Victorian Shapeshifters: Furries, Shaggies or Folk Angels?

Is it a dog!? Is it a calf?! No, it’s something in between or just possibly a headless bear or a giant lolloping rabbit, instead. Simon and Chris debate the appearance and habits of a class of supernatural creatures Simon insists on calling, to Chris's irritation, 'furries': solitary, shaggy shapeshifters that haunted the roads and wilds of nineteenth century Britain. These ambiguous animals, with their trademark fiery, saucer-like eyes, might predict death, assault those who confront them, or protect vulnerable travelers from attack. Then there are the big questions. Did these shapeshifters make their way to the United States as Chris claims? Did they become the Alien Big Cats and Black Dogs of modern folklore, as Simon insists? Are they ghosts, cryptids, fairy-animals, or just a mangy tabby glimpsed in the moonlight? And watch out for swelling sheep on those late-night rambles.

Further Reading

Wilder Mann, Charles Freger https://www.charlesfreger.com/portfolio/wilder-mann-fr/

Explore phantom black dogs, Bob Trubshaw

Black Dog Folklore, Mark Norman

Mystery Big Cats, Merrily Harpur

American Monsters, Linda S. Godfrey

Monsters Among Us, Linda S. Godfrey

http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/creature-feature-something-between-a-dog-and-a-calf/

Past Praying For: Something Sinister in a Field http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/12988/

http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/a-ghost-of-evil-odour/

http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/black-dogs-and-dynamite-south-mountains-washington-monument/

https://esoterx.com/2018/11/06/exit-stage-left-pursued-by-a-ghost-bear/

Transcript

Chris: Yeah, I heard you had a big August planned, some kind of a organisational project.

Simon: I decided this summer to try and overhaul my study. I have this lovely big room with several thousand books, and I decided to go right through the lot. And then I got scared, and then my good friend, the Ohian, Chris Woodyard said, no, do it. And so I spent tens of hours this August going through the room. And I guess that earlier in my life, when I used to buy a book or when I was given a book, I had this sense they were entering the family and they would stay with me until I died, when one of my fairy studying sons would then inherit all of the library. And it's just not the way things have worked out. So I've actually had to discard a lot of books and six boxes went off today. Very painful.

Chris: Where did they go though? Where do you put them?

Simon: Well, I put an advert on Facebook and I said, look, got 10 boxes full of books. And one young woman turned up and her car could only fit six in. So we'll have to see if tomorrow she comes back for the other four or not. What about you, Chris? I'm very curious now about other people throwing books away. Is this something that you do easily?

Chris: Oh, no. Oh, no. It's so painful. I mean, if I've got something that somebody gave me that has, you know, a cookbook or something that it has no relevance to working, I don't worry about it. And frankly, I'm very disappointed in a lot of modern books. So I can let them go a little easier. I also have thousands of books and I'm thinking, okay, what happens when we do our Swedish death cleaning? Some of them have to go to my old university where they have a good giveaway to grad students or students. It's wonderful. They've got this huge table and you can just help yourself. So that makes me feel better. I just, I can't, it just upsets me to think of them just going to Goodwill or some thrift store where nobody will care about the content or their value. To be fair, the used book market is kind of saturated in spots and it's hard to sell. But I also have a thought that maybe I'll send all the paranormal, all the supernatural books to the repository in Sweden that has, they started out as like a UFO library, but they've branched out. And if I can get them to pay for shipping, it's, they can have the lot.

Simon: One problem I've had is that often I come across books that do not interest me in the slightest, but they have dedications in the front from people I love. What do you do in that situation?

Chris: Well, I don't get books from people I love, who love me. So, you know, I'm deprived. That's not true. No, I really, I don't have very many signed copies of anything.

Simon: So, you know, maybe my dad gives me something or one of my daughters and the book's pretty dreadful, but it's got their writing in it's to me.

Chris: Yeah. That's a tough one. And I don't know what you do with that. I have real trouble getting rid of books.

Simon: Well, I want to segue into today's podcast and I'm struggling to think how I can do this. I can tell you that when I was cleaning my bookshelves on some of them, there was lots and lots of dust and it was almost like a layer of fur. So there you go.

Chris: So that's, that's tantalising. What are we, what are we talking about? Are we talking about Jeff, the mongoose with the picture of him on the, on the fence post looking like a fur wrap?

