The Black Dog of Newgate

The Black Dog of Newgate is the spectral hound said to haunt London's notorious Newgate Prison — a black shape that appeared before executions, gliding along the prison walls as an omen of death. Its legend was popularised in a lurid pamphlet first printed around 1596 and reprinted for generations, which traced the apparition to a grisly origin: in the reign of Henry III, during a famine, a scholar imprisoned for supposed sorcery was killed and eaten by his starving fellow inmates — and returned as a fearsome black dog to take his revenge, so terrifying the murderers that they broke out and fled.

Thereafter, the tradition held, the Black Dog walked the night before each hanging, and condemned prisoners dreaded the sight of it. As one of the few black-dog legends rooted in a city and a prison rather than a lonely country lane, it is a distinctly urban member of Britain's great spectral-hound family — the doom of Newgate given shape in the dark.