Moddey Dhoo

The Moddey Dhoo (black dog, in Manx) is the spectral hound of Peel Castle on the Isle of Man, and it has something almost no British black dog has: a definite setting, a routine and witnesses with a job title. The account was published by George Waldron in «A Description of the Isle of Man» in 1731, shortly after his death.

Waldron does not describe it as a mastiff, which is the image that has since taken hold. He says it had the shape of a large black spaniel with curled shaggy hair. It appeared in the guard room as soon as the candles were lit, lay down before the fire in full view of the soldiers and stayed there; it came out of the passage at the close of day and returned to it at dawn. The garrison grew used to it and lost its fear.

What is interesting is what that lost fear did not change. The castle had a passage running through the church grounds to the quarters of the Captain of the Guard, and the custom was for the watchmen to lock the gate in pairs and carry him the keys along that same passage. Nobody did it alone. They could sleep beside the dog, but they would not walk unaccompanied through the place where the dog came and went.

One night a drunken soldier seized the keys out of his turn and announced that he would go alone, and that he would speak to the beast besides. The others stayed in the guard room and heard noises down the passage they could not account for. When the man came back he was ghastly with fright and could not get out what he had seen: he died three days later without telling anything. Waldron closes the episode with the detail that finishes it off: that was the last time the dog was ever seen.

What the garrison did next is what turns the anecdote into a legend. They did not pray or exorcise: they walled up the passage and opened another route to the captain's quarters. It is a bricklaying solution to a supernatural problem, and it is exactly the kind of detail that betrays a story circulating among people who knew the building.

The black dog of Peel does not exhaust the island's tradition. Sightings are still told at other points on Man (Ballamodda, the Milntown corner near Ramsey, Hadon Hill), where the animal is described as black, long and shaggy of coat, with eyes like burning coals. They are different dogs with the same shape, and none of them is the castle's any more.

The Moddey Dhoo owes its fame beyond the island to Walter Scott, who worked it into «Peveril of the Peak» in 1823 and acknowledged in his notes that he had taken it from Waldron. But Scott did not copy it: he enlarged it. Where Waldron had a curly-haired spaniel, Scott put a fiend in the shape of a large, shaggy, black mastiff, and that is the image that has come down to us. Comparing the two versions is watching a monster being manufactured, live, out of an unsettling domestic animal.

The rest of its elements work by opposition, which is why the story holds without needing to explain anything. The guard-room fire is where the dog is tolerable, because there is light and there are witnesses; the passage is where it stops being so, because there is neither. The routine of paired sentries marks the border between the two, and the drunkard crosses it out of vanity, not curiosity.

That leaves the silence, which is what stops the story from closing. The witness comes back speechless and dies without telling anything, so there exists no account from the man who saw it: only his corpse and the walled-up passage. A tale that explained itself would have worn out in the eighteenth century; this one cannot, and that is why it is still told.