Simon: God forbid. No, no, no. Jeff is not welcome in today's podcast. I'm sure that you'll be bringing him in sooner or later. I want to talk today about furries. Phantom plushies. When I am talking about furries, I am talking about a particular kind of 19th century British supernatural being. And the furries are, for me, there are three points. First of all, of course, they are furry. Second, they are mammalian. So they could be anything from mouse all the way through to a huge bear or a horse. And third, they shape change, or at least they are indeterminate. They're shapeshifting in one way or the other. And these beings are found right through England, Wales, and much of Scotland in the 19th century. And over the years, I've just become more and more fascinated by these beings. And I suppose that the reason I'm bringing it up today is furry is very much my term. And this is very much my way of looking at this type of supernatural being. And I guess bringing it to you, Chris, is the equivalent of stress testing.  And it's like those poor crash test dummies that are strapped into cars, and the car then hits an obstacle at 100 miles an hour. So I want to see what you make of the furry as a concept, or whether it's a thumbs up or thumbs down from you.

Chris: First off, the term furry, but I find it kind of a precious term to use for a supernatural creature. And given how often these creatures are described as being very shaggy, and the preface shag occurs in a lot of supernatural mammals, why not shaggies? I really have to object to you appropriating the name of this subculture. These are people interested in anthropomorphic animal characters. And there's actually two sort of branches of this. We have to distinguish between the furry lifestyle and furry fandom. Now furry fandom enthusiasts like human-like animals. The most popular species are foxes and wolves, large cats, dragons. They go to conventions, they play online games, they sometimes wear costumes, either elaborate fur suits like sports mascots wear, maybe sometimes just ears and a tail. Some write fan fiction around their favourite characters. But for some, it's more than that. It's more than a hobby or a literary or art genre. It's a lifestyle. So these folks create what are called fursonas, which are animal alter egos or avatars. And some furries consider these fursonas to be their true personality. They see themselves as not entirely human. They would like to be the actual animal. And some of them say that they have this emotional or spiritual connection with an animal. And that's not terribly different than indigenous peoples having a totemic connection with an animal or a spirit animal. So it's definitely a group of enthusiasts. And I'm not sure that you want to use their name for your supernatural creatures. 

Simon: Paul Listen, I have my lawyers on speed dial, Chris. I'm ready. I'm ready for what comes next. And as to appropriation, the word that you used, what about these folks appropriating 19th century supernatural traditions there? What about that? Down in Arizona and New Mexico up to their shenanigans. My goodness. Well, let's set off before we start arguing about the details. We've already had our first argument, but before we get to number two, why don't you give us a reading just to blast us out into orbit? And I happen to know today that you were going to give an account of a 19th century Cornish Methodist preacher relating to his hoodlum days in his mid late teens when he got involved in poaching gangs. And remember back then that could be the death penalty or transportation. It's a serious crime. And the account that you're going to read, Chris, I don't know what you make of it, but it's one of my very favourite furry encounters.

Chris: Yeah, it comes from a biography of Samuel Drew, as you said, a British Methodist preacher and theologian from Cornwall. It happened around 1834 when he was out with some of his pals. There were several of us, boys and men out about 12 o'clock on a bright moonlit night.  I think we were poaching, but it was something that would not bear investigation. The party were in a field adjoining the road, leaving from my master's to St Austell, and I was stationed outside the hedge to watch and give the alarm if any intruder should appear. While thus occupied, I heard what appeared to be the sound of a horse approaching from the town, and I gave a signal. My companions paused and came to the hedge where I was to see the passenger. The sound increased, and the supposed horseman seemed drawing near. The clatter of the hooves came more and more distinct. I was seized with a strange, indefinable feeling of dread when, instead of a horse, there appeared coming towards us at an easy pace, with the same sound, a creature about the height of a large dog. As it passed, it turned upon me and my companions huge fiery eyes that struck terror to all our hearts. The road where I stood branched off in two directions, in one of which there was a gate. Towards this gate it moved, and without any obstruction went on at its regular trot. The creature was unlike any animal I had then seen, but for my present recollections it had much the appearance of a bear with a dark, shaggy coat. Had it not been for the unearthly lustre of its eyes and its passing through the gate as it did, there would be no reason to suppose it anything more than an animal perhaps escaped from some menagerie. That it did pass through the gate without pause or hesitation, I am perfectly clear. Indeed, we all saw it, and saw that the gate was shut. The bars were too close to admit the passage of an animal of half its apparent bulk, yet this creature went through without effort or variation of its pace.

