The folklore of black dogs in Yorkshire

The problem with Hallowe’en is the Americanisation of an ancient festival.

What we fear nowadays has more to do with Hollywood. Forget the Vampires, the werewolves, Frankenstien’s monster, and the return of the mummy.

The forgotten history of the West Riding holds much more frightening things:



Behold the BLACK DOG – a creature to strike fear into the hearts of anyone – well may be not this one. But for many centuries a large Black Dog with glowing eyes could paralyse anyone with terror.

It can also manifest as a demonic Sheep or an enormous black donkey. The black dogs appears at night seeing it would herald the untimely death of someone nearby.

Throughout European mythology, dogs have been associated with death and guardians of the underworld. This association seems to be due to the scavenging habits of dogs.

Just hearing the Berghest is enough to herald the death of a close relative. Try to stop it, and you will only hasten your own demise rather. The name derived from the same term for other bedtime monsters like bogie men and boggerts, the term Berghest comes from burh-Town and ghest–ghost.

But it seems to have Germanic origins - linked to Odin, the leader of the Wild Hunt a lone hunter tracking down a lady of the forest accompanied only by his two dogs.

In Leeds one term for them is Gabble Retchets, or gabriel’s hounds, from the Old English word “ræcc”, meaning a dog that hunts by scent. Appropriated by the church Gabriel is an angel linked to death who serves as a messenger.

As Mother Shipton's Prophecies "For storms will rage and oceans roar, when Gabriel stands on sea and shore, and as he blows his wondrous horn, old worlds die and new be born.”

In 1879, folklorist William Henderson described them as “monstrous human-headed dogs, who traverse the air, and are often heard although seldom seen.” In the neighbourhood of Leeds the phenomenon is held to be the souls of un-baptised children doomed to flit restlessly around their parents’ home.



A man called Nichols, writing in 1828, sai :-'Leeds has it's distinct Padfoots, distinguishable one from another, for almost every street'.

Padfoot, another name for the black dog, come from Wakefield, Leeds, Pudsey, and Bradford The soft padding of feet is first heard before the clanking of chains. It pads softly behind you and if you look back you’d see a shadowy, half-real creature in the hedgerow. Enough to frighten some to death in an instant.

Although dismissed by some as bean geese, In 1664, Reverend Oliver Heywood wrote: “There is also a strange noise in the air heard of many in these parts this winter, called Gabriel-Ratches), the noise is as if a great number of whelps were barking and howling, and ‘tis observed that if any see them that person dies shortly after.”

Whilst One source from Sheffield informed Henderson that “the sound was exactly like the questing of a dozen beagles and highly suggestive of ideas of the supernatural”.



Story is told of a man, whose way being obstructed by the Padfoot, kicked the thing, and was forthwith dragged along through hedge and ditch to his home, and left under his own window.

A man in Horbury saw a white dog in the hedge. He struck at it, and the stick passed through it. He was so "flayed" that he ran home trembling, went to bed, fell ill and died

But is this just a tale from the past? In 1993, a driver saw a large shaggy beast roaming between Horsforth and Rodley, that left him in dread fear for days.

In 2001 in Leeming bar: A large blackdog with no face and floppy ears ran in front of a car with two women in it. The hound pass through the bonnet untouched. A man that the women spoke to once they reached their destination later killed himself.

In 2009, a large black beast was been spotted on the tracks near Burley Park station by railway workers. In 2011 in Carlton, organisers of a rave heard unearthly growls and snarls that appeared to follow them wherever they went but they couldn’t find the source of the noises.

Take care and don’t have nightmares.

A Fresh Look at Creativity

This story begins with a young man, quite an ordinary, unremarkable man. And it’s all true.

Brought up in a large family, the eldest of five.

The most interesting thing about him is that his father has an interest in local politics.

He grew up in the same town as me – a small market town and again quite unremarkable.

Here it is – this is where he spent all of his early years.

Not much else to do growing up here.

He even went to the same school as me …… although not in the same year.

Unlike me, he crawled into school like a snail, reluctantly carrying his satchel which weighed him down – And he left with no qualifications.

