Is The BLACK FAIRY DOG from Faery? part 3.

Hopefully Lisa Roy's perfect fairy can look into her magic ball and transmit the answer to us. This is part three of my "feeble lucubrations" as our olden British colleagues might say, and it will be the last. (detectable internet sighs noted.) 

HIGH-STRANGENESS IN THE DATA? 

There is a little of that. 
CASE A. Gorleston, East Anglia. 1972. An officer for the Coastguard was on duty and scanning the beach from his lookout station. The Sun had just risen. There was nothing of interest along the beaches, so the officer concentrated on a lonely dog running on the beach. The large black dog was running around the beach as if looking for someone. The witness watched the running dog continuously for more than two minutes. Then just as if (somehow) a "sheet" was slowly drawn over the animal, and it gradually became invisible. 

Well, THAT's different. I've had two UFO cases in my career wherein the object seemed to gradually be eclipsed by something mysterious and itself unseeable, but that doesn't help me much in coping with this claim. 

CASE B. Beccles, Suffolk. Late 1930s. (unusual in the credibility department in that the writer (Ivan Bunn) stated that he personally interviewed the witness more than one time.) The witness and her sister went out at night to post a letter. As they got near the Post Office a large black dog appeared. The witnesses thought that this must be a neighbor's dog running loose, and did the neighborly thing of trying to catch it. When just about to successfully grab it, however, the dog began to shrink its size. It got "to the size of a cat" and then just disappeared completely. 

Hmmm... shrinking to near nothing then "POP!" gone. Pretty weird. And NOT explainable.

CASE C. Rural Colorado mountains. c. late 1990s. Four people were on a vacation drive (a mother and her two daughters showing their guest the local scenery) when they saw a large dog cross the road ahead. The dog was black, but to begin with nothing unusual. However, once the car came alongside the dog, the animal merely walked into the side of the mountain and was gone. There was no crevice, no outlet of any kind --- just a solid rock face. 

OK. One more complete stumper.

CASE D. Cowpen near Blyth, Northumberland. c. turn-of-the-century. This was one story in a local newspaper that was collected with others in a book called Uncanny Stories in 1926. Two persons, one an evangelist, were walking, as they usually did, near the local cemetery just before midnight. A large black dog "just" appeared alongside as if it had just been in a long run. As they stared at one another, the dog "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 ... We watched it drift away over the tops of trees, and finally disappear from our view travelling skyward." 

Uhhh .... WHAT?!!!

CASE E. Kettleness, Yorkshire. 1950s. A minister-to-be had become impressed by Bram Stoker's Dracula book and that it might have been inspired in part by a local Kettleness legend of a wandering Black Dog. This was around 1910. Then, in the 1920s, he interviewed a fisherman who reported a Black Dog interaction. Finally, in the 1950s, the minister-to-be had indeed become not only a minister but also a regional exorcist for his church. He with two friends witnessed a Black Dog in concert with "an overwhelming sense of evil." 

Knowing of his unusual "skill", his friends asked him if he would consider exorcizing the area and therefore the beast. The minister said yes and made preparations. One evening, sometime later,  the exorcist walked the shoreline with his friend and felt the same evil foreboding. "A huge black hound" appeared and moved toward them. The friend panicked and ran. The exorcist stood his ground. He believed that the hound wasn't physical but some sort of projection by evil. He convinced himself that he'd dealt with all this before in previous exorcisms. So, saying the words of exorcism, he splashed Holy Water at the black thing. The Black Dog disappeared. The exorcist continued to do his work over a larger area in the locale. Supposedly this ended for all time the appearances of the Black Dog. 

I suppose that one's openness to this claim relates to one's views about demons and exorcism. I'm a Catholic. This guy wasn't a Catholic priest, but we Catholics do have a willingness to see possibility in possession and exorcism. On the one hand, I felt that the narrative of this case (I probably should have typed it all out in quotes for your own reaction) was a bit too "heroic" by the teller. On the other hand, I've known two Catholic exorcists (one quite well), so have some resistance to merely rejecting such claims. 

So I'm flummoxed by all this. ... as usual. 

High Strangeness indeed. Four very odd methods of disappearing and one very odd method of being forced to disappear. 
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Glowing or Red Eyes? I have very few red-eyed Black Dogs in my list of 60+ cases (perhaps seven in all.) This, it turns out, is not unusual in this field if the researcher takes a (to me) appropriate approach to the data. In my opinion, the paucity in "red fiery eyed" black dog reports in my collection is a resultant from the sifting of the case list for better credibility. Again, in my opinion, the vast majority of fiery red-eyed claims are older claims, and most of those cases buried in cultures whose members "know" that they are supposed to describe Black Dogs with fiery eyes. ... and ... the reports hardly distinguish themselves from the legends. 