Simon: It's a great piece, don't you think? 

Chris: It is, it is. It's got all the characteristics of your furries, as you're calling them, and the unearthly lustre of its eyes, and just walking through a gate with a shut gate. That's wonderful.

Simon: It's a little bit like in our last episode with road spirits, the way that something vanishing is often the sign that a thing that seemed normal and everyday actually isn't. And here we have this ability to actually penetrate matter, to pass through a gate without being noticed. And this experience haunted Samuel Drew throughout all his life. He went on to become really a theologian, the Cornish metaphysician they called him. And yet right through his life, he would tell everyone about this. And he actually took his son, his eldest son, Jacob, to the exact point on the road to say, Jacob, it happened here. That was the gate over there. The creature came up. And it's interesting that Samuel Drew towards the end of his life considered that the creature had probably been sent by God. And it was a warning to him that his present way of life was not working, that something had to change. And indeed it did for him. And this is a theme I hope I'll be able to come back to later. But when I think of the British furries of the 18th and 19th century, the best way I could describe them to someone who was completely new is that they're kind of folk angels. They have something like, let's argue about this later. Let's take an argument at the time, but I'll come back to furries as folk angels if I may later.

Chris: They have an actual animal shape. They're not just a hairy blob monster. 

Simon: Okay, well, let me try and defend the words I used before. Remember, I referred to three. They're mammalian, they're furry, and their shape changes. As far as being mammalian, in Britain at least, the overwhelming number of animals that you see in this role are indeed mammals. If you cross the ocean to Ireland, there are several other creatures that crop up. For example, I've always been a little bit shocked by the frequency with which you find turkeys of all things in Irish supernatural lore. But in Britain, it really is overwhelmingly these different forms of mammals. The only other animals that you sometimes get, occasionally you have references to shape changes that become fish in the 19th century, and then also occasionally you have references to shape changes that become birds. It's not typical. Can you think from Britain of other types that don't fit into the mammal bracket?

Chris: There's only one I can think of, and it was mentioned in the same breath as Samuel Drew's event, but this was in North Antrim. There was some sort of a field which contained something sinister. The horses would never pass it without shying. They would see this great, rough, dark animal with burning eyes rolling over and over on the grass. It was believed to be a soul in torment, and the horses being sensitive to death were distressed by it. Another young woman described how they were out on a lonely mountain road, and they heard behind them a terrible growling noise and a rushing sound. Before they could move, a great animal rolled over the dike behind them, almost touching them and sending out a fiery heat as it rolled across the road and into a field beyond where it plunged about as if in torture, showing its burning eyes as it writhed about. Again, they thought it was some sort of damned soul past praying for. Those aren't exactly mammalian, and I'm not sure whether they really fall into this category.

Simon: I'm not sure either, but it is Ireland, and Ireland has its own rules. For example, furries don't work very well in the highlands of Scotland. They tend to be much more Irish in a supernatural sense. I love the description. I love the idea of this soul rolling around. It's almost this mediaeval idea that the world becomes purgatory, but it sounds much more Irish, and indeed it's from the six counties.

Chris: The fiery eyes though, what is it with these saucer eyes on all these creatures?

Simon: I mean, that must be much broader than Britain, but in the UK, if you look for eyes like saucers, these kind of phrases here, you'll come up with a lot of interesting beings. Would you expect to find that in the US as well?

Chris: We have some of it. I remember it from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. I can't think which one it was, but it's a dog with big fiery saucer eyes. I'm thinking a saucer, unless you've got one with a lustre glaze, doesn't really have much reflective value. Is it just referring to the size? Were there a lot of tea sets in these country cottages? Why not a pot lid? Something more reflective. I'm just always curious, why saucers?

Simon: Maybe it's such a British thing, like you say, in reference to having tea at five, something that cut right across social classes, particularly by the late 19th century. I suppose it's primarily, yes, size rather than reflectability. The second thing I would defend, and that I find peculiar is, well, this word that you object to, but furry. The fact that these creatures are furry, or your preferred term, one that has unfortunate connotations in Britain. These creatures are shaggy, and this just comes up again and again and again. So if you have a description of a horse that is going to be a phantom, very often there will be a comment that there's something about the way it hair sits. It's like a colt at the end of its first year that has not actually had its hair taken off. So this fact of being furry matters. It comes up again and again, and leaving the 19th century behind. Also, when we go back into our mediaeval and early modern sources, we don't have that many references to furries, but we have references to supernatural beings that are described as having these shaggy coats.

