The black dog at the hall

01

The Encounter

A mid-nineteenth-century paper at the Norfolk Record Office notes that Blickling then had a tale of a black dog haunting the drawing room. The writer is not named, no individual meeting is described in that surviving sentence, and the catalogue dates the group of papers only to the middle of the century.

F. J. Meyrick later gave the scene more form. His father, Frederick Meyrick, was in the drawing room with the Squire’s sisters when one lady asked whether he could see a dog. She believed a black dog had crossed the room and gone behind the tapestry. A message was sent to her sister to ask after Toby, the household dog. Toby was asleep in the bedroom, and no second or larger dog could be found.

The next morning, the Squire reportedly said that the old bricked-up turret had been opened the previous day. The timing binds the drawing-room sighting to an older house story in Meyrick’s telling. It does not establish what the lady saw, or that the presence was the same being known elsewhere as Shuck.

02 / Historical context

First recorded account

The earliest located record is Norfolk Record Office file MC 3/858/1-5, 715X7, a group of five mid-nineteenth-century papers concerning Blickling. The catalogue title includes the phrase ‘the shuck dog apparition’. The quoted manuscript sentence itself says ‘black dog’ and does not use the name Shuck.

The catalogue supplies no named author or exact year. The handwriting has not been inspected directly for this archive. Its sentence is available through a Norfolk Record Office article, which provides both the wording and the reference. This establishes an archival black-dog tradition at Blickling while leaving its authorship, date and intended name unresolved.

F. J. Meyrick’s Round about Norfolk and Suffolk, published at Norwich in 1925 or 1926, preserves the later narrative. Meyrick grew up at Blickling, and his father became rector there in 1868. His account is close to the household tradition, but it was printed roughly sixty years after the reported drawing-room event.

“a black dog which haunts the drawing room”

Unknown writer, mid 19th century, NRO MC 3/858/1-5, 715X7

03

What the record supports

• A black-dog haunting of Blickling’s drawing room was noted in a mid-nineteenth-century estate paper.
• Meyrick records a woman seeing a black dog cross the drawing room and disappear behind tapestry while the known household dog was elsewhere.
• Neither the archival sentence quoted by the Record Office nor the reported words of the witness use the name Shuck.
• No attack, pursuit, death omen, unusual eyes or great size is reported in the drawing-room sighting.

04

Later accounts and changes

Meyrick joins the drawing-room sighting to a longer tale of a wicked Blickling squire whose corpse would not remain buried. In that story, a black dog with the dead man’s eyes appears after a monstrous eel is brought from the lake. A wizard finally confines the dog in the south-east turret. This is an older house tradition as Meyrick tells it, not the testimony of the woman in the drawing room.

Later writers have proposed Sir Henry Hobart as the wicked squire and have named the dog Black Shuck. Those identifications may fit the place and the wider Norfolk tradition, but they are not stated in the mid-nineteenth-century sentence quoted by the Record Office.

The catalogue itself now describes the papers as concerning the ‘shuck’ dog apparition. That wording is evidence of the archive’s present identification of the subject. Without the original paper before us, it cannot safely be treated as the unnamed writer’s own term.

05 / Source audit

How this record was checked

These are the checks behind the dossier. They show what was inspected, what it establishes and where caution is still needed.