That may seem harsh and "bold." But I have a second ally in this. Mike Burgess is the fellow who did the really heroic effort that we all can read on the SHUCKLAND web site. He worked his database over like no one else in the field --- remarkable --- strong --- impressive. Burgess has 179 cases on his site which specializes in East Anglia cases.  Of those 179, 21 described glowing fiery eyes, and only 9 described red eyes. Red is rare in these stories; glowing fiery (remember that "fiery" is yellow-orange, not red) eyes are only a bit more common. Most dog's eyes don't exhibit enough interest to even merit specific mention. 

Also, the collage above is to demonstrate that "glowing" eyes are rather common --- that is what eyes do --- they reflect light, different colors for different species. 

                                                                                                                                          

 Dogs don't typically "shine" red but a few shine orange. Often eyes just shine strongly in some color or other so that they seem like internally glowing spot lights. They aren't. Witnesses might report glowing eyes for several reasons: the eyes really are reflecting ambient light, they might even appear a bit yellowy or orangey, they might be so excited that they're seeing eyes brighter than they are, they might even convince themselves that those eyes were "fiery" or even red, when they in fact were just normal reflections. 


The bottomline here is that your loyal analyst thinks that red eyes are just a red herring. 
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One Last? Ridiculous Thought. (and less ridiculous conclusions):

As I've plowed through all this, I had a creeping idea that this phenomenology was NOT the old dominant "Devil Dog" violent phenomenon, but rather the much less interacting wandering dog in the evening on the rural road. Mike Burgess seems to believe this too. His data says to him that the violent Shuck rests on legends and old stories, while the alternate vision dominates the modern stories and the better documented ones. This has hit him so strongly that he has come to his own conclusion that there is little, perhaps nothing at all, to the paranormal theory of the Black Dogs. The cases that he respects he feels are just as likely to be caused by real dogs running stray. 

Mike Burgess seems to have come to this point due to his powerful work statistically. Very few characteristics show out in those stats. He is of course welcome to that view and has certainly earned it. But to me, this is a glass-half-empty position, whereas I am a glass-half-full type. For me, it is the mass of GOOD well-vetted encounters that shouts: There's some REALITY here!! Not that There's some un-reality here --- that latter is always true in such fields. There are always loads of bad reports; always loads of misinterpretations, bad observers; always strange other ways of seeing things. Mike Burgess is a great researcher, but I think that he came to the wrong conclusion. 

But there is just one last thing before I make my stand as to the probable reality of a Rudkin-MacManus style of Black Dog. I DID get a small number of "violent" types of reports. What of them? Just outliers? Maybe just bad reports? Possibly. I have one very weird idea that snuck into my head. It's "Out Proctor" as we used to say here.  

OK. There's a case from Aylesbury in the early 1800s where a large black fiery eyed dog grows larger as it approaches a terrified witness, who then hits the thing which explodes and disappears, meanwhile damaging the witness. There is another case from the same era from Tring, wherein the sees a similar creature coming out of a fire, terrorizing the witness and sinking back into the ground. And there is a case from Dartmoor in 1972 of a witness seeing a dog-shadow with fiery eyes, which is struck and explodes into light, destroying the house's electricity and breaks windows. 

Explodes damaging the witness ... comes out of fire and sinks into the ground ... explodes when struck, breaks windows and puts out electrical system .... 

Just wondering. Could there be some "unknown" phenomenon at work in a few instances here? Can there be something that manifests as a dark cloud or mass of something with the hint of fire inside (think of a kind of ball lightning surrounded by dark dusty cloud)? Could it be pretty "shocking" in more ways than one? Could it be a dynamic thing, scary and morphing shape? 

Out Proctor. Yep. See this thing in the right cultural setting, and excitedly feel that one is being menaced by a Black Dog. The "Dog" gets "excited" and explodes or whatever. 

Just a really weird data-less thought but what-the-heck, it's my blog. 
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Conclusion:
A. This is soft.
B. The Black Dog phenomenon a la Rudkin-MacManus exists as the best witnesses describe.
C. The red-eyed Shuck phenomenon probably doesn't.
D. The Black Dog phenomenon isn't the Work of the Devil.
E. Some significant number of these cases perform just as if they are "film-strips" perhaps from the past, re-running its sequence now and then for unknown reasons.
F. Some significant number of the cases perform as if they have no real interest in the people, while others seem to at least deliberately pace with the witnesses.
G. The phenomenon is an outside phenomenon --- I have only one case which mimics the outdoor ones --- and that is one further reason for not seeing this as poltergeist in nature.
H. Does this Fairy Dog come from FAERY? It doesn't have much of a Faery feeling about it to me. Good fairyworld cases are "full of life." This seems much more "mechanical." 
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 NOW ... just to leave off in as much confusion as possible: When I moved into my "new" retirement community, the sales representative visited my old place and was very interested in all the odd topic books and files, and after a few questions, she said: I had a strange experience once. And --- are you ready for this?

