"My dad saw Shuck in the Seventies!"

This article first appeared in Fortean Times magazine, issue FT412;58-59, December 2021.

I investigate reports of big cats in Suffolk, I've received over a hundred of these over the past seven years. But while seeking testimony on Suffolk big cat sightings, a surprising number of unsolicited accounts of encounters with the phantom East Anglian hellhound Black Shuck seem to come my way. Shuck can't possibly exist, of course. Nonetheless, I still receive testimony of his antics in the country of Suffolk. An interesting and surprisingly consistent pattern in this handful of Shuck reports is that most of them describe encounters from 40 years ago, usually reported by sons keen to tell me how "my dad saw Shuck in the Seventies."

Detail of the coat of arms of Bungay on the "Welcome to Bungay, a fine old town" sign. Bungay is the epicentre of Black Dog culture in Suffolk.

During Shuck's long history, the two peaks in reported East Anglian Shuck activity occurred in the 1920s and in the groovy, cool, fab era that was the 1970s. The ancient horror that was East Anglia's Black Shuck was at large scaring the residents of Seventies Suffolk as never before.

Ivan A.W. Bunn's excellent contemporary analysis East of England Shuck traditions, "Shuckland: Analyzing the Hell out of the Beast" remains unequalled to this day.

Among the many 1970s Shuck experiences that came to Bunn's attention was one via a letter from 1973, in which Lincolnshire man with no previous knowledge of East Anglian black dog traditions told how he was laying drainage pipes across the marshes behind the massive Holy Trinity Church at Blythburgh (so huge it's known as "the Cathedral of the Marshes"). Suddenly, he heard a dog loudly panting behind him. He turned round and there was... nothing. It was only when he told some locals in the pub that they produced a book of local Shuck stories.

Although Bunn's researches were turning up "hitherto unrecorded characteristics" in Seventies Shuck sightings, he observed at the time that 1970s reports don't mention the more spectacular aspects that Shuck displayed in earlier times. Seventies Shuck tended not to be headless, not to have one eye in the centre of its head, not to have horns, not to wear chains, nor to resemble a calf or grow in size or shape-shift or foretell deaths or explode. He didn't even seem to walk in step with witnesses that much.

Even Shuck's red eyes were seldom mentioned anymore. He was increasingly just a strange, rather big dog that appeared out of nowhere. He still did his vanishing act, although witnesses just reported not being able to work out where he could have gone. Modern Shuck witnesses were left wondering whether they’d in fact seen a huge, black but otherwise ordinary dog.

They came thick and fast, the Seventies Shuck sightings, particularly around Lowestoft, Suffolk's next biggest town after Ipswich, where Shuck chronicler Ivan Bunn is still based. A woman spotted Black Shuck in the bushes at Lowestoft's Belle Vue Park in 1975, although her husband saw nothing. Folklorist Theodora Brown claims to have had an encounter of her own with the Black Dog in the churchyard of St Mary's Bungay in the 1970s. A Mrs Whitehead saw a death-portent Shuck in the streets of Bungay at the moment her mother died, while Police Constable Jenkins had several seventies Shuck experiences around the A12 road at Blythburgh. Peter Jennings's Haunted Suffolk records an early Seventies sighting of a large white dog seen by a woman walking in Beccles cemetery. The dog faded away as she approached. Keith Flory contacted Ivan Bunn's Hidden East Anglia team to tell them about the night in 1973 when, motorbiking home from Woodbridge, he was followed by a Great Dane-sized Black Shuck who bounded after his motorcycle all the way down the town's Old Barrack Road - effortlessly keeping up with him all the way until Flory finally lost his pursuer in Seckford Hall Road.

Old Barrack Rood, Woodbrige, scene of a Seventies motorcycle chase featuring Black Shuck

Some 40 years later, a few of my Suffolk Shuck informants said they'd never before communicated to anybody else what their fathers had related to them in the Shuck department, one informant felt they could only tell me because their father had since passed away. Some informants expressed regret at not having pressed their dear departed dads for more on their Shuck sightings. It's as if there's a complicated Shuck-experience dynamic in father-and-son relationships in the county of Suffolk.

