Gytrash

Also Known As: also Guytrash, Guytresh; equated in the West Riding record with the Padfoot, and said there to be called Sworth in Cumberland
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: English Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: It holds no fixed body, arriving on a dark road as a dog, a cow, a calf, a headless old man or a wheel travelling under its own power.
Role in Mythos: It is the road terror of the West Riding of Yorkshire, a local boggart whose appearance was read as notice that a death was coming.
Relation to Humans: It fastens onto people walking alone between villages, keeping pace at their backs or waylaying them where they have to pass. Nobody dies of it in the surviving accounts, but the advice recorded for its West Riding twin the Padfoot is to say nothing and do nothing, because a word or a blow gave the thing power over you.

The lane out of Horton after dark had a great black dog on it. On the road from Leeds to Swillington, something about the size of a small donkey used to roll along the ground ahead of the carrier’s cart like a dropped woolpack, then go sideways through a hedge that showed no gap afterwards. And somewhere across the same few miles of the West Riding there was a cow. If you met the cow, somebody was going to die. All of it answered to one word, and the word never told you which of them was coming.

Joseph Wright collected that word for his English Dialect Dictionary and gave it the flattest definition available: an apparition, spectre, ghost, generally taking the form of an animal. He printed it as guytrash, with gytrash and guytresh beside it, and marked it for the north country and the West Riding. Then he stacked his witnesses underneath, and the witnesses do not agree with each other. One has the thing with cloven feet and eyes as large as saucers, and adds, a little defensively, that as far as the writer had been able to learn it was a strictly local visitant. One gives the Horton guytrash, near Bradford, which was another boggard and generally took the form of a great black dog. One is a Yorkshire paper of 1876 quoting a man with no commentary at all: he teld us at he saw a guytresh. One is practically a curse, from a West Riding glossary, in which somebody must be either Oud Nick or a Guytrash. And the oldest is a single line lifted from the Denham Tracts, where the word sits in a long roll-call of northern horrors, wedged between imps and patches.

The cow has a name behind it. Samuel Dyer’s book on West Riding dialect, published in 1891, prints it as a note from a Mr Sam Blackburn of Brighouse, and Blackburn does not soften anything: the guytrash is an evil cow whose appearance was formerly believed in as a sign of death, it is also known as padfoit, and in Cumberland it is called sworth. Four clauses, no story attached, no attempt to make it frightening. It is the closest the whole record comes to somebody simply saying what the thing was, and what it was, in that town, was a cow.

The fullest description of one was written by a nineteen-year-old in December 1837, a decade before anybody put the word in a novel. Branwell Brontë wanted a gytrash for a story and set about defining it first, mostly by ruling things out. It is not like the ghost of someone who was once alive. It is not a fairy or a sylvan creature. It is not a demon or one of the powers of the air. It hardly ever appears in human shape at all: a black dog dragging a chain, a dusky calf, nay even a rolling stone or a self impelled cart wheel. His own local specimen, the Darkwall gytrash, took the form of an old dwarfish and hideous man, as often seen without a head as with one, moving at dark along the naked fields that spread round the aged house. Its visits were connected in everybody’s mind with the fortunes of the family, evil omens were drawn on such occasions, and if tradition spoke true the omens were fulfilled.

Ten years later his sister used one, and the shape of the creature changed for good. Jane Eyre is sitting on a stile in the frost, listening to a horse she cannot see yet, when a rush comes under the hedge and a great dog glides out past the hazel stems, black and white against the trees, lion-like, long-haired, huge-headed, with what Charlotte Brontë calls strange pretercanine eyes. Jane knows exactly what she is looking at, because her nurse Bessie told her about it: a North-of-England spirit that came upon belated travellers on solitary ways in the form of horse, mule, or large dog. Then the horse comes round the bend with a man on its back, and the spell goes out of the evening, because nothing ever rode the Gytrash. It was always alone. A few steps further on there is a sliding sound, an oath, and a clattering tumble, and the most famous gytrash in English turns out to be a dog called Pilot and a bad-tempered gentleman flat on the ice.

