What is the Wild Hunt???...

 

The Wild Hunt has been known for centuries in Europe, especially in the Celtic Lands.

In England it is supposedly led by the Devil, or Old Nick, Beelzebub, Satin, The Arch Deceiver, --- and all his many names...  The Devil brings his hounds on the Hunt, of course, his red eared, red eyed hell hounds, and they have many names too: the Devil's Dandy Dogs, the Gabriel Rachets, the  Yeth-hounds or Yell-hounds, the Whistlers, the Dartmoor Pack, the Whisht Hounds...  They were also called the Lyme Hunt...

The "Anglo Saxon Chronicle" of 1127 says that after February of that year people saw a group of charging dark riders on dark horses traveling at an enormous speed behind fierce black hounds with staring eyes and panting green tongues.  Around Halloween in the 1940s, around Trauton, England, the same type of thing was sighted.

In Dartmoor and Cornwall, the spectral hounds are said to be under the control of huge headless riders.  The Christian church of the time warned people to change their bad ways or the Devil and his slavering, fire breathing horses and yelping, baying dandy dogs, one stormy night, would hunt them down and drag them, screaming and kicking out wildly, to Hell.

Lewis Spence, in his book, "British Fairy Origins", wrote that the hounds of the Wild Hunt were sometimes called Sky-yelpers and that they were headless and raced high in the air.  [Now, - they yelped without heads and mouths???... Hmmm...]  If the pack went back and forth over a house a death was sure to occur.

For humans, worst thing about seeing the spectral Wild Hunt was the fear that they would be caught up in it, either to become one of the hunters or to be the prey.  The spell of the Wild Hunt would not be broken until the first rays of dawn were seen.  A few remnants of legends tell of people fighting off the Wild Hunt, but, then, the Hunt returned the next night, and the next, and the next, to overcome them and eventually bear them away.