Black Shuck, Old Shuck or simply Shuck is the name given to a ghostly black dog which is said to roam the Norfolk, Essex and Suffolk coastline. Black Shuck is sometimes referred to as the Doom Dog. Black Shuck is also sometimes erroneously called Black Chuck in North America.

The legend

For centuries, inhabitants of England have told tales of a large black dog with malevolent flaming eyes (or in some variants of the legend a single eye) that are red or alternatively green. They are described as being 'like saucers'. According to reports, the beast varies in size and stature from that of simply a large dog to being the size of a horse.

There are legends of Black Shuck roaming the Anglian countryside since before Vikings. His name may derive from the Old English word scucca meaning "demon", or possibly from the local dialect word shucky meaning "shaggy" or "hairy". The legend may have been part of the inspiration for the Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles.

It is said that his appearance bodes ill to the beholder, although not always. More often than not, stories tell of Black Shuck terrifying his victims, but leaving them alone to continue living normal lives; in some cases it has supposedly happened before close relatives to the observer die or become ill. In other tales he's regarded to be relatively benign and said to accompany women on their way home in the role of protector rather than a portent of ill omen.^[1]

Sometimes Black Shuck has appeared headless, and at other times he appears to float on a carpet of mist. According to folklore, the spectre often haunts graveyards, sideroads, crossroads, near bodies of water and dark forests. Black Shuck is also said to haunt the coast road between West Runton and Overstrand.

Appearance in Bungay and Blythburgh

One of the most notable reports of Black Shuck is of his appearance at the churches of Bungay and Blythburgh in Suffolk. On 4 August 1577, at Blythburgh, Black Shuck is said to have burst in through the church doors. He ran up the nave, past a large congregation, killing a man and boy and causing the church tower to collapse through the roof. As the dog left, he left scorch marks on the north door which can be seen at the church to this day.

The encounter on the same day at Bungay was described in A Straunge and Terrible Wunder by the Reverend Abraham Fleming in 1577:

This black dog, or the divel in such a linenesse (God hee knoweth al who worketh all,) running all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer as it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward, in somuch that even at a mome[n]t where they kneeled, they stra[n]gely dyed.

Other accounts attribute the event to lightning or the Devil. The scorch marks on the door are referred to by the locals as "the devil’s fingerprints", and the event is remembered in this verse:

All down the church in midst of fire, the hellish monster flew, and, passing onward to the quire, he many people slew.

The appearance in Chignal St James/Chignal Smealy, small villages near Chelmsford, Essex are said to have occurred many years ago. All those said to have seen the devil dog are rumoured to have met an untimely end within a year of seeing the red-eyed devil dog, matching the legend that all that see Black Shuck will perish within a year of looking into his eyes.

Black Shuck in popular culture

Many stories, perhaps most notably The Hound of the Baskervilles, feature ghostly black dogs. The "ghostly black dog" is a common mythical creature, and Black Shuck is specifically named in a number of works of literature.

• Although The Hound Of The Baskervilles is set in Dartmoor, the idea was originally conceived by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson whilst on a golfing holiday in Cromer. Although it is accepted that the idea for the story first occurred in Norfolk and was very likely based upon the Black Shuck legend, the writers subsequently headed south and based it upon Sabine Baring-Gould's home at Lew Trenchard, close to Fletcher Robinson's family residence and Dartmoor Prison.
• The Black Dog of Bungay and Black Shuck both appear in The Kettle Chronicles: The Black Dog, a novel by Steve Morgan, former vicar of Bungay, set in 1577. According to the children's book The Runton Werewolf by Ritchie Perry, Black Shuck is a Gronk, a race of friendly shape-shifting aliens, the ancestors of which were accidentally left behind on Earth when one of them suffered from stomach troubles. Hector Plasm: De Mortuis features a one panel picture and reference to Black Shuck. Black Shuck also makes an appearance in Mark Chadbourn's trilogy The Age of Misrule and is mentioned in Philip Pullman's Northern Lights.
• The dog is the leader of a group of mythological characters in the 2000 AD series London Falling.
• An episode of the children's documentary series Mystery Hunters investigated the case of Black Shuck.
• British rock band The Darkness included a song entitled "Black Shuck", which describes the beast and its appearances at Bungay and Blythburgh, on their album Permission To Land.
• Black Shuck also appears in the Supernatural: Origins comics.
• Black Shuck is the subject of the musical drama The Storm Hound by Betty Roe and Marian Lines.^[2]
• A dark hound named Black Shuck serves the champion of the Shadowdancers in the online role-playing game Lusternia.
• Black Shuck appears as the hobgoblin Puck's pet/companion in the Sneigoski / Golden series, The Menagerie.^{[citation needed]}
• The singer-songwriter Nick Drake recorded a deeply melancholy song called Black-Eyed Dog which drew from black dog legend. The black-eyed dog in the song is a supernatural harbinger of doom, serving as a metaphor for both depression and death (Winston Churchill famously branded his own bouts of depression as the 'black dog').
• Black Shuck is a Cerberus-type boss in the Final Fantasy XI assault mission "Better Than One."
• Black Shuck is the featured creature in the "Hellhound" episode of the Animal Planet series Lost Tapes.
• A Black Shuck appeared in the May Bird series by Jodi Lynn Anderson.
• The supernatural-themed webcomic Geist Panik, by Brian Wilson, features a character known as Connall who is a Black Shuck (implying there are multiples within the comic's world) cursed to with "reverse lycanthropy" (a dog which assumes the form of a human).
• A caller to US radio programme, Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on February 24 2007 described an encounter with a ghostly dog. Later in the show, Art Bell read a fax from a listener stating that the caller's encounter sounded like one with "Black Chuck - a spectral dog". This is most likely drawn from the legend of Black Shuck, possibly in the process of being converted to the US vernacular (Chuck).^[3]

See also

• Barghest
• Dip (Catalan myth)
• Black dog (ghost)

References

External links

• The Hell Hound of Norfolk
• EDP24 The tale of Black Shuck^{[dead link]}
• Apparitions Of Black Dogs
• Black dogs in folklore
• The black dogs of Bungay story
• Photograph of the scorch marks left by Black Shuck at Blythburgh
• Shuckland - a website about Black Shuck