The Wild Hunt

The Wild Hunt is among the most dreaded apparitions of British and European folklore — a spectral cavalcade of huntsmen, horses and baying hounds that storms across the night sky or over the wild moors, often heralded by a rising wind and the cry of the pack. To see it was perilous, and to be swept up in it could mean being carried off; its passing was widely held to foretell war, plague or death.

Across Britain the Hunt rides under many names and many leaders — the Devil, Herne the Hunter in Windsor Forest, Sir Francis Drake, and in older strata Woden or Odin himself. In the north its hounds are the Gabriel Ratchets, whose cries pass unseen overhead; on Dartmoor they are the Wisht Hounds; in Wales they are the Cŵn Annwn, the white red-eared hounds of the Otherworld. Whatever its guise, the Wild Hunt embodies the terror of the wild night and the thin border between the living and the dead.