Black Dogs and All-The-Way-Fool

Before our recent family troubles [which are guardedly optimistic as of today], I was thinking about Catherine Crowe's "miscellany" of spirit-related encounters and that she had mention of one "Black Dog" story and briefly alluded to others. I couldn't help but be reminded of Diarmuid MacManus' "Pookha" incidents in his The Middle Kingdom, which I consider a foundation stone of credible encounters in these "Magonian" matters. It is because of cases like reported by MacManus that I feel that I'm not "Out Proctor" on this, but merely "All-The-Way-Fool". [for those not following this blog regularly, these are my terms for an interesting potential anomaly for which there is not enough solid evidence {i.e. "Out Proctor"--see the old post}, vs. an anomaly that I feel has quite good evidence for its probable reality, but requires an let-it-all-hang-out "outlandish" theory to truly encompass it {i.e. "All-The-Way-Fool"--see the old post}. Black Dogs of paranormal appearance and disappearance seem very well defendable to me. So, today, I'm going to try to contribute a little something to what turns out to be a quite large and diversely opinionated literature on this subject. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To begin, these tales come to western culture from a variety of, usually, Celtic sources, but upon investigation have that "uncomfortable" global character that gives one the creeps that we are dealing with a widespread reality. The picture at the right is an artwork by an Australian artist representing his version of a "Dreamtime" aboriginal spirit dog ["Kanyarr" being the name given]. I'm no expert on aboriginal art [though I believe that we have a lot to learn about the Spirit World from it], so I can't tell you what we are dealing with in this picture, but it is nevertheless a dramatic representing of the spirit-power existing in this entity, and the global nature of conceptions like this. Cryptozoology experts like George Eberhart and Jerry Clark have surveyed literature on the Black Dog incidents, and give me confidence that I am not completely off-the-scent here. But one should begin with the cases, so here they are.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Catherine Crowe's Black Dog incident goes like this: a young lady is sitting at work inside her home, when she suddenly sees a large black dog sitting near her. Startled, she knew that it shouldn't have been able to get in the room, but, as it obviously had done so, she rose to put it out. The dog disappeared. Thinking that something illusionary had just happened, she sat back down. Shortly the dog reappeared. Really startled this time, she ran out to tell her mother, who thought that she was slightly bonkers. None-the-less, the mother sat outside the workroom door while her daughter went back in. Again, the dog reappeared. Shouting out, she called her mother to come in. But the now-you-see-me-now-you-don't animal was gone. Catherine, due to her orientation [and that of many at the time], felt that the Black Dog was similar to the Celtic Banshee and foretold a death. The mother's later death was ascribed to this, and on her deathbed was said to have uttered "remember the dog!". Although perhaps the Black Dog and the Banshee have something in common, the rest of my reading on these encounters doesn't make a good link at all. However, the tenor of the times was in that direction in Scotland and Britain in general. A simultaneously-published book, The Unseen World, by John Mason Neale is an unusually written thing, but a treasure box of encounters of the spirit kind [he and Catherine knew of one another's work, admiring the content, but disagreeing on theology--Neale being much more traditionally Christian]. Neither of their interpretations need delay us now, however, as we need more information. But, one thing about Catherine's case: this disappearing dog occurred inside the house, not out in the countryside as do most. And it appeared to a young girl with no expectations that some dog would suddenly show up in her room. Such unexpected encounters when they also fit a pile of other accounts, add greatly to the credibility of the phenomenon.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Diarmuid MacManus has six encounters which are clearly Black Dog cases. He calls them "Pookas", which will throw us into a greater complexity later. His chapter on them should be read by anyone interested in the reality of these things, not least because he gets the stories from people he knows. In the "Ballaghadereen Pooka" a woman tells of walking near her home when "an enormous black dog as high as her shoulder was walking by her only three or four yards away". Its eyes conveyed to her no hostility, but rather interest and intelligence. The dog moved ahead to an iron fence gate and walked right through it as if it "were merely mist". She ran screaming into her house at that. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------In another case, a lady was walking her own dog, when she saw a large shape lying in the road. It rose, revealing itself to be a huge black dog. It looked at her, walked off to the side, and merely disappeared. Her own dog noticed the Pooka, and instead of its normal protective behavior ran squealing to her. When the Pooka disappeared, her dog reacted as if nothing had happened at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A third case of a friend of the author occurred as late as 1952 [one of the last events included in the book]. This girl was walking with a can of buttermilk that she had fetched from farming neighbors, when she heard padding footsteps behind her. Turning, there was the huge jet-black dog. It came just alongside, and quietly accompanied her. It seemed very friendly, so she reached out to pet it. But she could not feel any contact with it as if her hand passed through it. It appeared completely solid, but was not. She tried this more than once, finally turning to stare directly at it. It then moved ahead, stopped, turned its head to the left, and just disappeared. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just a few more from varied sources: Eddie Lenihan in Meeting the Other Crowd has a personal Pooka story. When he and his brother were boys, they visited their uncle's farm and were constantly all over the place running errands and goofing off. One day they saw a huge black dog just sitting at a field gate. They thought little of it. At ten or eleven PM, the dog was still there, immobile. At midnight, still there. The dog stayed on station and remained there for at least two solid nights. They never saw it leave, and, as kids, didn't reason it out. But in later years they found that many people in the vicinity knew of the "thing" whatever it was, but the consensus was that it was a "fairy dog" who haunted the nearby ancient fort. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Rickard published a long list of black cat encounters once, but buried within them was what seems clearly to be a Pooka. This incident, reported in the newspapers, was a 1969 case from Cheriton Cross in Devonshire. It says just this: at 7:30 PM, on Exeter Road, a motorist saw a "Great Dane" standing in the road. Too late to brake, the vehicle "passed right through" the dog, and the dog just disappeared. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Another person who collects paranormal encounter stories is Dan Butcher. He presents two of the wilder stories in this subject. One is a 19th century case of a schoolteacher in Hertfordshire, who was driving a buggy to his home when he approached the site of an old hanging gibbet. There in the road was a "flame of fire". Just before it was a great black dog, with eyes like fire and an evil grin. After a few moments, the "thing" seemed to sink into the ground. [no doubt much to the relief of the teacher]. Secondly, and this one is, to me, less credible due to the fact that there is an "agenda" embedded in the story, is the tale of an intelligent thinker, who was converted to Catholicism, when he saw a large black dog running within a church which he had "idly entered". The dog confronted him, and then instantly vanished, taking the church with it. The man then had a Marian Vision and converted. Well, as a good Catholic boy, I'm not a priori opposed to the idea that this happened, but the "message conveyed" by the tale pollutes the objectivity of the waters for me, so caveat emptor on that one. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This next thing is so wild that I can't resist including it. In a book entitled Uncanny Stories [sort of a compilation of readers' tales a la FATE magazine, but in this case the Daily News ] appears this: Two evangelical Christians are visiting a Catholic cemetery in Cowpen near Blyth when a large black dog appeared by their side. It appeared tired. The two spoke to the dog [as people do] and began to walk on. The "dog" then "seemed to pull itself together and, rising before our eyes, gradually spread itself out to about the size of an ordinary bed quilt , then it sailed away from where we stood leaving us standing spellbound. We watched it drift over the tops of the trees and finally disappear from our view". Date:c.1920s; and time 11:30PM. And No, I don't think it was a UFO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------One last tale: this is probably about the year 2000, although the date is not given. A 14 year old was asleep in his bed, when he was awakened by his dog having crawled in and asleep beside him. But it wasn't his dog. This dog was black and had red blood-shot eyes. He tried to shoo it off, and it growled at him. Going to the door to open it and demand that the dog leave, the thing gave him a malevolent stare and just vanished. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are many cases in the literature, though for the English-reader they are much more commonly collected by people interested in the Celtic traditions. Diarmuid MacManus believes that at least for Ireland the students of Black Dog lore have got it wrong. He says that almost every incident that he has gathered points not to a relationship with Banshee-like death-foretelling, but towards a relatively benign "spirit" who will not mess with you if you do not mess with it. The only exceptions to this, he says, are from Ulster, and these are not in the style of real encounters but of folkloric fairy stories for kids. In Ireland these creatures are viewed, in one old hypothesis, as the neutral angels who would not choose either clearly good or clearly evil in GOD's first test. They have been "Earth-bound" in their parallel Magonian reality and interface with our own spiritually/psychically in better or worse ways depending on their own choice--the Pookas choosing a benign face towards us. In Wales, there are many similar stories, some of which lean toward the "hound-of-hell" variety [i.e. prognosticating deaths] and some of which are more Pooka like. The primary Welsh hypothesis, according to Wirt Sikes in his 19th century survey, British Goblins, is a mirror to the Irish concept, but substituting the souls of those not bad enough for hell and not good enough for heaven for the neutral angels. Sikes' book is an interesting one, and I will try to post something about it later. The Black Dog seems rarely to be the Night Mare horse that many would like to say is the common form of the Pooka, and this, to me shows how many traditions have run together over time. Just to indicate the linguistic complexity, consider this: Pisky-->Pixy-->Picky-->Pucksy-->Puck-->Puca-->Pooka. All of these are legit terms for fairies and all run together in their different ways in different parts of the British Isles [some via archaic forms of Old English and Anglo-Saxon]. In Middle English, the term Puck arises from Pouke or Pouk, pretty close to Pooka. In Welsh the term Pwca is used to mean goblin and fiend [i.e. demon]. In Iceland, the Puki is an Imp and a Devil. And as English got slightly more modern, the concept came closer and closer to the Devil which ultimately created the name of Poker for Satan. This is pretty far, methinks, from the original Pooka and its generally friendly demeanor. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am reminded of the Greek concept of the Hound-of Hell, the three-headed dog Cerberus. I also cannot avoid remembering the Egyptian god, Set, which I studied and felt that it was a representation of a biologically-real [though perhaps now extinct] animal that terrorized the deserts, killing and dismembering corpses, and generally being anti-social. My feeling about Set [and please see the earlier post] was that it was a great candidate for an original Hound-of-Hell, and its name a good candidate for the later Satan. I see no good correlation with our typical Black Spirit Dog, however. That seems to me to be a paranormal thing and a pretty tolerable companion on the path of life. Still others did not like our shaggy black spirit pooch, and with Edmund Spenser said: "Ne let the Pouke, nor other evill sprights, fray us with things that be not". Well, dropping the "evill" part, I could go along with that. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We, as the Congress of Dogs would like to state firmly our conviction that any slurring of our reputations with comparisons of Set, Satan, Banshees, and other seemingly canid entities of evil or even anti-social intent is off-the-path-of truth and bordering on libel. If we had opposable thumbs, we'd call our lawyers.