies who had died before they could be baptised and as a consequence were unable to enter the portals of Heaven.

A number of other animal apparitions acted as premonitions of death around Yorkshire, and whilst they may not have been recorded under the name barguest, padfoot or guytrash, they performed an identical role and were held in similar awe. For instance, in South Yorkshire, ‘It is always an unlucky omen and frequently a sign of death to see the Grey Cat. This spectre is tall and very thin, with big, round, flashing eyes and it always appears in the dusk of an evening.’ Then there’s Elland in West Yorkshire, haunted by ‘a ghostly white mouse which visited Long Wall after dark; it was said that whoever saw it was sure to meet with some misfortune.’ Or Cowling in Craven, home to ‘a white rabbit that is seen to cross the road at Ickornshaw in a most eerie way and considered an omen of evil portent.’