She was visiting a friend (maybe a cousin) at a rural farm. The cousin stated that there was a poltergeist in the barn, and it manifested all the time. She of course laughed that off. He insisted, so she called his bluff. They went to the barn, got quiet, and listened. There then came several knocks like footfalls from high up in the rafters. The cousin claimed success. She said "Right. Anything could do that. Maybe you even got one of your buddies in on the gag." 
The cousin was miffed or seemed to be. He insisted that they try again. What the Heck. Why not? So back to the barn. 

When they got there the cousin yelled out "that wasn't good enough! You'll have to do more than that!"  She laughed again. But shortly the wall behind them began to seriously creak. It seemed to move and change color ... then it the middle of that wall THIS appeared:

         This thing seemed to be coming right out of the wall, fiery red Devil Dog eyes and all ..... 

Well.... no joke folks ... true story ... and almost impossible to believe (not in terms of believing the young lady sales rep, that story came forth pure and true, but in terms of how my analysis of the Black Fairy Dog worked out.) 

... no, I don't think that her story changes my mind about the above "conclusions", but it sure as heck complicates my mindscape about all of this.

 I mean, who pays attention to fiery red eyes anyway? 
  

                                               

Are Black Fairy Dogs from Faery? part 2

Alright; I am still bone ignorant but willing to demonstrate it publicly in a second post. I'm standing by my opinions in the previous posting that I can find decent evidence for the idea that large black dogs occasionally exhibit anomalous behavior by pacing pedestrians or cart or car drivers, with the anomalous fingerprint of instantaneous disappearances. This soft (humble?) conclusion is based upon around 40 or more sifted reports, even if the big majority of those were from two investigators only. 

Here's what I want to do in this second part: 
a.) give a few more cases that fit the pattern;
b.) make a couple of remarks about the difference between this study and the general literature;
c.) look at another data site on this topic;
d.) give a few higher strangeness incidents;
e.) an approach to the "fiery eyes" issue;
f.) a way-out crazy idea of mine aimed at a very few reports. 

.... and since, as usual, I'm winging it, so the above list will probably be violated by the time I'm finished. (It was. I got through only half of it.)

A. A few more cases:  as hinted at before, the Rudkin-MacManus cases amount to around two dozen, and I have extracted maybe 15-20 more which I believe to be defensible. 

CASE ONE: Edale, Derbyshire. 1930. A woman walking at 8pm sees a dog heading her way. The dog is the size of a very large collie and black. As it passed she attempted to pat it. Her hand passed through its surface with no sense of feeling anything material. As the dog walked on, it simply passed through an iron wire crisscross fence. She ran to the fence, but there was no further sign of the dog. (Source of this is the Graham McEwan chapter with no internal reference for this exact story. [@#$%^*%$###!!! to put it mildly.] There are several tales in his chapter associated with this area; some sound like "my" pattern; some sound slightly wilder.)
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CASE TWO:

Aberdeenshire, Scotland, 1955. 
This one is my favorite among the non-Rudkin-MacManus group. It is that because of the high quality of the witness, John Stewart. He was not only a well-known highly accomplished piper, but also a local chief of police. Needless to say, we rarely even get a comment about the integrity of a reporter, let alone one this good (and by the way I had to find this out myself from "non-paranormal site" information. )