The other pattern emerging in these testimonies of Seventies Suffolk Shuck sightings is more the absence of a pattern - they are all very, very different. While the magical powers of Shuck seem to have been gradually shaved away over time, the sheer variety of shuck encounters has if anything increased.

A man from Rattlesden told me his father, back in the 1970s, was driving on the A140 from Ipswich to Stowmarket one night when he collided with Black Shuck in the dark. He got out of the car to take a look and found... nothing. The next day there was a strange deposit on the bonnet of his car, "like eggshells." Another bizarre encounter narrative came from a man identifying himself as "Major Pickle" on Twit'er. He disclosed how his father (eventually) told him that on 5th August 1973, he (Major Pickle's father) and a friend were driving from the small, mostly agricultural village of Henstead, west of the A12 to the coast at Bawdsey to go canoeing.

Coming round a corner on the road near Henstead, the canoeists saw a huge black dog with something like a mane, standing in the road just looking at them. It "seemed to be there and was just gone" according to Pickle's account. When his dad got out of the car for a look, there was nothing to see except (then) open fields. It was what happened next that made those two 1970s canoe enthusiasts think they'd had a brush with a beast of ill omen. The friend with whom my informant's dad went canoeing always mapped and researched their canoeing routes. They'd regularly been canoeing off the coast at Bawdsey before, but "they never encountered anything like this". Their canoe went into a "freak tidal whirlpool", they capsized and were almost drowned. They were washed up on the Ministry of Defence's Bawdsey Island Radar Station, "an interesting experience during the Cold War". Their inadvertent trespassing in a then restricted Cold War-era defence installation meant they kept quiet about the events of that day.

Major Pickle said of his dad's encounter, "To the day he died he was convinced it was Shuck and the story never changed in any way." Could it have been a big cat? Dad insisted it was a really big dog.

Folklorist Theo Brown claims to have had an encounter with Black Shuck in the churchyard of St. Mary's, Bungay, in the 1970s.

Jim Bradley, a Norfolk birdwatcher, contacted me to tell me how "my friend's father who I would say is now in his 60s" encountered the Black Dog himself "in Orford in the late 70s... He and a friend were out walking and a black dog, calf-sized, wandered onto the track and stared at them. It eventually lumbered off into the scrub. They followed its path but the beast had seemingly disappeared, no trace whatsoever."

This wave of Seventies Suffolk Shuck sightings may have been Shuck's last hurrah, after that reports of Shuck encounters tailed off. The few Shucks that have manifested in Suffolk since then seem to have lost many of their supernatural powers. Christopher Reeve, co-author of Shock! The Black Dog of Bungay, told me that by 2014 he couldn't find any adults who would give him new accounts of Shuck experiences. Small children still seem to see Shuck locally, or at least have no inhibitions about relating other people's sightings.

Bungay's football team is the Bungay Town FC, known as the Black Dogs, although its training ground is just a couple of hundred metres over the Norfolk border in Ditchingham.

While "my dad (or my dad's best mate) saw Shuck in the seventies" accounts emerging over 40 years later are still surprisingly common, accounts of more recent Suffolk shuck experiences are rare. From Rendlesham Forest comes a 1980s story of an encounter by Paul and Jane Jennings “on a cold winter’s afternoon in 1983”, as related by ufologist Nick Redfern in his article "Weirdness in the woods". The Jenningses encountered a big black dog on the forest path. Jane said the beast's head "was clearly canine in appearance… much larger than that of any normal dog. Yet... its body seemed to exhibit characteristics that were distinctly feline". It had an "eerily mournful expression upon its face... Suddenly, the beast began to 'flicker on and off for four or five times', then finally vanished” leaving a strange metallic smell.

