The Black Dog of the Hanging Hills

A documented 1898 published account, on cliffs that really do kill people

The Hanging Hills rise over Meriden, Connecticut, a three-mile run of dark cliffs whose highest summit, West Peak, stands 1,024 feet above the sea. They are trap rock, basalt from lava flows hundreds of feet deep that welled up through faults some 200 million years ago as North America tore away from Africa and Eurasia. The iron in the dark stone weathers to rusty brown, the basalt breaks into columns, and great slopes of shattered scree lie below the ledges, plunging into Merimere Reservoir beneath East Peak. In October 1900 the industrialist Walter Hubbard opened Castle Craig, a stone tower that looks lifted from medieval England, as part of the 1,800-acre Hubbard Park he gave the city, and in 1939 Edwin Howard Armstrong used West Peak for one of the first FM radio broadcasts; his 70-foot mast still stands there.

The hills also have a dog. It is said to be black, short-haired and of no particular breed, black like an old hat left out in the rain, friendly enough, and utterly silent: it barks without a sound and leaves no footprints. The rule that goes with it is simple. If you meet the Black Dog once, it shall be for joy; twice, for sorrow; and the third time you shall die.

Nearly everything known about it comes from a story by W. H. C. Pynchon, published in the Connecticut Quarterly in 1898. His narrator, a Harvard geology student, visits West Peak in the spring of 1894 to collect specimens of vesicular lava, and a quiet black dog trots along beside his wagon all day, never once barking, raising no dust from the dry road. Three years later he returns in February with a friend, a geologist from the U.S. Geological Survey named Herbert Marshall, who confesses he has seen the dog twice. As they climb the frozen southern face, a black dog appears on the cliff above them, breath steaming from its jaws but making no sound. "It is the third time," Marshall says, and the rock beneath him gives way.

The piece is fiction, but folklorists treat it as the root of the legend, and Pynchon may have drawn on a tale he had heard. Whatever its origin, it has outlived its author's intent. Network news segments revisit it now and then, and in Hubbard Park, where dogs of every kind are welcome, any black one trotting up the trail can give a walker who knows the story pause.