Stewart was walking at night and approaching was a large dog. The report does not say if the dog was black, but that is probably implied due to the nature of the article topic. This dog seemed to come through a fence. As it passed Stewart, he reached out to stroke the dog, but again his hand passed completely through the animal. The report does not say how Stewart lost sight of the anomaly. But it did say that he felt that he had seen the same animal seven years earlier in Kenmore.
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CASE THREE: Pottsville, PA. early 20th century.  Case description is brief but it's strength is that it was written up by Jerry Clark (Unexplained!) so there is a real reference given --- thank you my friend Jerry! The report was given to an actual investigative folklorist and goes as follows: "One night when I was a boy walking with friends along Seven Stars Road, a big black dog appeared from nowhere and came between me and one of my pals. And I went to pet the dog, but it disappeared from right under me. Just like the snap of a finger it disappeared." Simple and clean. And note that this is the first solid non-UK case that we have.
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CASE FOUR: Devonshire, UK. 1984. Similar situation to the previous --- brief case description, but Jerry Clark reporting so there is a good provenance. Witness originally talked to a known investigator face-to-face, so OK to that. The witness saw "this bloomin' great black thing .... I put on my anchors {brakes} and in the headlights it slowed down and walked right up to the car. I could see its eyes as plain as day, green and glassy they were, and he looked right over the bonnet [hood] at me, he was that tall, and then he went! ... like a light going out. I just couldn't see it anymore. It isn't real like an ordinary dog. I could feel the hairs on my neck standing up." Most notable thing here: 1984 is the latest date we have yet in this survey.
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CASE FIVE: Chicago, IL. mid-20th century. Poor provenance for this case (FATE Magazine, November 1981.) BUT: the case is well told and the general narrative in most ways is appropriate to the phenomenon and to the simplicity of the witness experience and attitude. So, here goes: A woman was visiting a friend for support for the friend's recent successful pregnancy. She was walking from the friend's apartment to the elevated train station two blocks away. But it was late and Chicago had just had a nasty death of a young woman. She was scared even for the two block walk. She glimpsed a shadowy figure behind her which didn't help. Tearing up in the eyes, she didn't immediately notice that a large white collie had roamed up beside her. She almost fell in love with it and its timing, but the dog wouldn't let her get close enough for a hug, and strode out just ahead of her. In fact, the dog seemed to speed up to hurry her along. This seemed necessary as the shadowy figure behind seemed to increase pace as well. As it sped up, so did the dog, hurrying the lady along. Finally they were running to the elevated station. Reaching the safety of the waiting passengers and lights, she turned around to see a shadow duck back into the darkness. Looking for her collie companion, it too was no longer to be seen.  -----------  Well, I like the story for obvious romantic reasons, despite the weak provenance and the fact that her White Knight Canine was indeed white.
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CASE SIX: Bouctouche, New Brunswick. c. 1980. Provenance is poor. Story appears as a response to a blog posting on a site called "At The Edge." The author of a major article seems to have gotten many e-mails on this topic and probably did as good as could be done by listing all of them on the site with whatever information they contained. This (excruciatingly) demonstrates the BAD situation that we are in due to the internet. This case almost assuredly involves a witness who would be willing to do a direct interview and even a site visit ... but no way in this long distance hit-and-run world. But here's the story: 

A young woman was having trouble sleeping on a warm summer evening. She knew that her mother would still be awake downstairs so she went downstairs to get some cooler night air. So, outside she went to sit on the steps. After sitting for a short time, she got a raising of the hackles on the neck type of feeling. Then, she saw a large black dog sitting just a few feet away, staring unblinking at her. Frozen in fear now, she stared unmoving. She started praying (The Our Father) and dropping her eyes for the merest moment, the dog disappeared. The dog seemed to be like a black lab, but unusually menacing for such a breed. The one really unusual thing she recalled was that she felt its eyes glowed (but not red.) 
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CASE SEVEN: Suffolk county, Long Island, NY. late 1980s. Same provenance as above. Fairly lengthy detailed narrative. One day in summer a young woman was going outside to retrieve something from the family auto. The family dog sat on the porch. She saw "this enormous black dog-like creature" running from the woods at her right. The size of this thing startled her. She described it as significantly bigger than a mastiff maybe weighing 400 pounds. Its gait was odd in some way that she couldn't explain. She wasn't even sure that the thing's feet touched the ground. There were no sounds (what we in Ufology call The OZ Factor). Its path of running was in an abnormally straight line and the animal never varied in its gaze in just that one direction. And then, just as it would enter the woods on the other side, it vanished. The family dog was negatively affected by this encounter, snarling at the young woman when she tried to run inside. Her father ended up having to come out to the porch to settle the dog (a Rottweiler) down.

A likeable tale. Kind of believable. But a lot moreso now that we've seen a few dozen other tales having much in common with it. ... and also, a USA case.
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That's enough of the non-Rudkin-MacManus cases to demonstrate that such DO in fact exist. 
I have a non-researched belief that there are at least another "full-set" of such cases out there somewhere (i.e. equaling my 60 case group) and probably currently reside ready for the picking in the more dedicated British researcher files (Knowing how good Janet Bord is, she probably has two to three times my numbers and with better provenance.) But I don't yet see them in the form (and sifting) that I would prefer. There IS one researcher whose approach to this topic has particularly impressed me --- a fellow, who I do not know, named Mike Burgess, who runs (ran?) the website SHUCKLAND. There are LOTS of things on that site which make me believe that he is a researcher that I'd very much like to sit around and talk with, and learn from. 

