It was not a good day for the parishioners from Bangui, Suffolk. First, on August 14, 1577, right during the divine service in the Church of St. Mary, a storm broke over the city and lightning hit the church. And then the real Cerberus burst into the building.
A huge black dog burst into the church through the door and ran straight past the benches with the parishioners. At the sight of him, two men in horror knelt down and began to pray, and when the monster rushed past them, then … somehow incredibly twisted both of their necks and the men fell dead.
As quickly as it appeared, the black dog disappeared into no one knows where, leaving behind only two still warm corpses. So this strange event was described by the Rev. Abraham Fleming (1552-1607) in the note "A Straunge and Terrible Wunder".
This story was just one of a series of stories about a sinister black dog nicknamed Black Shuck, whose image after that incident is still on the coat of arms of the city of Bangui.
Even weathercocks over houses remind of the black dog in Bangui.
There are many legends about mystical devilish black dogs in different countries around the world, but most of them are in England. Black Shak is just one of the nicknames for this creature. Elsewhere in the UK, they were nicknamed Vagabond, Shaggy Hound, Grim. On the Isle of Man, they are called Moddey Dhoo, and in Scotland, Cu Sith.
This black dog also inspired writer Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. Doyle, as you know, was fond of many paranormal activities and studied many stories about the black dog to write the story.
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The same black dog nicknamed Grim plays a prominent role in the book (and film) "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", so this phenomenon did not remain in past centuries, but is still relevant today, although it is now much less common. And its popularity is so high that dozens of hotels, pubs, bars, restaurants and other places with the name "Black Dog" are scattered throughout the UK.
Researcher Mark Norman grew up in Devon and has been interested in the black dog phenomenon for over 15 years. In the archives of the University of Exeter, he discovered the records of the famous English folklorist Theo Brown, including numerous stories about a black dog.
Moreover, not all black dogs in these stories were harbingers of misfortune and death. Some were tied to specific roads and behaved more like defenders, attacking and frightening bandits.
Throughout the stories, black dogs may have had different descriptions, but they almost always have their abnormally large size, shaggy hair, and large burning eyes. Sometimes dogs showed a chain around their necks, sometimes creepy creatures with the body of a black dog and the face of a man were described.
There were also dogs living in fog, dogs the size of a house, and dogs walking on their hind legs in these stories.
Stories about creepy black dogs are lost in the mists of time. The earliest of those that have come down to us is dated 1127. According to Norman, many of these stories were only invented to scare naughty children or scare off road robbers. However, even nowadays there are many stories from eyewitnesses themselves that they saw creepy black dogs with their own eyes.
“Since 2000, I've received several of these stories from different places from different people,” says Norman.
Some people argue that black dogs are actually the same mysterious large cats that have long roamed England and frightened the villagers. Others think that black dogs are a kind of hallucination caused by the desire for sleep.
Norman admits that there may be some grain of truth in these theories, but that he has heard stories that he simply could not explain.