The Monster Book. Nick Redfern

tragedy, and death.

      One of the most infamous of all black dog encounters in the British Isles occurred at St. Mary’s Church, Bungay, Suffolk, England, on Sunday, August 4, 1577, when an immense and veritable spectral hound from Hell materialized within the church during a powerful thunderstorm and mercilessly tore into the terrified congregation with its huge fangs and razor-sharp claws. In fact, so powerful was the storm that it reportedly killed two men in the belfry as the church tower received an immense lightning bolt that tore through it and shook the building to its ancient foundations.

      According to an old, local verse: “All down the church in midst of fire, the hellish monster flew. And, passing onward to the quire, he many people slew.” Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the beast bounded out of St. Mary’s and was reported shortly thereafter at Blythburgh Church, about twelve miles away, where it allegedly killed and mauled even more people with its immense and bone-crushing jaws—and where, it is said, the scorch marks of the beast’s claws can still be seen to this day, infamously imprinted upon the ancient door of the church.

      St. Mary’s Church in Bungay, Suffolk, is the site of a famous 1577 sight of a beastly black dog.

      Even more intriguing is the fact that Bungay’s legend of a satanic black hound parallels that of yet another local legend: that of Black Shuck, a giant, spectral dog that haunts the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts. Such is the popularity of the Bungay legend that it has resulted in an image of the beast being incorporated into the town’s coat of arms—and the Black Dogs is the name of the Bungay Town Football Club.

      The stark, disturbing and memorable image that the infamous devil dog, or the phantom hound, as described above undoubtedly conjures up is that of a definitively sinister beast that stealthily prowls the towns and villages of ancient England by nothing more than silvery moonlight or to the accompanying background of a violent, crashing thunderstorm. It is, however, a little known fact outside of dedicated students of the phenomenon that sightings of such creatures have also taken place in modern times: in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, even, as is evidenced by the following reports from my files.

      First, there is the story of the Bradley family of the city of Leeds who had the very deep misfortune to encounter one of the now-familiar hounds of Hell in early 2009: at no less a site than the English city of Lichfield’s famous and historic cathedral, which has the distinction of being the only English cathedral to be adorned with three spires.

      According to the Bradleys, while walking around the outside of the cathedral one pleasant Sunday morning, they were startled by the sight of a large black dog racing along at high speed and adjacent to the side of the cathedral. The jaw-dropping fact that the dog was practically the size of a donkey ensured their attention was caught and held. But that attention was rapidly replaced by overwhelming fear, when the dog allegedly “charged the wall” of the cathedral and summarily vanished right into the brickwork as it did so! Perhaps understandably, the Bradleys chose not to report their mysterious encounter to cathedral officials or to the police.

      The jaw-dropping fact that the dog was practically the size of a donkey ensured their attention was caught and held.

      And then we have the account of Marjorie Sanders. Although Sanders’s account can be considered a new one in the sense that it only reached my eyes and ears in August 2009, during which time I was on a week-long return trip to England, it actually occurred back in the closing stages of the Second World War, when the witness was a girl of ten or eleven. At the time, Sanders was living in a small village not too far from England’s Tamworth Castle—which overlooks the River Tame, and which has stood there since it was built by the Normans in the eleventh century, although an earlier Anglo-Saxon castle is known to have existed on the same site, and which was constructed by the forces of Ethelfreda, the Mercian queen and the eldest daughter of King Alfred the Great of Wessex.

      According to Sanders, “probably in about early 1945,” her grandfather had “seen a hell-hound parading around the outside of the castle that scared him half to death when it vanished in front of him.” For reasons that Sanders cannot now remember or comprehend, her grandfather always thereafter memorably referred to the animal in question as “the furnace dog.” Whether or not this is an indication that the spectral dog had the seemingly ubiquitous fiery red eyes that so many witnesses have reported remains unfortunately unknown; but, it would not at all surprise me if that was one day shown to be the case.

      Then we have the brief, but highly thought-provoking, account of Gerald Clarke, a Glasgow baker whose father claimed to have briefly seen a large, black-colored, phantom hound with bright, electric-blue-colored eyes on the grounds of a military base in central England—called Royal Air Force Stafford—in the late 1950s, and while on patrol late one winter’s evening. As was the case with so many other witnesses to such disturbing entities, the elder Clarke quietly confided in his son that the creature “just vanished: first it was there and then it wasn’t.”

      In view of all the above, one can only say: “Beware of the Dog!”

      SHAPE-SHIFTING BLACK DOGS

      Up until the end of season four of The Walking Dead, we were familiar with seeing our straggling bunch of heroes hunkered down in a fortified Georgia prison, doing battle with both the dead and their arch-villain, the one-eyed Governor. But the resurrected dead, people feeding on people, and prisons also have a place in the real world. Our story, however, revolves around monsters, rather than virally created zombies of the undead variety.

      In the latter part of the sixteenth century, London, England’s Newgate Prison was the site of a horrific series of deaths that would have made even the average walker proud in the extreme—if such creatures possess significant numbers of brains to be proud. Due to a pronounced lack of regular food, on more than a few occasions the prisoners targeted the weakest members of the pack and turned them into food. It was very much a case of having to eat the living to avoid becoming one of the dead. We are, then, talking about cannibals in the cell block.

      One of those savagely killed and partially eaten by the prisoners was an unnamed man who did exactly what the bitten and the equally semi-devoured of the prison of The Walking Dead did on so many occasions: he rose again. Not, however, as a voracious devotee of raw, human flesh, but as a ghastly and ghostly black dog with a pair of blazing red eyes.

      Once again the mysterious dog manifested before the farmer, but this time, incredibly, it was supposedly heard to speak, in rumbling tones.…

      The actions of this undead man-hound were not at all unlike those of its television-based equivalents. The creature violently slaughtered all of those who had taken its human life by savagely biting down on their necks with its immense and powerful jaws. Death swiftly followed for the guilty parties. Reanimation, however, did not. When the deed was done, the man—in spectral dog form—vanished, never, ever to be seen again.

      Ruins of Newgate Prison, where, it is said, underfed prisoners killed and ate some of their fellow inmates back in the sixteenth century.

      Then, there is the very similar, and very weird, tale of a pair of brothers: William and David Sutor. The dark saga all began late one night in December 1728, when William, a Scottish farmer, was hard at work in his fields and heard an unearthly shriek that was accompanied by a brief glimpse of a large, dark-colored dog, far bigger than any normal hound, and one possessed of a pair of glowing red eyes—just