Chris: And I have to contradict you because you've got a fatal flaw in your, if there's going to be colts and horses or ponies, they're not furred, they have hair.

Simon: I agree that in zoological terms, it might not work, but it's something that you have in common between the descriptions like you have there of this dog stroke bear creature and the horses as well. This fact that the hair or fur is just too much, there's too much of it. Quite where it comes from, what it means, I don't know. I suppose that if anything, I'm reminded of our episode on helpers when we talked about how often these beings were described as being hairy. 

Chris: Hairy, yes, you're right. I'm wondering though, if this has a different aspect because the shagginess is a pretty common feature. Is it a symbol of wildness? Because wild men and the wood woes, they're always hairy and furry. 

Simon: It pains me to say this, but I think you're spot on with that. And we said much the same with helpers. And you can imagine here as well that dogs, horses, these creatures are fairly common in day-to-day life in 19th century Britain. But if you're describing an ill-managed animal, one that is not under the authority of human beings, then maybe this shagginess is a way of signalling that.

Chris: Yeah, they're feral.

Simon: Now, the other point that I talked about is shape-changing. And here, Chris, you, of course, are an expert. What would you tell us about shape-changing generally with these beings?

Chris: I think this is the most interesting trait about them. This goes back very far. In our episode on the zombies and the shapeshifters of mediaeval Yorkshire, there were quite a few shifting entities. We had a horse that turned into a revolving haycock with a light in the middle, a bullock without a mouth, eyes, or ears, a bird, I think, that turned into a dog, and another horse that turned into this weird revolving piece of canvas that rolled away. There's virtually identical stories of shapeshifters met on the road in the work of the Reverend Edmund Jones. And these aren't like the mediaeval spirits we talked about from Byland Abbey, seeking absolution. They're just out there to plague whoever's on the road. And I find that really, really interesting that they have such a different role. Nineteenth-century shapeshifters, I'd say, most commonly assume the shape of a dog or a calf or a mix of both. 

These sort of indeterminate ones, I'm not sure, again, what that means symbolically, unless, of course, they're literally liminal creatures. They're not one thing or another. So we've got like the shag foal was half a horse, half a dog.  Puck is considered to have incarnations as a horse or a headless bear, a shaggy dog. Maud Fowkes, who was a psychic investigator, recalls seeing a strange creature in Italy. And she said it was a large animal, larger than a large dog, and in shape, a sort of blend of a bloodhound and a calf. It was black and its eyes were horrid. And another correspondent reading this in the Occult Review suggested it was actually a wild boar, which is not improbable, I suppose. They have this sort of pattern of they're half dog or half calf, or they actually visually change as you're watching, which must be terrifying.

Simon: I think I'd make two points to what you've just said. First, very quickly, that when you go back to our mediaeval sources and our early modern sources, shape-changing just seems to be what the supernatural does, all forms of the supernatural. However, when you get to the 19th century in Britain, the furries are about the only shape-changing forms, with the exception of witches, that are still in their naughty ways, sometimes becoming cats or becoming hares. Shape-changing is actually quite rare. The second point, and this speaks to what you were saying, this ambiguity between species. One of my favourite 19th century quotations says that these forms would fair mystify any zoologist. What kind of creature is this, really? Again and again, we have people who are saying, it looked like a lion, but in a way, no, it was more like a small horse. Well, people seem to change their mind on that. I have a term that I use alongside shape-changing that is indeterminacy. What I mean by that is this fact, not that this being shifts from being a horse to a flaming house to a bird flying through the sky, that sometimes happens. The people who are watching it can't quite pin it down. It's almost as if it's not entirely stable. This indeterminacy, I suppose, is a fairly low-grade version of shape-changing.

Chris: I'm wondering, what is the purpose of the shape-shifting? Is it just to sow chaos among people seeing it? Why the ambiguity? It's almost as if the entity hasn't fully committed to being a dog or a calf. What's the purpose of it?