A post on the Centre for Fortean Zoology's blog from "Woody" related his how he and his dog Max had a 1994 Shuck encounter on one of their regular runs around "Martlesham Creek... by the river Deben, that runs to nearby Woodbridge." It was there that Woody became "aware of being watched, checking behind me about 50 yards back stood a huge black dog, my own wouldn’t take his eyes off it. It stood stock still, watching us ... (I) put my dog on a lead” and walked out of sight of it." Max turned again and growled. "There stood the big black dog again... I began to worry a bit." There followed three or four more sightings of the same black dog, always the same distance away, always with the same stance, and "with me very nervously looking over my shoulder until we got level with Martlesham Church, when Max turned, growled and practically broke the lead in his eagerness for a fight only... there was nothing there!" Woody and Max then "ran like hell the remaining mile... home and locked the doors." Woody admitted "the dog I saw may just have been someone's... be it a bloody big one."

This dog from the coat of arms of the Gooch family watches over the Benacre Estate on the North Suffolk coast.

One of my unsolicited Shuck informants told me a story of "a guy" out near Coddenham, north of Ipswich, who in the early 2010s took his dog for a walk on a windy, rainy day and they were apparently chased by a big dog, as soon as it got nearer to them it would vanish and the process started again."

Twenty-first century Shuck witnesses often concede it could have been an ordinary dog they saw. When a "shaken driver" reported his encounter with "a white wolf stalking the back roads of Suffolk" in 2009, he believed he’d seen an escaped exotic animal rather than a Suffolk Shuck phantom. Nigel Stebbing, who was able to photograph the "white wolf" from his van at Kersey, near Hadleigh. didn't think he'd seen a phantom hellhound. (There's a tradition of a White Shuck around Woodbridge and a ghostly "White Dawg" in Lowestoft, though.) By 1998, a couple from Bungay visiting Suffolk's Dunwich Forest who heard panting or growling no longer assumed - as did our pipe-laying Lincolnshire man back in the 1970s - that it was Black Shuck. They were instead convinced they'd heard an Alien Big Cat.

© Matt Salusbury 2021

A talbot, a white dog, on the coat of arms of the South Suffolk town of Sudbury. There are white Shucks as well as Black Shuck in Suffolk too. Woodbridge has a White Shuck and Lowestoft has a ghostly "White Dawg."

Phantom black dogs alive and well and providing long-term parking on Ipswich Waterfront

Suffolk's phantom black dogs are alive and well and providing long-term parking on Ipswich waterfront. (There's also an Ipswich-based Black Shuck MCC motorcycle club, and Shuck Creative packaging design, just north of Ipswich, and the Hellhound Brewery in Bramford does a Black Shuck Porter "breakfast stout".)Photo: Matt Salusbury


Bungay's Black Dog, which - according to Rev. Abraham Fleming's A Straunge and Terrible Wunder of 1577 - ran through St Mary's Church, Bungay, one Sunday in August of that year, can be found on the "Welcome to Bungay" sign (below) right on the Suffolk-Norfolk border. The current coat of arms (much more recent, from the 1950s) shows the terrifying Black Dog and lightning bolt. The motto translates into English as "Hold to the ancient traditions."

The Black Dog on the Bungay coat of arms, on the "Welcome to Bungay" sign

In A Straunge and Terrible Wunder included the black dog is the Devil in the form of a dog, during a terrible thunderstorm that featured thunder, lightning, hail and "darkness". It killed two men - "wrung the necks of them bothe" - as it ran through the church at Bungay, inflicting strange and terrible burns on other worshippers who survived. The church clock exploded. The same black dog then appeared in Blythburgh, also in Suffolk but to the South, on the same day, jumping onto beams inside the church, before slew "two men and a lad" and others in the congregation were "blasted", before it flew out.

The Bungay black dog seems to be a very different animal to the Black Shuck of East Anglian tradition. Black Shuck, terrifying though it could be, rarely if ever attacked people, and it could sometimes (as in the case of the one around Dunwich) be a protective spirit. The Dunwich variant would fall into step with walkers at night, and as long as they avoided direct eye contact with it, it would see them home safely. Others talked, like the one seen on the road into Woolpit (near Needham Market), which accurately foretold the imminent death of one person it encountered.

