There are many memorable scenes in the book ‘Dracula’, but one that I think of whenever I visit Whitby is the ship The Demeter of Varma grounding on the beach. A black dog leapt off and disappeared – Dracula in disguise, of course! Bram Stoker saw an actual ship called The Dmitri which had come ashore in a storm;
“1885 wreck of Russian schooner or brigantine DMITRY which stranded on Collier’s Hope, Whitby, after safely reaching the port for shelter during a gale, bound from Antwerp to Newcastle-upon-Tyne in sand ballast. Constructed of wood, she was a sailing vessel; her home port of Narva is now in the modern state of Estonia.“
https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/
The reason I’ve been thinking of this is from a “conversation” on social media about the black shuck/shug, a mythical black dog-like creature which comes in various forms in different parts of the country. The chat was about the fen hound, and people immediately responded by mentioning the black shuck, and also someone added the shug monkey. I’ve certainly never come across that mentioned, but I’m intrigued!
I come from East Anglia, and I’ve written before that my family home ground has legends of a black dog, the black shuck. Sometimes the shuck only has one eye in the middle of his forehead, sometimes he has no head at all, but stories of his prowlings appear in Peterborough (where my grandparents lived for a while) and Littleport, (where a cousin’s family come from) and in Bungay and Blytheburgh in Suffolk, and Dereham in Norfolk.
Someone in the conversation mentioned the barghest (with a variety of spellings), a mythical creature in the form of a big black dog-like animal, said to wander the streets of Whitby and York. Maybe this is where Bram Stoker got his idea from. There are stories of these creatures not only in the Fens and Yorkshire but ghostly black dogs appear all across Britain. A local Devon legend of the yell or yeth hound, probably gave Conan Doyle his inspiration for The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Usually these manifestations do have a particular name, such as the black shuck in East Anglia, or barghest in Yorkshire, and a load of different names in Lancashire, gytrash, padfoot, the grim, shag, trash, striker and skriker. Sometimes they breathe fire, sometimes they break down the doors of churches, and often they are thought of as a portent of something bad. It’s thought they originated back in ancient pre-Roman times, maybe even pre-Celtic, who knows. A fear of big animals with sharp teeth and big claws, creeping invisibly in the darkness must resonate in our deepest folk memories.
Sometimes there is substance to the stories which appear in the press. One year when we were on holiday in Northern Ireland, in County Antrim, there were reports in the local papers and on the news of a big black creature which had been seen locally… In this case, as I remember, it was an escaped or released big cat, formerly a pet. This report, along with the other stories, gave rise to a dreadful beast roaming my fictional Camel Wood, and it became the Greaty Beast of Camel . When I wrote this for the students I was teaching, I didn’t realise that very near here, in the village of Banwell, not ten miles away, a big black creature had been seen by a woman out walking her dog. This creature was, of course, named the Beast of Banwell!
Obviously my featured image isn’t of a fearsome, mythical beast but Reg
Lois Elsden 