Black Dog of Bouley Bay

The Black Dog of Bouley Bay is the spectral hound of Jersey — a huge black dog with eyes like saucers and a dragging chain, said to haunt the steep lanes and the wild north-coast bay of Bouley on dark and stormy nights. To meet it was an omen of misfortune or of coming storm, and islanders dreaded the rattle of its chain on the wind. It belongs to the same broad family as the black dogs of mainland Britain — Black Shuck, the Barghest — but is wholly Jersey's own.

There is a sly local tradition, too, that the legend was deliberately encouraged — if not invented — by the island's smugglers, who found a man-eating phantom hound an excellent way to keep the curious and the law-abiding shut indoors and off the coastal paths while contraband moved by night. Whether genuine apparition or smugglers' ruse grown real in the telling, the Black Dog of Bouley Bay is the best-known ghost-beast of the Channel Islands.