That paragraph is now load-bearing. Charlotte’s version is possibly the earliest appearance of the word in print, and it became the basis for the citations that followed it, including the entry in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable at the end of the century. Which is how the gytrash became a black dog in every reference book that mentions it, and how the cow quietly disappeared. The novel did not invent the creature. Bradford men were still putting the word into local histories forty years later without a nod to any novel, and the dialect collectors were writing down what they had been told rather than what they had read. But the novel decided which of its forms would be remembered.

There is a hole in the record worth standing in. William Henderson’s Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties is the standard Victorian sweep of exactly this ground, and it does not use the word gytrash once. What it has instead is the Padfoot, the nocturnal terror of the villages around Leeds, about the size of a small donkey, black, with shaggy hair and large eyes like saucers, following people by night or waylaying them in the road they have to pass. Old Sally Dransfield, the carrier from Leeds to Swillington, believed in it absolutely and had seen it often, sometimes rolling along the ground before her like a woolpack, sometimes vanishing suddenly through a hedge. A clergyman at Danby told Henderson it went ahead of a death, sometimes visible and sometimes not, padding lightly in the rear of people and then before them or at their side, uttering a roar totally unlike the voice of any known animal, with the trail of a chain sounding under the quick pad of the feet. Blackburn of Brighouse says flatly that padfoit and guytrash are the same thing. The gytrash, then, was a local word rather than a national one, and the creature it named answered to something else a few miles in any direction.

Its powers are the powers of the unlit road and nothing beyond them. It changes shape, it keeps pace, it makes a noise nobody can place, and it announces a death without ever being the cause of one. The danger sits almost entirely in what the traveller does next. Left alone it is a bad half hour in the cold. Spoken to or struck, it has a hold on you, and Henderson tells of a man whose way was blocked again and again until he lost patience and kicked the thing, and who was dragged home through hedge and ditch for it and left lying under his own window.

Its limits are the limits of the lane. It belongs outdoors and in the dark, in the space between one place and the next, and it does not come in after you. The traveller who sees a farmhouse window lit and gets to it is safe, and knows it. It is always alone, which is the flaw Jane spots in the dusk before she has finished being frightened, and it cannot survive being explained. The name has never been settled either. Norman French guizard, an apparition, has been offered for the first half of it, and the second half nobody has accounted for at all. It is hard to feel completely sorry for a spectre that ended up called a trash.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Gytrash?

The Gytrash is a shape-changing spectre of northern English folklore, recorded chiefly in the West Riding of Yorkshire, which haunted lonely roads after dark. Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary defines it as an apparition, spectre or ghost generally taking the form of an animal. Its appearance was treated as a warning that a death was coming rather than as a physical threat.

What does the Gytrash look like?

The Gytrash has no single form. The recorded shapes include a great black dog, an evil cow, a dusky calf dragging a chain, a dwarfish and hideous old man as often headless as not, and even a rolling stone or a cart wheel moving under its own power, with cloven feet and eyes as large as saucers reported for some of them.

Is the Gytrash the same as the Padfoot?

Yes, according to the West Riding record. A Brighouse man named Sam Blackburn, quoted in Samuel Dyer’s 1891 book on West Riding dialect, states that the guytrash is also known as padfoit, and that in Cumberland the same creature is called sworth. William Henderson’s description of the Padfoot near Leeds matches the Gytrash closely without ever using the word gytrash.

Why is the Gytrash in Jane Eyre?

Charlotte Brontë gave the Gytrash to Jane in chapter twelve of Jane Eyre, where Jane mistakes Mr Rochester’s dog Pilot for the spirit her nurse Bessie had described. That passage is possibly the earliest printed reference to the Gytrash, and it fixed the creature’s public image as a black dog. Later reference works, including Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, took their account from Brontë.

How do you escape a Gytrash?

You leave it alone and you keep walking towards a light. The Gytrash belongs to the open road in the dark and does not follow travellers indoors, so reaching a lit farmhouse ends the encounter. Speaking to it or striking it was believed to give it power over you: Henderson records a man who kicked its West Riding counterpart the Padfoot and was dragged home through hedge and ditch for the insult.