One further oddball activity by me: I wondered of course if I was making any sense with all my efforts above. There wasn't an easy way to do that of course, but I did try one weird thing. Many of you know that there is a site (rather a heroic site) which contains what is called a "paranormal database."(the name of the site.) This lists, for Great Britain and Ireland, cases upon cases of claimed anomalous encounters separated by each UK region/county. I, as is usual for my whacky way of feverishly seeking strange claims, read pretty much the whole thing. Yes ... I've done stupider things but I can't help myself. Anyway, I fortunately noticed that the site organizer has done a lot of useful work. To the point of this blog, there is a way to simply ask for all the Black Shuck related cases and they'll be sorted out without you doing all that yourself. So, Goldmine, right? .... here's what I found.

I plunked the magic button of the site and up came a vast number of references. (these are all REALLY brief by the way.) There were 355 (I think this is either right or very close) total Black Dog (allegedly) incidents. Well, WOW. But not so fast. I decided that it would be good to drop out all the cases which didn't even have ANYTHING of a date --- that is NOTHING. The word was "unknown." It felt reasonable to assume that if one couldn't even guess at a rough date, the case couldn't be a credible one. So how many cases had this problem? TWO HUNDRED and TWENTY FOUR of the 355!!!!! Good Lord! I'm talking about not even being able to state things like "late 1800s" or "1980s" or "mid-20th century." I accepted all of those. I was left with just 131 cases. 

Then I took those survivors and looked for things which at least said the creatures involved were black dogs. 99 of those 131 were not qualifiers even of that. THIRTY TWO alleged encounters ONLY left. Fourteen of the other 99 could be marginally added in if stretched. To say that this was disappointing hardly hits the proper tone. I got depressed enough by this that I bailed out on trying to find more about and analyze the 32 cases. 

I don't know what the message here is, except that it seems supportive of my feeling that there are not enough of these cases being in any useful sort of shape. 
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I don't know if I have more to usefully say on this topic, and may well have written nothing that useful yet. But hope springs eternal, and I will try to finish this wild hunt of the Black Dog on the morrow or, more likely, the next day. 

Till then, stay healthy physically and spiritually, my friends.

ARE BLACK FAIRY DOGS FROM FAERY? part 1

Black Fairy Dogs ... no, I'm not ready but I'm going to write my "final" opinions about this anyway. To ease into this and make it more enjoyable, here's a MacManus case to make it all real. 

 To the left is our main guy Diarmuid (or Dermot) MacManus (Our main gal by the way is Ethel Rudkin --- if it wasn't for the two of them, I believe that I would have nothing legitimate to say about the reality of these things --- and I think that with the exception of commentary about old legends and folktales, no one else would either.) 

The good Captain was a military officer, writer and a police officer on top of his landowner position and his friendships with people like W B Yeats. In other words a credible researcher of the highest quality. I was completely sold on MacManus before I even knew the rest of his history. I'm doubly impressed.

Here's one case:  

"In 1952 a friend of mine, Margo Ryan, a charming and intelligent girl, encountered the Pooka in a way that is typical. It happened within a day or two of mid-summer and though it was nearly midnight, by summer time of course --- astronomically about 10:30, for we are twenty minutes behind England --- it was reasonably light. 
      She was carrying home a large can of buttermilk from a neighboring farm and was walking along a quiet country road within a short distance of her house, which is near Redcross in county Wicklow. As she strolled on the quiet of the country night, a quiet that town people and people in mechanized country districts can never know, she heard a soft patter behind her and the next moment an enormous jet-black dog ranged up and walked quietly in company with her. After a bit, as it seemed so peaceable and friendly, she put out her hand to pat it, without looking down. But she could not feel it; her hand seemed to miss it and touch nothing. So she tried again, but again she could not touch it.
     This puzzled Margo, so she looked, and there it was, as solid as solid could be, though it had now moved a little away to her left and just out of reach. A moment later it was close to her again, so again she tried to pat it, but with as little success as ever. This startled her a little and she turned her head so as to look at it fully, but as she did so it moved forward and continued walking just a few feet ahead of her in the middle of the road for another fifty yards or more when it stopped, turned its head to the left, and vanished into thin air as she was looking at it. Let there be no doubt about it whatever; it did not run off but actually vanished from where it stood in the center of the road. Besides, in that place there was a ditch, and bank with no gap where a dog could have gone.
    Margo then realized vividly that the great dog stood much higher than her hand and it was not possible for her to miss it. Her hand MUST have gone through it as if it were air. 
    After this, her nervousness turned to positive fear, and she hurried home as quickly as she could without spilling the buttermilk. Her family received the story of her adventure with interest and all sympathy, for they are well aware of the reality of these things." 

