Fantastically Wrong: Why So Many People Think They’ve Seen Ghost Dogs With Glowing Eyes

This one’s eyes are closed so you can’t tell that they’re glowing. Promise.

At the height of World War II, a four-year-old British girl was sent to bed but could not sleep. Sitting on edge of her bed, fiddling with its ornamental knobs and staring out the window, the girl heard a scratching noise. Then, out of the corner of her eye, a massive black dog appeared and trotted in front of her, turning its head to stare at her as it passed between the bed and the window.

“It had very large, very red eyes, which glowed from inside as if lit up,” she later recounted, “and as it looked at me I was quite terrified, and very much aware of the creature’s breath, which was warm and strong as a gust of wind.” But before it had reached the door, it vanished.

It was a hound that goes by many names: black shuck, the hellhound, black jack, gallytrot. Depending on the observer, it can also be white or yellow; it rarely speaks but sometimes laughs; every once in a while it’s missing its head completely; and a few have been known to shapeshift. And it’s not just England that the hellhound stalks—similar tales can be found all over the world. (I’ll be referring to it as the hellhound from here on out, because that best encompasses all of the versions out there.) But why is this myth so widespread? And how can we explain why so many people have claimed to have seen the hound?

This tale necessarily begins with the wolf. Humankind has had a long, complicated relationship with the beast, largely because before we’d fully ascended to the top of the food chain, wolves were a serious threat. But with time they warmed up to us. They’d hang around our fires, waiting for our scraps, while the bolder ones slowly edged closer. In time, we domesticated the wolf into the dog. Their wild brethren, though, remained hostile, and to this day have been known to attack humans (our attacks on them, it should be noted, have been far more frequent and devastating).

Don’t get much more majestic than the wolf. Except maybe a wolf with like, a top hat or something.

Fast-forward several thousand years to ancient Greece and the dog is firmly planted in mythology with Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guards the underworld. But this is far from the only association of dogs with the underworld, according to Bibek Debroy in his book Sarama and Her Children: The Dog in Indian Myth. “For instance,” he writes, “in ancient Persia, dogs were the preferred means of disposing dead bodies.” Elsewhere around the world, stray dogs resorted to scavenging—at times on humans—earning them an association with death.

However, Debroy notes, “this association with the afterworld or dead souls did not prevent dogs from being elevated to divinity.” There’s the ancient Egyptian Wepwawet, a dog-like god that opened roads to the underworld. The Aztecs also deified the dog as Xolotl, who carried the sun through the underworld. So just as our relationship with wolves was complicated, so too is our relationship with dogs the world over. We’ve feared them as creatures of the underworld, yet rely on them for companionship.

Alcohol and Other Factors That Just Might Have Led to the Hellhound

So that’s the cultural background, but what about the cause of the hellhound phenomenon? It’s worth relating another experience, this time from Simon Sherwood of England’s University of Northampton. When he was around three to five years old, he awoke to the patter of feet. “I looked up thinking it was my dog, but to my terror I saw a massive black animal probably with horns, but perhaps ears, galloping along the landing towards my bedroom. I tried to scream but I found it impossible. The creature’s eyes were bright yellow and as big as saucers. The animal got to my bedroom door and then vanished as quick as it has appeared. I then managed to scream and my mum came in to calm me down.”

There’s a very important clue here, which Sherwood himself quite rightly recognizes (he goes on to uncritically report other more paranormal and impossible potential causes of the phenomenon, but whatever). Not being able to speak or move while still seemingly conscious is a classic symptom of sleep paralysis, which happens when the brain and the body are out of sync during sleep.

Tales of ghost dogs have been floating around England for hundreds of years, and I’m willing to bet they’ll be around for hundreds more.
During REM sleep, your muscles are so relaxed that they’re essentially worthless (which, by the way, may be an evolutionary trick to keep you from acting out your dreams and injuring yourself). Should you wake up, though, and your muscles don’t immediately kick back into gear, you can feel paralyzed and probably quite a bit panicked. But soon enough it’s all over. This would explain why Sherwood was unable to scream at first, then eventually recovered his voice.

Some people like Sherwood even hallucinate and see a giant black dog, for example. But why would reports of the hellhound be largely consistent? Well, folklore is a powerful thing, even for a child, especially when it’s terrifying. Tales of ghost dogs have been floating around England for hundreds of years, and I’m willing to bet they’ll be around for hundreds more. Well, at least until we come up with a good treatment for sleep paralysis.

There are other stories, though, of wide-awake folks seeing evil dogs out in the open. An account from 1908 of an Englishman walking home from an inn: “I suddenly saw an animal that seemed to be like a large, black dog appear quite suddenly out of the hedge and run across the road quite close in front of me; I thought it was the dog belonging to the curate. I was just going to call it to send it home, when it suddenly changed its shape, and turned into a black donkey standing on its hind legs. This creature had two glowing eyes, which appeared to me to be almost as big as saucers. I looked at it in astonishment for a minute or so, when it suddenly vanished.”

Fun fact: Hellhounds love car rides, just like regular dogs. Except they fall out easy, because they’re ghosts and just kinda float through things.

Whether or not the man had tied on a few at the inn is lost to history, but I suspect as much. Experiences like this can be explained by … the existence of big dogs and the existence of alcohol and drugs. And those glowing eyes? They have a perfectly rational explanation as well.

Some creatures, including cats, raccoons, and dogs, have a layer of reflective tissue in their eyes known as the tapetum lucidum. This acts like a mirror to bounce light at the retinal cells for a second pass, greatly enhancing night vision. It’s responsible for eye-shine, that glow you get if you snap a flash at your dog or cat. And it’s not hard to imagine that it’s this eye-shine that gave rise to the myth of a hound with burning eyes.

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