While many of North America’s early black dog tales come verbatim from those of Europe, centering around phantasmal hounds pacing Anglican graveyards, the story gained new cultural life in the wake of the civil war as white Southerners began reporting the appearance of strange, spectral canines, some of which were missing legs or heads, around various slave cemeteries.

It’s unclear as to when these reports began, but it seems fair to suggest that the sightings partially emerged out of burgeoning latent guilt at the concordant institutions of slavery and systemic racism in America. The guardian canines, then, represented a post-mortem sentry protecting the remains of disenfranchised people who had found freedom in death. It’s a nice explanation, but a bit too pat. The ragged, mutilated appearance of these spirits hints at an underlying ignorant fear that, just as whites have sleek, pure-bred animals watching their graves, the blacks must have ragged, mangy beasts guarding theirs.

Unlike European cemeteries, with their regimented lines of headstones and kempt vastness, slave cemeteries were usually small, out of the way and devoid of permanent grave markers. Many were started by white land owners who neither regarded the slaves as people nor wanted to lose valuable tracts of land to non-mercantile ritual. Even after slavery ended, and blacks were able to claim many of these burial grounds, the minimalist interment procedures continued. Rather than fetishize death, like Europeans did, through the construction of stone markers and statuary, many former slave families chose instead to craft markers from wood or local flora as a means of embracing the naturalness of death and the basic humanity, rather than socio-cultural personhood (which slaves weren’t granted anyway), of the deceased (many slave cemeteries also lack the formal grid structure of Western burial grounds, conserving space and allowing loved ones to be buried together in the same plot).

It’s reasonable to suggest that some dog sightings came out of this cultural difference, refracted through the lens of racism, which led some White visitors to interpret the floral grave markers not as memorials, but rather as hoodoo charms placed carefully by vengeful hands – dark folk magic, in the form of a ghoulish hound, protecting the sacred earth from disruption.

This variation on the black dog legend perfectly reflects the way in which folklore adapts to address perpetually changing cultural fears and concerns, legitimate or not.

Friday: Black dogs today

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