So: A. IF MacManus is a good honest researcher-writer (and I thoroughly believe that to be true); and B. If he trusts his witness (which he does and thereby so do I), then C. What do we have here? My opinion: a walloping good report of a true anomalous encounter with a very large Black Dog, which "just" vanished and did not seem to be "physical" (ex. touchable.) 

In fact: after (and during) reading this case, I, as an old UFO historian, got the EXACT same feeling that I've gotten reading certain very old UFO cases. That feeling is: GAME OVER --- this is real and NOT mundanely explainable. And, just as in reading some of those old UFO cases, the thought lingers: OK, fine, I'm there, but what then exactly IS this? With UFOs, when you pound away at the literally HUNDREDS of such blockbuster cases, the (in my opinion) unavoidable resultant goes this way: 

Ignorant sensationalist listener: Do you believe in UFOs? 
Me: No. Why would I reduce my mindset to "belief" on such a non-profound topic? Ask a better question please.
Ignorant listener: Uhh... what kind of question? 
Me: How about --- if we take a hypothetical position that "Advanced Aerial Technology, which exhibits characteristics that we cannot duplicate, has been encountered flying around in our atmosphere", is there evidence supporting that hypothesis?
Ignorant listener: Uhh... OK ... go on then.
Me: Absolutely. LOTS of evidence supporting that. 
Ignorant listener: YOU believe in Aliens!!! 
Me: Groan .... could somebody get this fool a lollypop or something? 

My not-really-cavalier point to that dialogue is that while for me it can be a very small number of really good encounters which convince me that I'm dealing with a true anomaly (and a fascinating research question), those cases don't tell me exactly what I'm dealing with, and certainly don't throw me into that research-deadliest mental state of "belief." Adding to this: UFOs are a relatively easy (in my opinion) field of study to reach mountains of data upon which to build a defense of hypothesis, and also whittle certain hypotheses away, as EXTREMELY unlikely. The "Black Fairy Dog" anomaly/anomalies is/are nowhere near as robust in good data nor as limited in reasonable hypotheses. 

So, I'm "there" but I'm not yet "There", and I have my doubts that I'll ever get "THERE." 

OK. enough of the "philosophy", let's have another story. This is a case which MacManus listened to after he had (sort of by strange accident) picked up a "card" from a cigarette pack (certain brands used to place small cards of athletes, bathing suit beauties, and other things inside the wrappers). This one was something which (weirdly to me) had an artist's version of the "pooka" on it with a little talk about the legend. MacManus saw the leprechaunish humor in this find and carried it around with him. 

The tale: MacManus was in a city to do some business and the person with whom he had an appointment was a bit late. He was there chatting with the secretary waiting.

"She told me that her parents were farmers some three miles from Ballaghdereen in county Roscommon. 'But that is near me, for I am from outside Kiltimagh, in the heart of fairy country', I said laughing. 'Oh, we have fairies too', she replied, full of local patriotism. 'Ah, my dear, I am, sure they are not as real and tough as ours', I maintained.

    'But I've seen one', she blurted out in indignant tone. Then she stopped, embarrassed by her admission. This of course fired my interest, and I soon convinced her of my sympathy, and once she was sure I would not laugh she readily and convincingly told me her tale.

    It was at her home, about six o'clock on a hot summer's afternoon some six years before, when she was sixteen. She was standing in the field just behind the house when she noticed an enormous black dog as high as her shoulder walking by her only three or four yards away. As it passed, it turned its head and looked at her, though with interest rather than hostility, but to her its eyes seemed almost human in their intelligence. She had no thought that it was supernatural nor even any sense of nervousness until it reached an iron gate opening into the next field, some twenty yards from where she stood. Then, to her horror, she saw it quietly and without hesitation walk clean through the closed gate as if the solid iron were merely mist. 

    For a few moments she remained rooted to the spot, the hair on the back of her neck tingling and rising, then she pulled herself together and, turning, ran screaming into the house to the protection of her mother."

Her family was not sympathetic and she resolved to tell no one else of this experience until the accident of meeting MacManus in her employer's office. He was the first person to whom she told of her incident since that day. MacManus then displayed the cigarette card  and "she agreed that it was just what she had seen." 

MacManus has a few more such encounters in his Middle Kingdom (a book about the general array of encounters in central Ireland, not just pookas.) Re-telling those couple of his stories will serve as reward for both of us, as I soldier on with my narrative of mainly failure hunting this thing. 

