| SHUCKLAND Introduction Alphabetical List of Locations | |
| Location: | Salcott, ESSEX |
| Encounter: | "...I had come across no record of this horrifying ghost-hound in Essex until, in the late 1930s, I rented the shooting of the Guisnes Court Estate...The gamekeeper and marshman was William Fell, who looked like a Viking...Yet he admitted that he had been frightened out of his life when one night he and another man were driving in a horse and trap from Peldon along the Wigborough Road [B1026] to Guisnes Court. Suddenly, somewhere near the Salcott crossroads [TL943138] an enormous black dog with drooping ears and a crimson, slavering tongue appeared. It was, said Fell: 'As big as a calf, with eyes like bike lamps, and so tall that its head was level with the floor-boards of the cart.' It followed them for half a mile or so and then suddenly disappeared." (1) "William Fell...swears to me that he has seen it twice on Wigborough Hill...'The Black Dog suddenly appeared on the road behind us and followed us for half a mile. He was pitch-black and his eyes were glaring. When we got to Guisnes Court, the horse was sweating and we were all of a shake'." (2) |
| Sources: | (1) James Wentworth Day: 'Essex Ghosts' (Spurbooks, 1973), p. 11-12. (2) James Wentworth Day: 'Black Shuck', in the 'East Anglian Magazine', Vol. 21, No. 11 (Sept. 1962), p. 642. |
| Comments: | By the geography, this probably actually took place on Whitehouse Hill. |
| Place Name: | Salcott - OE 'cottage where salt was made or stored' |
| Other: | The Salcott/Tolleshunt Knights parish boundary runs through the crossroads, then crosses the B1026 about 220 yards south. |