The black dog on the lane

[Cherhill_Bill]

not a believer in ghosts as you all know, but ill put this one down because my father swore by it and his father before him. theres a stretch of lane up our way where you did not want to meet the black dog. big as a calf, eyes wrong, walks beside you a while and then is just gone. seen as a warning, a death in the family coming, that sort of thing. my grandfather saw it the week before his brother drowned and never spoke of it but the once. ive never seen it and i hope not to. plenty of these black dog lanes about, shuck they call it over in the east. ours never had a name, just the black dog, and you walked in the road and not the verge after dark and you didnt ask why.

[Marlborough_Nan]

We had one too, the other side of the county, and just the same, a warning and not a haunting. My mother would not send us that way after dark, and when I asked her why she only said the dog, as if that explained everything, and somehow it did. You did not need it explained. You just did not go. Funny how much got passed on that way, not as a story but as a rule with the story worn off it.

[Cherhill_Bill]

thats it exactly Nan, a rule with the story worn off, like the sayings thread. the dog might be nothing, but the not-going was real, and it kept children off a dark lane that ran right past a quarry and a deep pond. so maybe the dog did its job whether it was ever there or not.