Moddey Dhoo

Also Known As: Manx moddey doo, “black dog”; written Mauthe Doog by Waldron, Mauthe Dog by Walter Scott, Modha-doo and Mauthe-dhoo in Anglo-Manx speech
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Manx Mythology, Celtic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A silent black dog that came out of a passage at nightfall, lay by the guard-room fire until dawn, and did no harm to anyone who let it alone.
Role in Mythos: It is the resident apparition of Peel Castle, the being that made a garrison of soldiers mind their language.
Relation to Humans: The men who shared a room with it lost most of their fear and kept a private rule against swearing in its presence, but none of them would walk the castle passage alone. The one who did came back unable to speak and was dead in three days.

The candles went up in the guard-chamber and the dog came in. It crossed the floor without a sound and lay down in front of the fire, and there it stayed, in a room full of armed men, until the light greyed at the windows and it rose and went back into the dark passage it had come out of. It never barked. It never ate. It belonged to nobody. The garrison at Peel Castle grew so used to the black shape at the hearth that most of the fear wore off them, though not all of it, and never enough for any one of them to want to be the last man awake beside it.

The soldiers called it the Mauthe Doog, or that is how the man who wrote it down heard them say it. George Waldron was an Englishman posted to the island between 1720 and 1730 to watch its import and export trade for the Crown, and his Description of the Isle of Man carries the only early account of the thing that anybody has. He put down a large black spaniel with curled shaggy hair, seen in every room of the castle but keeping by preference to the guard-chamber, and he said the tale had been attested to him by several people, one of them an old soldier who claimed he had seen the dog more often than he then had hairs on his head. Waldron’s spelling did not survive later scrutiny. When William Harrison edited the Description for the Manx Society in 1865 he noted flatly that there are no such words in Manx as Mauthe Doog. The name is moddey doo, black dog, and nothing grander than that.

There was a rule in the guard-room and nobody had written it down. While the dog lay there, no man swore and no man told a foul story. They had decided it was an evil spirit waiting only for permission to do them hurt, and permission was not a thing anyone wanted to grant by accident. So the roughest company on the island passed its watches in careful manners, in front of a creature that looked at the fire and asked for nothing at all.

The trouble was the keys. Every night one soldier locked the castle gates and carried the keys to the Captain of the Guard, and the way to the captain’s apartment ran through one of the old churches on the rock, along the same covered passage the dog used. So the men made a private arrangement: whoever was down for the following night went with the man whose turn it was, and nobody walked it alone. One night a soldier who had been drinking laughed at the arrangement. It was not even his turn. He said he wanted nothing better than for the Mauthe Doog to come after him, because he would find out whether it was dog or devil, and when the others tried to talk him down he only grew louder. Then he took the keys and went out.

A great noise came back down the passage and not one man in the room had the nerve to go and look at it. When the soldier came in he had stopped talking, and he never started again. He lived three days. People sat with him and begged him to speak, or if he could not speak, to make some sign of what had happened, and he gave them nothing; only, by the way his limbs and his face were pulled about, it seemed to those watching that he was dying in more pain than a natural death asks for. The dog was never seen in the castle again. The passage was bricked up and a different way to the captain’s quarters was cut, and that was the end of the arrangement. Waldron’s informants placed all this about threescore years before he wrote, which puts it around 1666.

Everything after that is other people improving the story, and it is worth knowing which parts are theirs. A. W. Moore, who reprinted the passage in his Folk-Lore of the Isle of Man in 1891, said in the same book that Waldron knew little about the Manx and told his marvellous tales in his own language, probably with many additions suggested by his fancy. Harrison had already called the whole Peel Castle chapter absurd and far fetched. Then Walter Scott put the creature into Peveril of the Peak in 1823 and made it the Mauthe Dog, a fiend or demon in the shape of a large, shaggy, black mastiff, moved the abandonment of the passage back to the reign of James the First, and armed his doomed soldier with a drawn sword he never had. The spaniel has been losing ground to the mastiff ever since. When Sophia Morrison retold it in Manx Fairy Tales in 1911 she added the detail that everybody now remembers and that nobody wrote before her: the dog gets up from the hearth and follows the man out. In Waldron it does not move.