Simon: I would say there are two things. I think, first of all, this indeterminacy or more dramatic examples of shape-shifting is just a supernatural flex. It's a little bit like when we talked about road spirits suddenly disappearing, or the bear creature seen by Samuel Drew going through a gate. It's their way of communicating to the human beings roundabout that we are not of your world. You could also, though, say, and this might appeal to the medievalist in you, that demons and devils are associated with, as you said before, chaos. They represent the breakdown of God's natural order. This doesn't work very well with what I was saying about folk angels before. Let's not go too far with this. Maybe this inability to stay in form is actually a signal that they come from without God's order.

Chris: Some of them have horns too, in the United States at least. Let me give one more example. This was in Little Milford, 1920. A correspondent of the Occult Review described a number of weird encounters on the local roads near Little Milford from the 1880s. The first was something that looked like a cat at first glance, but it was too large and had a head like a fox. He said it glided and made absolutely no noise. Then he saw a dog as large as a Saint Bernard dog, black with a bushy tail. I passed quite near to him and then saw to my astonishment that it was not a dog, nor indeed was it like any animal I had ever seen or heard of, for its head and forequarters were like a goat or calf and it had short horns, but its hindquarters were more like a dog's than anything else. There was nothing unusual about the eyes that I noticed, but it had a big, massive head. Other people saw this big black animal. They described it as something between a dog and a calf or just a huge black dog with glaring eyes. The author made some enquiries and found that the country people don't care to pass that part of the road at night and they say there is fear there.

Simon: As you were saying that, I was reminded of the idea that we have in 19th century devil law. The idea being that the devil has it within his power to appear to you or me, but he has to have some feature of his being that shows he is not fully human. So it could be a tail sticking inappropriately out of the back of his trousers. It could be hooves as feet. It could be a whiff of sulphur and maybe we're seeing something similar here.

Chris: It's true. I think that, as you say, it's signalling that these are unearthly.

Simon: I suppose another thing that's worth saying here is when I've written and talked about furries elsewhere, people often start to say, oh, you mean black dogs. And this in itself is a fascinating part of British folklore culture that in the 19th century, some people did refer to supernatural spirits that happened to be black dogs. But by the middle of the 19th century, thanks particularly to the work of the great folklorist, Theo Brown, black dog actually became a category. And we now have several books on the subjects of black dogs. And personally, I've always thought that this is something of a mistake and that by talking about black dogs, what we're actually doing is just taking part of this much in more interesting and wider category that covers various mammalian forms and where there's also important bleed between the different categories. So, for example, horses are confused with dogs, dogs are confused with rabbits and so forth. But I must also acknowledge that in the 20th century, black dogs have emerged as a kind of supernatural form in their own right. We've lost our phantom horses, we've lost our phantom bunny rabbits of which there were so many in the 19th century. But what we have now are canine forms that are almost always black. And we also have, of course, that other very unusual category, the ABCs, alien big cats. These are lynxes, lions, cheetahs that are seen in the British countryside and then rarely, almost never actually caught. And here there is maybe this suspicion, shape-shifting is no longer a thing. But sometimes in the accounts, you do have a sense of indeterminacy that people aren't quite sure how to describe what they're seeing.

Chris: You also have blurry photographs from very far away showing what they say is a large black cat, an unknown black animal. So, it's like the Loch Ness Monster. You can't photograph it properly. There's an author, Di Francis, who wrote a book called Cat Country. And she argues that a lot of people describe black dogs within a dog frame, because they are unfamiliar with large cats. And she has some details about how the headless black dogs are consistent with the low neck carriage of cats relative to a more erect head on a dog. And the sounds made by black dogs are actually more consistent with big cats. So, it's a very controversial theory, but I thought I'd throw it out there. 

Simon: I love the way that if you go from the 19th century and the descriptions of furries and you get to the interwar period, because this stuff doesn't really survive the Great War in its 19th century form. But what you start to get is, what's the correct word? The zoologization of these supernatural beings. And so, instead of the locals saying, this is a bad road, you shouldn't walk down it after night, people will start to send zookeepers out and say, we think there's an escape lynx or an escape big dog or something. And so, you have a supernatural tradition, but it starts to be looked at in a different way.

Chris: Right. And the cryptozoologists get involved, too.

Simon: But that's interesting, isn't it, too, that if you think of cryptozoologists in the US, they, of course, have the great luxury of saying, look, there are millions of acres of deep, dense bush out there. Who knows what is actually living in there? But in Britain, this just isn't an option. So, what do the cryptozoologists do? They talk about escaped animals. Right.

