7-Foot Tall Hellhound Skeleton Has Been Unearthed

[Ninurta]

I have a friend who said she was chased through the woods behind her house in the densely-forested area of West VA  when she lived there.
She posted her story on one of the boards, but I don't remember which one.  Anyway, I could see by her description that it was two Hell Hounds that she witnessed.  And, there have been others who have witnessed these creatures.


What about you?  Have you seen one of these "demon dogs"?

I haven't - at least not that I know of - but there is a tale that my grandad did, curiously enough in WV. The tale goes that he was walking home one night when a Black Dog met him at a bridge, snarling and gnashing it's teeth, daring him to cross.

I know you'll find this hard to believe, but I come from stock that may not be entirely sane or sober. We've had a problem with backing down or going into reverse for generations.

Grandpa, being a man of few words but effusive action, grabbed a fallen tree branch from the ground with which to contest his rights to cross the bridge, and advanced on the dog with intent to do malice aforethought. The tale goes on that the dog vanished when he was about half way to it, half way across the bridge, and that the last thing to go was it's glowing red eyes, fading more slowly than the rest of the dog. By the time he got to where it was, all set to crack it's noggin if there were mere tricks afoot, there was nothing left of it but a faint smell of sulfur.

I don't know how true the tale is, and never asked grandpa about it, but that's how the story goes.

It seems that the family has trouble crossing things occasionally. His grandpa, my great great grandpa, ran into a spot of trouble crossing the Little Kanawha river with a deer on his shoulders after a hunt. It was in the days of black powder, and of course he'd gotten his charge wet wading across the river with that deer across his shoulders, and just as he got to the other side, a bobcat leaped out of a tree onto the deer, apparently thinking to kill it and haul it off. Now, GG grandpap had gotten his powder wet, and it's damned hard to shoot something off your own back with a muzzle-loading rifle that has a 44 inch barrel anyhow, so he did the next best thing under the circumstances and all things considered. He reached back with his left hand, got the cat around the neck from the back of it's neck, and choked it to death before it could get through the deer and all the way to him. I hear he got a little scratched up in the process, but what else is a fella to do when help is miles away and the cat wants to eat you now?

You do what you gotta do.

I've already told elsewhere of my encounter with bigfoot, or a reasonable facsimile, in that same general area. I don't know if I've mentioned the glowing eyes I saw there one night, though. It wasn't Black Shuck or a "Black Dog" as they call them there, but I dunno what it WAS. In Roane County, just northeast of the town of Spencer, there is a ridge called "Egypt Ridge". I was out walking the ridge road one night around 11 PM, and as usual I had no flashlight - I never carried one. Just something else to keep up with, and I had good enough night vision any how. So there I was, walking the ridge road about 500 yards or so to the northeast of the old Egypt Ridge schoolhouse (you can still find it on USGS maps, I think, although  it has not been a school for years and years now) and I noticed two glowing patches in the woods under the road bank, right up in the head of Pup Run where the hollow meets the ridge. They were red and faintly glowing, about the size of two dinner plates and about 3 feet from center to center. Never heard any noise, no growling nor snuffling, just dead quiet. I did get the impression I was being watched, but by what I don't know to this day. The older I get, the more I think it was just my nerves playing with me. I thought for a while that it might have just been a couple patches of foxfire, but that is usually greenish, rather than red, and I never saw it but the one time, and I HAVE looked for it again afterwards. Way too damned big to be a Black Dog, but I've no idea what it really was - I'm just sure there is some logical explanation for it that I've yet to stumble upon.

WV can be a magical place at times, and things happen there that defy explanation. Some I'm sure are carry-overs from the first white folks to enter the area, who were mostly Scottish and Irish moving into the wilderness to get as far as they could away from the Crown, my ancestors among them - O'Briens from Co. Clare in Ireland, and McElwaynes from Ayrshire in Scotland. I wonder at times how much of these tales are just legend carried over with them and adapted to the frontier at the time... and whether or not some of the denizens actually followed them, perhaps Black Shuck among those. I know that it has been claimed that the O'Brien family Bhean-Side, named Ebhlinne, has been claimed to have been heard wailing there, and that my granny has seen what she called a "ball of fire" rolling off of a house where a death had occurred, while it was in progress, both tales from the old country that folks I know swear have happened in the back woods of WV.


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