I investigate reports of big cats in Suffolk, I’ve received over a hundred of these over the past seven years. But while seeking testimony on Suffolk big cat sightings, a surprising number of unsolicited accounts of encounters with the phantom East Anglian hellhound Black Shuck seem to come my way. Shuck can’t possibly exist, of course. Nonetheless, I still receive testimony of his antics in the country of Suffolk. An interesting and surprisingly consistent pattern in this handful of Shuck reports is that most of them describe encounters from 40 years ago, usually reported by sons keen to tell me how “my dad saw Shuck in the Seventies.”
During Shuck’s long history, the two peaks in reported East Anglian Shuck activity occurred in the 1920s and in the groovy, cool, fab era that was the 1970s. The ancient horror that was East Anglia’s Black Shuck was at large scaring the residents of Seventies Suffolk as never before.
Ivan A.W. Bunn’s excellent contemporary analysis East of England Shuck traditions, “Shuckland: Analyzing the Hell out of the Beast” remains unequalled to this day.
Among the many 1970s Shuck experiences that came to Bunn’s attention was one via a letter from 1973, in which Lincolnshire man with no previous knowledge of East Anglian black dog traditions told how he was laying drainage pipes across the marshes behind the massive Holy Trinity Church at Blythburgh (so huge it’s known as “the Cathedral of the Marshes”). Suddenly, he heard a dog loudly panting behind him. He turned round and there was… nothing. It was only when he told some locals in the pub that they produced a book of local Shuck stories.
This article first appeared in Fortean Times magazine, issue FT412;58-59, December 2021.