Whilst still a teenager, he pursued a woman almost ten years older than him until she caught him. Quite literally.

But there was good reason. His wife was carrying his first child and this was very much the shotgun wedding.

The marriage had been rushed forward and there were rumours he’d actually proposed to another woman around the same time.

So six months after he exchanged rings with his wife, along comes Susanna.

No qualifications, married reluctantly to a woman much older than him and now a father. Life wasn’t easy.

He scraped by as a farm hand, often surviving on the charity of his in-laws farm a few miles away. How embarrassing.

Stone broke, so what do you do. You have two more children over the next three years.
And it wasn’t just hard for him. His Father is declared bankrupt and narrowly avoids a prison term.

It’s around now that he fell in with the wrong crowd.

And when I mean the wrong crowd, we’re not just talking about shoplifting and petty thefts. A few years later this lot were caught attempting to bomb the capital.

Our man was eventually caught stealing from one of the big houses in the area,

It was around this time he went missing. Nobody had seen him for about a decade, enough time for the heat to have died down.

What happened during this time is still a mystery. Some say he hid out in Lancashire, others say he went abroad.

But, Just like Dick Whittington, he turns up in London as a bit part actor – as far away from the West End as you could imagine.

He banded together with some friends and they created their own theatre company.

Performing in a theatre which backed onto a street full of brothels.

A good start so far isn’t it – but this is where he started to invent.

Being a young man and jobbing actor near the pubs and bordellos of London, he can seriously lay claim to having invented addiction in his evenings, followed by arousal and, finally, puking by the end of the night.


But he did invent some real things – the Blanket - imagine bedtime without one.

Most people have eyes, and half the population have balls – but this man put them together and invented Eyeballs,

And he even invented the alligator – imagine how you’d say see you later without them?

These creations have led him to developing one of Britain’s biggest industries, worth a cool £1bn a year.

That’s the same amount as the snow damage caused to the UK in December

The equivilant to the “grey” economy in Wales, or over 400 Valley Parade Stadia.

His inventions have inspired thousands of others including writers, dramatists, composers and choreographers.


Here are just some of the people he inspired –some you might not want to have him inspired but inspire them he did.

Yet he’s commonly described as a crow, a fraud, a plagiarist, an upstart
Often seen as irrelevant, inaccessible boring and stayed. There was even a pamphlet questioning his sexuality.

Some people claim his work was never created by him.

The person is William Shakespeare, possibly the most influential person in the Western World.

The terrorists were part of the gunpowder plot and he didn’t abandon his family, making regular trips back from the capital.

But why this subject –I wanted you to take a fresh look at him and his achievement.

We often get lost in the language and forget he was a real man.

He brought common language to the arts – or as he called them, household words.

It is not the plays, but the words, the rhythm, the vocabulary and emotion. It’s not always easy but it is almost 500 years old.

Take Anthony and Cleopatra – two of the great leaders – yet Shakespeare makes them talk like an old married couple.

And look at his start in life – he wasn’t the high achiever and while he wasn’t the poorest in society, it was still a meteoric rise.

Take a fresh look at the young people in your life and see how you can inspire them to achieve greatness.

A recent survey in Wakefield found it wasn’t attitude and laziness of teenagers that created youth unemployment, but the stifling of creativity by parents, friends and relatives.

And for those who ask why it’s relevant today, in Bradford, I can only thank the RSC.

His Birthday is celebrated on the nearest Saturday to the 23rd of April – only this year, due to commercial reasons, they’ve shifted it to the 30th.

And the Rosemary? The herb of remembrance mentioned in Hamlet by Ophelia.

To finish, some other inventions of Shakespeare’s we couldn’t do without.

What would Science Fiction be like without Wormholes – time travel from the 15th century.


What would Britain’s Got Talent be like without Buzzers? Breakfast without Skimm’d Milk Or Mary Poppins without the Chimney Pot.

Even my own Blog, Set the World at Nought, is inspired by Shakespeare, although he stole the line from a prayer by St Thomas More.

So remember to wear your sprig of rosemary, like the townsfolk of Stratford will be, on Saturday.