Jan Tregeagle

Jan Tregeagle is the great damned soul of Cornish legend — a corrupt seventeenth-century magistrate and steward remembered for fraud, cruelty and worse, whose spirit was summoned back from the grave to give evidence in a Bodmin courtroom. Once raised, he could not be returned to rest, and to keep his howling ghost from the world he was set a series of impossible, eternal tasks meant to occupy him until Judgement Day.

He was condemned to empty bottomless Dozmary Pool on Bodmin Moor with a limpet shell pierced full of holes; fleeing the demons that guarded him, he was set instead to weave ropes of sand on the northern shore, and to sweep the sand from Porthcurno round to Nanjizal — labours forever undone by tide and wind. On wild nights his roaring is still said to be heard across the moors and cliffs as the Devil's hounds pursue him. Collected by Robert Hunt in his 'Popular Romances of the West of England' (1865), Tregeagle is Cornwall's definitive tale of damnation and of the torment of the eternally, futilely punished.