In the depression of the 1930s, the black dog from the Straunge and Terrible Wunder was deliberately revived in the hope that tourism would revive the town of Bungay's fortunes, with the black dog and lightning bolt emblem being placed on the town weathervane over the Market Place. It can also be seen on this sign on the door of the town's Waveney District Council offices and on the sign at the Bungay Town FC ("The Bungay Black Dogs") training ground (below), actually just over the Norfolk border in Ditchingham.

Bungay Town FC ("The Bungay Black Dogs") football team's training ground just over the county line in Ditchingham. The town's cricket club and its running club are also The Black Dogs.

There ara also scorch marks on the inside of the door to Blythburgh Church, said to be made by the claws of the Black Dog. A more likely explanation is that these have something to do with Cromwell's New Model Army, who requisitioned the church as a stable for their horses, and probably had some kind of farrier's shop in operation for shoeing horses, in which red hot pokers would have been standard equipment.

Scorch marks on the door of Blythburgh church, attributed to the Black Dog

The only fatalities recorded in any of the parish records that come close to the Straunge and Terrible Wunder story are two burials of men killed by a falling section of the belfry at St Mary's Church, Bungay in 1577, during a thunderstorm. It seems there may well have been a storm in which a lightning strike caused damage that killed people. Some have speculated that the terrible burns inflicted on other worshippers who were "blasted" could have been some kind of exotic ball lighting phenomena that careered through the church.

A similar phenomenon could have been at work in "The Great Thunderstorm" at Widecombe, Devon in 1638, in which a ball of lighting burst through the church window, tore of part of the roof, killed four and injured 60, leaving the vicar's wife in particular "pitifully burnt". (Sound familiar?) A contemporary woodcut shows a dark sky, thunder, hail, bits of the tower falling off and a ball of flame escaping from a cloud and careering towards Widecombe's church, but no Black Dogs in evidence.




The Black Dog Deli in Walberswick. While its sign makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to local Black Shuck traditions, there is a local story about Shuck terrifying a US airman and his wife immediately postwar by repeatedly ramming the wall of the hut where they lived one night.



This animal being slain by St George on a 14th century walnut wood chest in St Andrew's Church, Southwold, is clearly meant to be a dragon. But he does look awfully like a really massive dog!

It's more than possible that the Rev. Fleming made the whole thing up, or considerably embellished a garbled account of the 1577 storm that had reached London, where it was published. Fleming may have chosen Bungay as a place so out of the way (at the time) that he was confident nobody could go and check out the details. (The full title of the pamphlet is A Straunge and Terrible Wunder wrought very late in the parish Church of Bungay, a town of no great distance from the citie of Norwich, so the Rev. Fleming felt he had to explain where Bungay was to a London audience, so obscure was it.) Fleming - or his sources, if he had any - may have been influenced by local Black Shuck legends. It's noticeable that in the Suffolk witch trails of the seventeenth century, inquisitors took care to insert references to encounters with Black Dogs among all the clearly made up nonsense about imps in the form of headless, bloodsucking babies, exploding mice and ducks, oversized flies and legless horned greyhounds. Slipping in a bit of Black Shuck, an actual local tradition, gave their fantastic testimony extracted under torture a bit of authenticity.



Products by the Black Dog Chilli Company of Martlesham, near Woodbridge. Shown here on the shelves of the Black Dog Deli, Walberswick.

The Rev. Fleming in his introduction rails against "sin", sodomy in particular, and comments that the events in Bungay were "A spectacle no doubt of Gods judgement, which as the fire of our iniquities hath kindled". It has also been suggested that the Rev. Fleming was actually making an allegorical point about God's wrath at a particular juncture of the then unfolding Reformation. But Fleming would have been so terrified of the Queen's commissioners that he hinted at God's wrath at religious reform in such veiled terms that whatever his point was, it's been lost to us.



Blythburgh's scorch marks in close up

All this - and more - in the forthcoming Mystery Animals of Suffolk