Away from the castle the black dog is thoroughly Manx and much less tidy. W. Walter Gill, tramping the parishes in the 1920s for his Scrapbooks, found the word moddey sitting in old field and hill names all over the island, at the Nook of the Dog in Lezayre curragh, the Water-ditch of the Dog at Ballaugh, the Hollow of the Dog above Perwick, and he thought a good many of them had been named for what walked there. He noted that the moddey dhoo is always spoken of in the singular, one dog and never a pack. At Hango Hill outside Castletown, where men were hanged, the thing is headless and goes by the name Mollagh Wooar, the big bladder, and is chiefly seen by other dogs, who do not care for it. At Balladoole the grounds carried a White Lady and a black dog, though Gill was relieved to report that the two of them did not work together. On the Malew road near Robin y Gate an ordinary moddey dhoo haunted one stretch, and something worse haunted the next, which the people who told him about it would not describe. Gill himself met one at the Claghyn Baney in Patrick, on a dark night, by the light of a bicycle lamp, and said he had no doubt at all it was an ordinary dog, and that accidents like that are exactly how a haunted place keeps its reputation.

Not every one of them is bad news. A Peel skipper told his crew he had been stopped at the top of the town by a big black dog that would not let him pass. He went home for a heavy stick and came back, and the dog was still there; whichever way he tried to work round to the quay it got there first. He gave up and stayed ashore, so the boat did not sail, and in the morning a gale came on so suddenly that it might have drowned the lot of them. The Manx also used the words as an insult. In the Anglo-Manx dialect a moddey doo was what you called the parish sumner when he came round for the dog sheaf, which suggests the fear was never quite as solid as the folklore makes it sound.

What the Peel dog could do was mostly a matter of being there. Its one act of violence, if that is the word, was to kill a man without touching him. It seems to have gone through walls as easily as through its own passage, and it kept hours as regular as a sentry. Its limits were the limits of a haunting. It was tied to one building, one route and the dark half of the day, and it left everyone alone who left it alone; when its road was bricked up it stopped coming, which is a poor showing for a demon and a very good showing for a door.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Moddey Dhoo?

The Moddey Dhoo is a spectral black dog of Manx folklore, said to have haunted Peel Castle on the Isle of Man. Its name is simply Manx for “black dog.” In the story it came out of a passage at nightfall, lay by the guard-room fire among the soldiers all night, and went back into the passage at dawn.

Where does the story of the Moddey Dhoo come from?

The whole early record is one book: George Waldron’s Description of the Isle of Man, written in the 1720s by an English customs official posted to the island. Every later version descends from his few paragraphs. Waldron’s own editor, William Harrison, and the folklorist A. W. Moore both judged that Waldron embroidered what he was told.

Did the Moddey Dhoo follow the drunken soldier?

Not in the original. In Waldron’s account the soldier takes the keys and goes out alone, a great noise is heard from the passage, and he comes back unable to speak and dies three days later. The dog rising from the fire to follow him first appears in Sophia Morrison’s retelling in Manx Fairy Tales in 1911.

Was the Moddey Dhoo a spaniel or a mastiff?

Waldron describes a large black spaniel with curled, shaggy hair. The mastiff comes from Walter Scott, who put the creature into his 1823 novel Peveril of the Peak as the Mauthe Dog, a fiend or demon in the shape of a large, shaggy, black mastiff. Later pictures have followed Scott rather than the record.

Is the Peel Castle dog the only Manx black dog?

No. W. Walter Gill collected black dogs across the island in the 1920s, including a headless one called the Mollagh Wooar at the Hango Hill execution ground near Castletown, and traced the Manx word for dog through a string of old field and hill names. One Peel black dog is even remembered for blocking a skipper’s way to the quay on the night before a killing gale.