Chris: Now, wasn't there actually a case where there was some sort of wild animal craze in the 60s? People were actually keeping big cats as pets. And then, there was some kind of a law passed that you had to pay for a licence or something, and people just started letting them loose. Now, is that true or is that just a folklore idea?

Simon: I mean, there was definitely a law passed, no question about this. And I think it was in the early 1970s. I hope I've got that right.

Chris: Yeah, I think so.

Simon: And so, it's been suggested that at this point, some animals were released. I'm quite sceptical about the vast majority of sightings of these big cats. We have, for example, in the southeast, I think in Surrey, a small population of wallabies that basically came about because several were released at the end of the 19th century and they bred successfully. So, there's nothing impossible about creatures from elsewhere actually taking root in Britain. It's just that these sightings are so reminiscent of the supernatural sightings of the later 19th century that one just thinks, well, really, we're talking about the same thing here, just looked at through a different lens.

Chris: Yes, they are. That's very possible.

Simon: But look, this brings us, Chris, to the question that I'm particularly curious about. So far, your main objections to furries as a category is the terminology, the actual use of the furry. Leaving that to one side, what about the presence or otherwise of these creatures in the United States in the 19th century? Do we find something similar or am I describing a British reality?

Chris: No, I think I have enough examples that I think are very similar to British furries. But first, I want to do a little disclaimer. There's creatures like the squonk and the hoedag and the whirling wimpus, some of which might be classed as furries, and they sometimes find their way into collections of cryptids. But I want to emphasise these are simply comic, tall tale creatures. They did not exist. They were supposedly inventions of lumberjacks to scare new employees, because sometimes people take them at face value. The newspapers also delighted in stories of, what is it? Mystery creatures, which were usually hunted by armed posses to no avail. And they would always leave behind huge, unidentifiable footprints, like in 1959 in Van Wert County, Ohio, something resembling a dog killed a calf. But again, ambiguity. But you've asked if there are furries similar to British ones in North America. So here's two anecdotes that offer some parallels to Samuel Drew's story. The first one happened near a Welsh settlement called Blue Mounds in Wisconsin. And there was an area locally called the Ghost Walk or the Ghosts Promenade. This is a couple of young fellows coming back from seeing their girls. It was about midnight, very clear night. And before going much further, my friend stopped and pointed at an object ahead in the road. What do you see, ask I. A dog, replied he, and it's the biggest dog I ever saw. A dog, exclaimed I. It's a hog, I see, the hugest hog. And there it was, to his eyes one thing and to mine another. But dog or hog, it was immense. We didn't stop long to wrangle over it. And another young man described how, as I was passing along that stretch of road one night, I heard something in the field on the other side of the fence moving along with me step for step. Looking over, I was startled by seeing a big bear standing there as if waiting for me to proceed. When I stopped, it stopped. And when I went ahead, it did the same, passing through fences and trees as if they weren't there. 

Simon: Did you have to look hard to find them?

Chris: I had them in my files. So here's another one. This one comes from South Mountain, Maryland. That's near Boonesboro, Maryland. And a woman named Madeline Dahlgren wrote a book in the 1880s about the superstitions and legends of the area. And she described how many people saw a large black dog in the same area of the mountain. And this one fellow saw about 10 o'clock at night. It was bigger and blacker than any dog he'd ever seen. As he came near, the object intercepted him and stood guarding the road in such a way as to forbid his crossing. So, to use his own expression, he fit him. He fought. That is nothing daunted. He fought at him. But to his confusion, as the creature was attacked, it grew longer and presently seemed to extend across the road, making no noise, but showing a very wide and very ugly-looking red mouth, while all the time the thick and heavy blows rained down upon it. The sinewy arm of the woodsman met with no resistance, but rather seemed to beat the air. But presently, the still lengthening shadow passed onwards. And then the man, not a little flurried, went home. So that stretching, that growing larger, that's another feature of some of these furries, is they not only change shape, they change size.

Simon: Again, it's the indeterminacy, this ability, yes, to grow bigger or smaller.

