“They du speak of a dog that walks regular. They call him Skeff and his eyes are as big as saucers and blaze wi’ fire. He is fair as big as a small wee pony, and his coat is all skeffy-like, a shaggy coat across, like an old sheep. He has a line, and a place out of which he came, and he vanish when he hev gone far enough.”

- Description of Shuck in Garveston, Norfolk .

Black Shuck is a mysterious creature which has terrorised people in East Anglia for over a thousand years, up to present day.

A legend as old as the Scottish Kelpie or Irish Banshee, the Shuck is derived from the Anglo-Saxon name for demon (scucca).

Uncanny black dogs are no strangers to East Anglia, for in a great storm in 1577 (the same one in which the Devil is thought to have left his mark in Blythburgh church) a black demon dog, ‘or the devil in such a likeness’, appeared in Bungay church and brought havoc with him. According to an old pamphlet, he departed leaving two dead worshippers strangled at their prayers and another ‘as shrunken as a piece of leather scorched in a hot fire’.

Unlike dogs of this world, Black Shuck seems more attached to places than to people. He has always walked alone, loping along riverbanks and lonely roads, or leaping over churchyard walls and vanishing among the tombstones.

The appearance and characteristics of Black Shuck vary from place to place. He seems to emerge from his secret lair only at dusk, and is usually described as a shaggy creature the size of a calf, easily recognisable by his saucer-sized eyes weeping green or red fire.

There is a popular belief in Norfolk that no one can set eyes on Black Shuck and live. In East Anglia generally, when anyone was dying, people used to say “the Black Dogs is at his heels”.

Bungay – 1577

Sunday morning, 4 August, at St. Mary’s Church. The service started as usual, but sometime into the service the congregation noticed the sunlight fading. A few drops of rain turned into a violent lashing of water on the roof of the church. Without warning there was a loud clap of thunder followed a bolt of lightning outside the church, which briefly illuminated the interior before it, plunged into darkness. There was another flash and another.

At the height of the storm the great outer doors crashed open, and there stood a large black beast on all fours. With a great bound it leapt into the central aisle and up to the alter and then moved into the shadows. It came across some people kneeling down, praying, and with a ferocious snarl it “wrung the necks of then bothe at one instant clene backward.”

Those that the beast brushed past fell to the floor as if burnt and would be scarred for life. One parishioner, Jon Prowling, blocked the beast approaching some children. The beast knocked him to the ground and sank its jaws into his neck. He survived, but was a changed man, occasionally barking like a dog.

The door at Bungay church is still scarred with some claw marks that have been burnt into the wood.

Black Shuck is still being sighted today, in April 1996 there were reports of a large beast seen leaving the church at Horsham St Faith.

A villager in Clopton saw “a thing with two saucer eyes”, which blocked his way. The creature snarled “I shall want you within a week” and then bound away. The man died the following day!