The Gabriel Hounds
On dark nights in northern England, people heard a pack of hounds yelping high overhead, and shut their doors, because it meant a death.
What was reported
In the folklore of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire, the Gabriel hounds, or Gabriel ratchets, were a pack of spectral dogs that hunted through the night sky. You never saw them; you heard them, yelping and baying high above, passing over the house in the dark.
Hearing them was a bad omen. They were said to hang over a house where someone would soon die. Some said they were the souls of children who had died unbaptised, others that they were hunting the souls of the wicked.
Explanations offered
Naturalists in the 1800s pointed out that the sound matches flocks of wild geese flying over at night during migration, whose high, yapping calls sound very much like a pack of hounds. The hounds are a northern English form of the Wild Hunt told across Europe.
- When
- Told for centuries
- Where
- The Pennine moors, Yorkshire and Lancashire, England, UK
- Witnesses
- Northern English folklore
- Status
- Probably geese
Famous cases are real, widely reported events. Each file sets out what witnesses said and the explanations that have been offered, without taking a side.
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