Chris: And then there's this absolutely mad specimen from a Cincinnati paper, 1887. And they don't give the location, but I think it is, in fact, Cincinnati, Ohio. The woman narrator said she opened her bedroom door to go into the hall, and she saw this thing crouched up to it, a huge black moving object. And with amazing nerve, she took her lamp and started following it down the hall. I looked upon it well, until it turned into the ballroom and vanished before my eyes, and the air in my nostrils were filled with an odour indescribable, but something in the smell of cucumbers and burnt powder. If I were an artist, I would draw a picture of it, but as I am not, I will have to attempt a pen and ink description. It was in form, shaped something like a horse, but longer, and its belly touched the floor, while its forelegs seemed to move on, shoulder blades and highs set out upon its body. Its arch neck and head were shaped quite like a horse's, and as it moved noiselessly along the passage, it wagged its head and neck from side to side, while its legs with hoofs, something like a large camel's feet, trotted along before me, with emotions similar to that of a cow running. I followed it and looked at it until I say it vanished right before my eyes, and as I am a Catholic and firm believer in the use of holy water, I went to my room and got the base of it and sprinkled the floors and walls well with it. What do we make of that? That just seems like a complete hallucination.

Simon: Yeah, absolutely. And I find it suggestive that she had holy water on the premises.

Chris: And she had prefaced it by saying a dog had actually invaded their house, a rabid dog, a black rabid dog, and she had to chase it out where the locals killed it. And then this, she came back and at night, this is what was in the house. And she thought, oh my God, there's another dog. And then that's what she sees.

Simon: I mean, if you had a rabid dog in your house, and then you had that experience after, it sounds like an extremely vivid dream. You're trying to process this horrific event from earlier in the day.

Chris: She claims she was awake. She had just put her drunken husband to bed and it was kind of stressful. So I assumed she was actually awake. Lastly from America, Vance Randolph in his Ozark Ghost Stories and Ozark Superstitions book mentions the booger dog, which is a big black dog, sometimes the size of an ox. One young man told of how he met a spotted hound that was bigger than a cow and made tracks in the snow nearly two feet across. At the time, he was astounded that there'd be a dog of such size, but it never entered his mind that there was anything supernatural. It was years later when he came to realise there were no such big dogs anywhere in the world. He knew he'd seen the booger dog. Another one was seen by a doctor to walk on water. And the creature also jumped up behind the doctor on his horse, spooking the horse. We've seen that with road ghosts before also. So the US has a whole collection of ghostly black dogs, and some of them behave like furries. Others just howl in the streets at night or leave mysterious footprints. There was one who said good morning with an English accent in Pittsburgh. He looked like a black Newfoundland. This was 1908, and he disappeared in a green mist to the astonishment of two police officers who were witnesses. We get a lot of the devil in the form of a black dog. What's frustrating is when we find a creature with some of the attributes of a furry. There was a huge creature with horns, four legs, and fiery eyes that appeared before a mail clerk sorting mail in a locked train car. But it just appeared. It didn't shape shift. It just came and went. So what do we do with that?

Simon: But it's interesting that both the mail clerk and the woman who had the rabid dog in their house, in the 19th century, furries always appear outside. They very much belong to the landscape, not to the human sphere. So that's a little difference there. I would love to finish, Chris, by just running by you the notion that I started with, that British furries of the 19th century are the closest we come to folk angels in the British supernatural. And I can hear the scepticism in your voice. And to be honest, I feel it in myself as well. But I feel I'm inching here towards a truth about the folklore of these beings. So perhaps just be tolerant for 90 seconds while I do my best. I think the three things that furries do is, first of all, they attack people. But in this way, they're not like fairies that are just attacking people who, for whatever reason, have done some small thing and the fairies are angry. They attack those who are unjust in some ways, people who deserve it. The second thing they do is that they predict deaths. And sometimes they even predict births. They're very much into forms of prophecy in that sense. And then the third thing that they do, and these are the most charming furry stories of all, they protect the weak that are out in the countryside on their own. And here the classic story is a 17-year-old girl is walking through a wood. She's frightened. And then suddenly two dogs appear, one on either side of her. And she walks through the woods. And as soon as she gets to the edge of the woods, the dogs just vanish. And she subsequently hears that there were two men waiting for her in the wood, but these men were frightened to attack her because she had these dogs accompanying her. And so I'm not saying the furries have wings or that they answer to God, but there's something about them that is a little bit different from ghosts that in whatever form seem to care about their own time on earth or revenging themselves for things that have happened on earth. And other supernatural beings, fairies that are just very much living their lives and sometimes human beings get in the way. There seems to be something in the furries that they belong to part of, yes, the supernatural order, but also in a sense, God's order in this way. The idea that the world has its rationale, that the evil are punished, that the weak are protected. I'm very reluctant to say this, but as I mentioned before, I'm slowly inching towards understanding their role in folklore more. What would you say to these points?

