Regular Episode
#125 – MAN’S BEST FIEND
This episode also appears in a slightly different edit on The Folklore Podcast, making it a genuine crossover between two shows that share a fondness for the strange, the storied, and the carefully sourced.
🐾 What Are Black Dogs, Exactly?
Mark is quick to frame his position: he is a folklore researcher, not a paranormal investigator or a scientist. His interest is not in proving or disproving whether spectral black dogs are “real” in a physical or supernatural sense, but in understanding why people have these experiences, why the reports are so strikingly consistent across centuries, and what the symbolism embedded in those reports can tell us about human culture.
The accounts in his archive span nearly a thousand years. The earliest he cites appears in the Peterborough continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, dating to 1127, which describes the hounds of a phantasmal hunt as “jet black with eyes like saucers and horrible.” Mark notes the irony: the word saucer doesn’t enter English until the 14th century, so that translation is anachronistic — the original phrase means something closer to “big-eyed and loathsome.” Yet the idea of eyes like saucers maps perfectly onto what witnesses report right up to the present day, and even appears in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Tinderbox, whose treasure-guarding dog sports eyes “as large as saucers.”
🌍 Black Dogs Around the World
The tradition is far from a purely British phenomenon. Mark traces cross-cultural parallels, most notably with the Latin American cadejo — a spectral dog that comes in two colours (black for malevolence, white for protection), has fiery eyes and shaggy hair, and whose name carries a secondary dictionary meaning of “a tangled knot of hair.” That etymology connects neatly with one proposed derivation of the English term Shuck (or Shock), the demonic northern-English variant of the black dog, which may derive from the Anglo-Saxon scucca (devil) or, alternatively, from the shaggy coat the creature is said to have. In the cadejo tradition, witnesses describe the dog’s eyes as being “like tortillas” — the same overwhelming-size motif, decoded through a different cultural larder.
Blake draws a parallel to Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting, where a reporter’s misreading of “flew like saucers skipping across water” became “flying saucers” — another case of a vivid but inexact image hardening into canonical description through retelling.
🏹 The Wild Hunt and Folkloric Motifs
Black dog lore intersects with the broader mythology of the Wild Hunt — a pan-European tradition of a phantasmal leader (variously Odin, the devil, or a local notable; in Devon, sometimes Sir Francis Drake) riding across the sky with ghostly horses, riders, and hounds. Encountering the Hunt is an omen of death or misfortune. Mark recounts a cautionary tale in which a man who drunkenly hails the Hunt’s leader is rewarded with a sack — containing his own child’s severed head. The moral is clear enough.
The conversation turns to the academic scaffolding folklorists use: the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature compiled by Stith Thompson, a vast numbered taxonomy of story elements (motif E384: ghost summoned by music; E384.2: ghost raised by whistling, and so on). Mark acknowledges the Index is somewhat archaic in current practice but invaluable as a cross-referencing tool — a typology that lets researchers compare how the same narrative building blocks recombine across cultures and centuries.
👻 Protective Hounds, Portentous Hounds, and Lady Howard
Not all black dogs are omens of doom. A substantial strand of the tradition features a dog that silently accompanies a lone traveler — usually a woman on a dark road — then vanishes, whereupon it emerges that robbers or worse had been lurking on that route. The dog as guardian, not monster.
Mark’s showpiece local legend is that of Lady Howard of Okehampton, whose historical reputation as a capable, multiply-married noblewoman became overlaid by her father’s genuine crimes until legend made her a husband-killer. In the resulting folklore, a phantom coach trimmed with four skulls (representing four dead husbands) rattles out of her former home each midnight, preceded by a one-eyed black dog — or, in other versions, by Lady Howard herself transformed into the dog. Her penance: to carry a single blade of grass from a nearby mound to the house each night until the mound is bare. An impossible task. Doomsday will come first.
🔄 How Folklore Spreads — and Changes
One of the episode’s richest threads is a discussion of how folklore transmits and mutates. Mark points out that modern black dog accounts increasingly describe yellow or black eyes and demonic growling, where older accounts noted red eyes and near-silence — a shift he attributes to the influence of lycanthropy tropes in horror cinema (he name-checks An American Werewolf in London). The creature is the same; the cultural filter through which witnesses interpret and describe it has shifted.
Ben Radford‘s work on the Chupacabra is cited as a parallel case: the creature’s description changed dramatically once horror-film imagery entered the cultural environment of witnesses. Blake connects this to the pre-internet viral spread of urban legends — the “friend of a friend” mechanism that folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand documented so thoroughly — and to the fairy-abduction/UFO-abduction parallel, where the same archetypal experience (missing time, otherworldly beings, strange smells) gets decoded through whatever supernatural vocabulary the culture currently finds plausible.
The episode also touches on Slender Man as a rare case of folklore with a documented point of origin — traceable to a specific Creepypasta post — that nevertheless escaped into the broader cultural stream and began generating apparently sincere eyewitness accounts, culminating in a real-world criminal case. And there is a brief, wry detour through the 2016 creepy clown panic, which Mark predicts will eventually crystallize into its own folkloric tradition.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Black Dog Folklore 💵 by Mark Norman
– 📚 The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings 💵 by Jan Harold Brunvand
🔗 Related Links
– Black Shuck — the demonic black dog of East Anglia
– Cadejo — the Latin American spectral dog tradition
– Wild Hunt — pan-European phantasmal hunt mythology
– Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Stith Thompson)
– Slender Man — a modern folkloric creation with a traceable origin
– Fresno Nightcrawler — the cryptid video discussed in the episode’s closing segment
– The Folklore Podcast — Mark Norman’s show
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
In this episode of MonsterTalk, we are joined by folklorist and author Mark Norman to discuss legends of black hounds. Mark is the author of Black Dog Folklore as well as the host of The Folklore Podcast. This is a special cross-over episode with The Folklore Podcast and contains a slightly different edit of the interview audio. Discussion ranges from the legends of dark hounds in European folklore, to the nature of the academic study of folklore.
Related Links
Music
- Introduction music: Spooky Theme by Mystified [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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