Victorian Urban Legends: Canine Protector June 20, 2022
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my forthcoming book: The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. This legend (with full references) will appear in a second volume. If anyone can fill in missing pieces or offer other sources… I’ll be grateful and you’ll be credited and get laurel leaves in the post. drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com. ***
****The Nail has now dropped through a friend’s letter box in the US so it is apparently live!****
Phantom dogs, particularly black phantom dogs have become, in the last one hundred and fifty years, a staple of British folklore.[1] These phantom dogs are credited with guarding (and sometimes revealing) treasure, patrolling roads, but also with protecting travellers: ‘E363.2(ac). Ghost in form of large black dog walks with traveller to protect him from danger’; ‘E363.2(ba). Ghost in form of white dog protects traveller’.[2] Here is an example that Augustus Hare heard over dinner in the later nineteenth century.
Brancepeth Castle, Jan. 3, 1885. Mr. Wharton dined. He said, ‘When I was at the little inn at Ayscliffe, I met a Mr. Bond, who told me a story about my friend Johnnie Greenwood of Swancliffe. Johnnie had to ride one night through a wood a mile long to the place he was going to. At the entrance of the wood a large black dog joined him, and pattered along by his side. He could not make out where it came from, but it never left him, and when the wood grew so dark that he could not see it, he still heard it pattering beside him. When he emerged from the wood, the dog had disappeared, and he could not tell where it had gone to. Well, Johnnie paid his visit, and set out to return the same way. At the entrance of the wood, the dog joined him, and pattered along beside him as before; but it never touched him, and he never spoke to it, and again, as he emerged from the wood, it ceased to be there. Years after, two condemned prisoners in York gaol told the chaplain that they had intended to rob and murder Johnnie that night in the wood, but that he had a large dog with him, and when they saw that, they felt that Johnnie and the dog together would be too much for them.[3]
This story was, instead, published in the Daily Record in the 1920s, but apparently dated back many years:
My father was the minister of a Methodist Church. One day, when I was a schoolgirl, mother said to me: ‘You need not go to school this afternoon; I want you to go with your father to S__,’ mentioning a village about six miles distant. All went well until the time to return home. My father was carrying his priest’s bag; inside was the circuit plan, in the making, for which the meeting father had conducted had been called, and last, but not least, his quarter’s salary which had been given him – paid in those days in the same coins as had been put into the collecting boxes. I remember the bag was heavy. We were talking and laughing and I was feeling light-hearted and happy in the safety of my father’s company. Presently, we came to a wood which was a shorter cut home. The moon was rising and throwing shadows form the trees which made it difficult for us to follow the footpath, when, suddenly, as if from nowhere, appeared a big, black dog just behind us. My father, thinking the dog had followed us from the village, tried to send it back, but it still kept close to us. When we reached the middle of the wood, without any warning, two black forms stood right in the middle of the path in front of us and demanded my father’s bag. The most uncanny howl and growl I ever heard in my life pierced the silence; the two men vanished as if by magic. Looking round from where the sound came, we saw the dog had still followed us. ‘Let it come,’ said my father, and it trotted by us until we were right out of the wood. Then it, too, seemed to vanish into space. Was it a ghost?[4]
Such stories also appeared, though, as actual news items in the press. Here is one from Kent in 1851, which hovers between the supernatural and factual.
Dench, captain of the ‘Isabella’ schooner, was walking from Maidstone to Rochester some time since, between 9 and 10 o’clock, and having got about half-a-mile beyond the Bridgewood turnpike-gate, two men rushed out of the wood, and one of them gave him a severe blow on the back of the head, which caused him to stagger some distance and fall. At that moment he heard a dog growl and bark, and having lain on the ground, completely stunned, he believed, for some minutes, on recovering, he saw a large black and white dog, apparently of the Newfoundland breed, attacking the robbers, who ran away. The dog, which he had never seen before, then came up to him and crouched at his feet, afterwards following him closely all the way to his home in Rochester. Having slept in his house, been fed, and stopped about two hours after Dench arose in the morning, the dog disappeared, and has not been seen by him since.[5]
A second report comes from Sussex, 1867: it refers to an earlier newspaper that either does not survive or that has not yet been scanned. It is particularly interesting because it combines the black dog of legend with Chloroformed! [legend described in the Nail in the Skull]
A paragraph has been inserted in a contemporary, stating that a young woman living in Clifton-road had been attacked by a man as she was proceeding along Park-lane, and that he attempted to render her insensible by putting a handkerchief sprinkled with chloroform to her mouth, and that she was rescued by a black dog. The tale seems a very suspicious one; and when it is known that the young woman never communicated the matter to the police, and when they sought to discover the perpetrator of the offence she was extremely reluctant to give information. The mith [corr. truth?] of it is open to great doubt. The circulation of such reports tend to create great fear in the minds of many people, and in other ways work great mischief.[6]
Chris Woodyard points out to me that phantom dogs in nineteenth-century American are given a wider range of protective functions. We have examples of a phantom dog attempting to get miners out of a collapsing mine;[7] of a phantom dog stopping a train from crashing;[8] and still another dog that solved a murder mystery.[9]
[1] For ‘black dog’ folklore: Norman, Black Dog; Trubshaw, Explore; Waldron, Shock! Supernatural dogs have demonstrably appeared in British lore for almost a millennium. But in previous centuries the dog-form was just one of many taken up by shape-changing ghosts or spirits. The shape-shifter has become, in Britain, less credible in the last century and a half and particularly since the Great War. The rise of the ‘black dog’ legend might be best understood as the modern survival, under its most reputable or credible form, of the venerable British shape-changer. See, along these lines, Harte ‘Black dog’, 5-7.
[2] Baughman, Type, 161. Note that non-supernatural dog protectors are, of course, very common in folklore: see particularly ATU 178A ‘The Innocent Dog’(B331.1 Llewellyn and his dog) and B421 ‘Helpful Dogs’.
[3] Hare, The story of my life, 424.
[4] Giraud, Uncanny, ?? (*CW).
[5] ‘A Strange Story’.
[6] ‘A Questionable Story’.
[7] ‘In an Oklahoma stope…’
[8] ‘The Spectral Dog’.
[9] ‘Weird Tale’.