Chris: I would say that the protective black dogs and there's also protective white dogs are a subset of the furries. I don't think we can say that all of them are folk angels by any means, but there's definitely a very large number of stories of that type. The minister out collecting tithes and everybody knows he's got a lot of money and he's afraid as he's going home and dogs come and they actually attack the men waiting for him and drive them off. So yeah, it's definitely a subset of the furry work, but I don't think it's their sole purpose by any means.

Simon: Well, I'll keep troubling myself about this and perhaps I'll be a bit more convincing in six months or a year.

Chris: Okay.

Simon: Let's move on to the question of further readings then. I don't have huge amounts to suggest here. I'm bringing out a chapter in a forthcoming book on furries and so I mentioned that for what it's worth. In Britain, there's been a lot of writing on so-called black dogs and black dogs often take in some of the supernatural furries more generally. A particularly good book is there's an edited volume by Bob Trubshaw. I believe it's called Explore Black Dogs.

Chris: Explore Phantom Black Dogs.

Simon: Excuse me. That's it. Explore Phantom Black Dogs and that has two or three fantastic essays in. Well worth getting your hands on. Mark Norman has a book called Black Dogs. I mentioned Theo Brown before who unfortunately never published her life's work really, this great book on black dogs, but she did publish before she died a number of articles. Let me also mention Merrilee Harper who wrote Mystery Big Cats and I think it is the only book on the subject that really takes them as supernatural rather than a cryptozoological reality. I would go further and say that this is a much more useful way to look at this peculiar subset, the ABCs. These would be the books I have to offer. Do you have any others, Chris?

Chris: What I'm seeing is that werewolves are having a moment and dogmen. There's a woman named Linda Godfrey. I believe she's now passed away, but anything by Linda Godfrey, The Beast of Bray Road, The Michigan Dogman, Real Wolfmen. She gives all these anecdotes from people and she's very sensible about her approach. She's sort of a very classic 40 and she neither disbelieves or believes. It's always good to read something by her from the United States. I've written a number of blog posts which we can share on the page, but there's not a whole lot about shapeshifters out there except in sort of a fantasy, romanticy genre.

Simon: I've been amazed how little there is internationally, particularly if you exclude, as I would, were creatures, W-E-R-E. In other words, if you have someone who becomes a wolf, for me that's interesting, but it's a different category. It's like the witch who becomes the hare or a cat.

Chris: Not really a shapeshifter, yeah.

Simon: Shapeshifting features in their repertoire, but that's not what they're about. Whereas with the furries, you get a sense that that's their thing, that it's at the very centre of what they are.

Chris: I do want to recommend a book called Wildemann by Charles Frage. It documents the figure of the savage as it survives in local popular European traditions. These are fursuits with a vengeance. It's people that dress up like wild men. They're amazing, amazing images. All I can think of is furries who have gone completely wild when I see this book.

Simon: We now need to come to our second reading, and I'm very curious what you have here, Chris.

Chris: A carter was on his way to Kendall Market with a load of wheat shortly after the witching hour of night, and he proceeded as far as the immediate vicinity of the Boggart House near Carnsforth when his horse suddenly stopped and appeared much frightened. On looking to ascertain the cause, he perceived as he imagined a large sheep lying in the middle of the road, to which he proceeded with the intention of applying his whip to force its removal. He struck, the blow fell upon vacancy. The supposed sheep aroused itself, and as if with indignity at the insult, swelled out, as the man affirms, into the size of a house, and then, giving him a look of ineffable contempt, flew away in a flame of fire. The poor carter was petrified. The chattering of his teeth almost rivalled the noise, the bone playing of the celebrated jubs. His knees shook and his legs refused to perform their office. How long he remained in this condition, he's unable to state, but the fright had such an effect upon his nerves as to make him seriously unwell, and he has not recovered from the shock, although we have no faith in these supernatural visitations. It must be admitted that the poor man from the state he was in had seen something which dreadfully alarmed him. Perhaps on the previous evening, he'd been partaking too freely of the brie, and his heated imagination magnified the apparition.