Unearthly howling in a house beside the Norfolk marshes may have warned of a man’s death. Was it a Banshee? Or was it Black Shuck?
By Richard Holland
The weird world of death omens has been discussed in previous articles on Uncanny UK. I have just heard a fascinating and eerie first-hand account of such a phenomenon from Mr Gordon Stevenson, who lives in Denbighshire, North Wales. His experience occurred more than 40 years ago, near King’s Lynn, in Norfolk.
The incident took place on a Sunday night in 1963. Gordon and his first wife lived at the village of Clenchwarton, just outside West Lynn, and had been there for three years. Gordon described Clenchwarton as consisting of no more than a couple of dozen houses; his home was beside a narrow road which led down to marshes around that vast inlet of the English Channel, the Wash.
Gordon told me: ‘We’d gone to bed and I was just dropping off when this deathly howling started. It was so loud and sudden, it was as if someone had turned on one of these ghetto blasters at full volume in the room. I leapt out of bed and raced across the room to turn on the light. As soon as the light went on, the sound seemed to go out of the window and then move round the side of the house, to the front gate and then down the road, diminishing as it went. I could hear it fade away out on the marshes. It had been a horrible howling, continuous, with no up and down to it. It was unearthly.
‘Well, I went back to bed, not knowing what to make of it, and I was just falling asleep again when it started up again in a crescendo. Again, I put on the light and again the howling faded away out onto the marshes. The same thing happened a third time that night. My wife and I were frightened to death by it.
‘The next morning our neighbours Don and Eileen, who lived across the way, said they’d thought they’d heard a dog howling during the night and our next-door-neighbour said the dame thing. I can assure you it was no dog, although it may have sounded like that to them, since they weren’t so close to it. The chap next door had a boxer dog which hadn’t responded to the noise at all. Most dogs will join in if they hear another dog howling. As far as I know, our little boy, who slept in a downstairs room, wasn’t disturbed either.’
This is not the end of Gordon’s rather grim adventure. When he arrived at work, he learnt his in-laws had just phoned to tell him his father, previously of apparent good health and only 51 years of age, had suddenly collapsed. Gordon and his wife drove up to the Wirral that day to see his father, who by that time had been taken to Clatterbridge hospital. Sadly, he died three days after his collapse.
‘Three days and three bursts of howling,’ said Gordon. ‘I could only think that that unearthly noise had been a warning of my father’s death.’
Back in Norfolk, Gordon was told about Black Shuck, one of the many breed of spectral Black Dogs previously discussed on Uncanny UK*. Most of these apparitions are silent but Black Shuck is unusual in that it is known to howl mournfully over the Fens. A neighbour told Gordon to hear Black Shuck’s howling was a warning of an imminent death in the family.
‘I also wonder whether it may have been a Banshee,’ said Gordon, ‘because my wife had been of Irish extraction. Was it Black Shuck or had a Banshee come to warn my wife of her father-in-law’s death? Whatever it was, it’s been over 40 years, but I still go cold when I think of it.’
* (See also the articles on ‘Omens of Death’ and ‘Black Dogs’ in the Ghosts section.)
[SOURCE: Personal communication with the author. See also ‘A Ghost Hunter's Game Book' by J Wentworth Day, pp. 202-3]
© Richard Holland 2008 /The illustration of Black Shuck forms the frontispiece of ‘Here Are Ghosts and Witches’ by J Wentworth Day, published in1954. The copyright does not belong to Richard Holland. Should the copyright holder wish it to be removed, they should please contact the editor via the ‘Contact us’ page.