                      The Devil Take The Hound-most?                              OK Bad pun. Sue me. This is tough research so you take what pleasures you can get. 

For what it's worth, this is what I tried to do: I have that big Black Dog file and a handful of relevant books. NOT comprehensively, but not lightly either, I tried to comb through those resources looking for the kind of case report that a UFO researcher might find at least somewhat interesting (i.e. credible.)  I'm looking for "encounters" remember, not fairy tales nor ancient legends nor "people around here believe that ...." Whereas in the field of Little People research you can find some such reports in somewhat olden times, I literally found NONE from the period prior to the beginning of the 1800s and few prior to the beginning of the 1900s. Why? Don't ask me; these things are just REALLY poorly documented or even "talked about." I will readily concede that dozens of folks (mainly in the UK) can/could do a better search, but I had to bend my standards far out of comfort zones to even list 60 incidents. When I consider that strongly credible UFO reports number in the thousands, and similarly credible Little people reports seem to number in the hundreds, finding a weak set of 60 disappoints --- and this despite the internet awash with folks bragging about how deluged we are with such reports (almost entirely badly reported.) 

Forgive me --- just drives me crazy. There ARE some smart people over the pond who seem to be trying to rectify this, but even their current publications are dominated by casual retelling of old stories (in majority violent) and not good recent field investigation. Great academic and entertaining writing but useless for me in getting at truth. 

Anyway, my "60" cases: 

 To the left is our great lady, Ethel Rudkin. SHE is THE field researcher. She goes to the witnesses and, like MacManus, records their stories face-to-face, and then tells us about what really happened. 

Ethel Rudkin graced us with 18 cases (thereabouts) which were recounted in enough detail in her God-send of an article in FOLKLORE #49, 1938. Rudkin's 18 cases and MacManus' 6 comprise 40% of the possibly useful incidents in my sifted pile. OR, to put it another way: without the two of them, I'd have "nothing." 

Rudkin's tales are mentioned in briefer form than MacManus' (I'll give one shortly) but her strength lies elsewhere. What she did was collect MANY incidents, often about Black Dog encounters in exactly the same areas. Her stories have the subtle strength of (while usually being less spectacular) presenting repetitive incidents witnessed by several different people at different times. Ethel Rudkin has documented evidence for Black Dog encounters tied to specific locations, though not repeating "scientifically" on the clock. It is VERY hard to read her research and cavalierly dismiss the probability that there have been places in her home county of Lincolnshire where it would not at all be surprising to her, the locals, or me, for someone to be accompanied by a large black dog on a walk in the county roads. 

The promised tale:(this is the one with the most "action"; almost all of the encounters discovered by Ethel Rudkin are pretty "tame" interactions a la MacManus' group.)

 " Mrs. G B in her young days was in service at Grayingham, and on her evenings out she used to meet B., now her husband. They used to part at Blyborough, and she would walk from there to Grayingham alone. Once she was aware of a very large Black Dog that followed her as she went along the road by The Fishpond; it annoyed her to have him "taggin' after" her, so she slackened her pace to let him come up to her, which he did. "Quick as lightening," she said "I 'upped wi' the umbrella I was a-carryin' an' 'lammed 'im one as 'ard as I could." But she nearly fainted at the result, for the umbrella "went clean thruff 'im" and the Dog trotted on beside her to the ash tree at the end of Chapels Lane where he vanished up the tree, or into the tree. " 

Hmmm.... That's normal. Sure. Happens all the time in my neighborhood. The Rudkin and MacManus encounters do in fact tell a two-dozen case story which is coherent over those incidents. (two dozen is a minimum --- Ethel Rudkin has 18 reasonably well described encounters and maps 21 cases in her map where she is looking for patterns. From hints in the text and elsewhere, it appears to me that she had more than just the 21 in her files. Hopefully all of her work will be detailed some day.) 

The gestalt story is a simple one: Big Black Dog appears to humans as they are walking or riding outside, paces them or otherwise accompanies, or just sits and stares, does not seem to really menace in any way except for the emotional response of the observers, "does no harm", is rarely felt to exhibit tangible qualities other than a quiet step, and very often ends its appearance with a shocking "instantaneous" vanishing even while being in plain sight. 

Other writers have tried to add to that description. Rudkin herself did. She looked for water connections --- others have as well. Those attempts are EXTREMELY unconvincing to me. Rudkin did not push this idea. Others have. Given the presence of "water" nearly everywhere in Britain, one needs a FAR better criterion for the term "close" to water to be even interesting. I've not seen it. 

