Barghest

Here’s my take on a Barghest (also written as Barguest…), a category of ghostly black dog typical of Yorkshire, a vast county in the north of England. Black spectral hounds are very common in the British Isles, but some have also appeared elsewhere in Europe, and even in the Americas. They can behave very differently from one place to another, and we will come back to that, but the Barghest remains one of the best known.

Like all its ilk, it takes the form of an oversized domestic dog with black fur, prodigious fangs and claws, and only appears after dark ; its eyes shine with an infernal glow, unlike other specimens of black dogs, which, conversely, have empty eye sockets even darker than their fur. Like the vast majority of these creatures, the Barghest is a malevolent omen of death, but it stands out for the direct physical threat it poses. Indeed, not content with simply announcing the death of those it meets, it jumps on them to mutilate them itself.
One is said to haunt a limestone gorge in North Yorkshire called Trollers’ Gill. According to the legend surrounding this place, reported by the writer William Hone, a man once sought to confront the Barghest there, only to be finally found dead the next day, his chest lacerated. This Barghest in particular would also have the power to petrify with a single glance. Another story says that a Barghest would have several times ventured into the city, into the Snickelways of York, to attack isolated night walkers. The port town of Whitby (where Bram Stoker made his Dracula land on England, in the guise of a ferocious canine) was also subject to apparitions of a Barghest. It is also said that one of them, which haunted the area around Darlington (a town in County Durham, very close to Yorkshire), had shapeshifting powers, taking the form of a headless man or woman, a white cat or a rabbit, and other ones can make themselves invisible.
It is said that when a notable person from this region is about to die, a Barghest may appear, and lead an eerie funeral march, followed obsequiously by all the other local canines ; anyone who found themselves on the path of the black dog would expose themselves to receiving claw blows that would never heal. Another way for this specter to announce the imminent death of a person is to lie across their threshold. According to some sources, Barghests cannot cross rivers, like some vampires.

Another particularly dangerous and famous black dog, the Black Shuck is said to haunt the countryside and coasts of East Anglia, a region located in the east of England ; sometimes described as having only one glowing eye in the middle of its forehead, it distinguished itself through particularly notable intrusions into churches in Suffolk (a county just below East Anglia). On August 4, 1577, as thunder broke out, it burst into the Church of the Holy Trinity in Blythburg, passed through the entire nave, killing a man and a young boy, and caused the steeple to collapse ; after which, it left as quickly as it had entered, not without leaving burning scratch marks on the door of the building, which are still visible today. The same day, in Bungay, an extremely similar attack took place, reported by the Reverend Abraham Fleming. Such attacks were probably the origin of the belief that ghostly black dogs were actually "avatars" of the Devil himself.
But there are also benevolent ghost dogs, although they are rare. In Somerset, in the southwest of England, a black dog nicknamed Gurt had a reputation as a protector and guide for unaccompanied children and lost travelers. And in the state of Connecticut, in the northeast of the United States, in the town of Meriden, there’s a tale about a little black ghost puppy, emitting no sound, and not very shy, which brings good luck when it is met only once ; however, meeting it a second time brings bad luck, and coming across it three times is a sign of imminent death... As for the Church Grim, the true antithesis of the Black Shuck mentioned above, it is known to protect a church and its adjacent cemetery from desecrators.

Let's now address the case of the dogs of Dartmoor, a town in Devon, in the southwest of England. Local legend speaks of an entire pack of black dogs, roaming the moor accompanying the ghost of Richard Cabell, a rich hunter who died in 1677, known to be detestable, and who was suspected of having sold his soul to the Devil. This wild hunt was repeated on each anniversary of the man's death, but the ghostly pack could also gather around his tomb, howling and barking. It is this same story that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles, one of his most famous Sherlock Holmes stories.