The Wisht Hounds of Wistman's Wood

The popular version goes like this: on winter nights, particularly around Wistman's Wood, you might hear the Wisht Hounds (also called the Yeth Hounds or Wish Hounds) hunting across the moor. They are phantom dogs, sometimes said to be headless, and the legend warns that to see or hear them is a bad omen. The hunt is often connected to the wider folklore of the Wild Hunt, that shapeshifting European tradition of spectral riders and hounds tearing through the sky.

As for where this actually comes from: the written trail is hazier than you might expect. The name Wistman's Wood itself appears in 17th-century documents, but I cannot find a clear early source that ties the Wisht Hounds specifically to that location with a date attached. The legend exists in various forms across Dartmoor folklore collections, but pinpointing when the connection took root is tricky. It may be that the eerie character of the wood (genuinely ancient, densely overgrown, easy to get lost in) attracted the story over time, or that the tale is older than the written record. The honest answer is: nobody I have found yet knows for certain.

Folklore ties the Wisht Hounds to Old Crockern, the spirit said to preside over Crockern Tor and the old tinning grounds, who is said to release the hounds from Wistman's Wood. The earliest known source for Crockern himself is Sabine Baring-Gould's Book of the West (1899).

The same black-hound legend is tied to a second Dartmoor site. An anonymous letter in Notes and Queries (28 December 1850) describes a headless black dog haunting the valley below the Dewerstone. Sabine Baring-Gould separately recorded, in 1900, a wild huntsman with black dogs appearing on the Dewerstone's summit, and William Crossing later wrote that the Dewerstone was the spot the huntsman "chiefly favours", tying the two places to one continuous tradition. In the same 1900 book, Baring-Gould also gave a rationalist explanation for the name itself: that the wisht hounds heard overhead are brent geese flying north or south. He never reconciled the two accounts.