Rudkin looked for connections between appearances and town names --- mainly what the map is about. I don't see that in the data either. A more interesting (to me) concept was her wondering if the repetitive appearances occurred along what Alfred Watkins and Paul Devereaux called Ley Lines. THAT's not well connected either, AND as the concept of Ley Lines isn't exactly pinned down, this situation is like two unknowns trying to lean on one another to prop themselves up --- not an ideal circumstance. Still I'm interested in the first stage of this one: namely, can the repetitive Black Dog "tracks" be shown as correlating with ancient roads/pathways from traditional times? Ethel Rudkin at least began a serious look into that. 

So, that's Black Dogs from the MacManus-Rudkin (and, in humble minority, Swords) perspective at this state. What about others' data? 

There's not much, again in my opinion. Although there seem to be literally hundreds more claims, I find ones with credibility (named witnesses, at least rough dates, known investigators writers actually talking to real people, etc) in very short supply (REALLY surprised me, folks.) 

There is a chapter in a book by some writer named Graham McEwan (Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland) entitled "The Black Dog." It contains seven (eight?) cases which are promising and not already Rudkin-MacManus cases. They have a strength and a weakness. The strength is that all of them fit the Rudkin-MacManus pattern, a fact which gives me a rush of confidence. The weakness is that every one of these is described as if a reader would just automatically know where-the-@#%# the descriptions came from. They, in other words, commit the prime sin of scholarship --- they do not facilitate the reader-scholar in THEIR search to follow-up the facts. ... drives me nuts. 

Still, because the write-ups are well-done, and the details seem to be coherent, I'm trusting this author to have gleaned these cases from reasonable sources. If so, that would mean that we have over 30, nearly three dozen, incidents in this pattern. 

I'm stopping for now. I have a bit more to say (maybe tomorrow, though that's almost surely too soon.) I'll leave with the debunker's siege gun argument: Why can't these be just big dogs? 

                                        Well, there ARE big dogs, even black ones. 

Kind of hard to just suddenly duck out of sight behind a bush, though, don't you think? (I love it when the debunker argument almost immediately cancels itself out.) Back soon with the weirder claims --- some anyway. And random thoughts of what we're experiencing.

Black Fairy Dog: preliminary note

Preliminary Note on The Black Fairy Dog:
This analysis is a Bear, or rather a wrestling match with a Kraken. 

 When I decided to take (another) swing at this topic, I saw what seemed to be a nice orderly (if wide) topical file on the shelf which promised a reasonable research project.

 WRONG. And the above isn't the half of it. The Good News is that this topic is loaded with masses of reading material so all of you have free rein at it, entirely disregarding my feeble attempt (to be presented in maybe another two days.) 

I am three days into this and have selected about 60 cases which seem to me to be worth trying to make some sense of. These are out of literally hundreds.  The big cut-down is due to the (for my purposes/philosophy) horrible state in which most of these cases exist. Generally speaking, it is very hard to rationalize much "credibility" from the way these things are reported. "My" 60 cases come after tossing out everything which smacks of hypnogogia ("I just woke up to see ..."; I was daydreaming in my room when ... "; "I SWEAR that I was awake.... ") There is a LOT of that. 

Also, cases where the report is a child's reflection from some very young age MANY years ago. Or, almost anything where there seems to have been inserted into the tale some kind of "agenda" or the growth into a fairy tale rather than a simple encounter. And there are other (for me) nerve-jangling giveaways  which my intuition can't tolerate. "There was a time, many years ago now, when ..." and like phrases which almost equate to "Once Upon A Time." 

Out of these reasonable and unreasonable prejudices come a small number of cases with which I am at least a little comfortable. They don't speak of Hounds-of-Hell, or many-headed Cerberus, or the dangers of The Wild Hunt --- though the vast majority of the ancient tales do. It almost seems as though we humans gravitate towards the violent and the macabre, even when it doesn't seem to be there. What that says about us I leave to you to explain. 

I REALLY wish that cases of Black Dogs would be better reported. The internet seems to have made this even worse. These unnamed uninterviewed witnesses (with their low detail hit-and-run shallow claims) doom, I believe, us into never getting close to any of this. What we need are true field investigators at least in several locations in Britain and Ireland who will go right to the witnesses. Drives me crazy --- but I'll try to complete my little study and commentary in a couple more days. 

My study (meagre as it is) indicates to me that this is a real (external to the carnival of the mind) anomalous phenomenon, and is still occasionally manifesting. It's a bit criminal that we don't seriously try to investigate it with more rigor. Listening to random stories from people that we don't know or haven't even met isn't good enough.  

What's Out There???

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.