Gabble Ratchets British Folklore Part Three #HazardousToYourSanity

Posted by Lyssa Medana on September 21, 2023 in

I hadn’t heard about Gabble Ratchets until I moved to Yorkshire. In fact, I only really came across them when I was looking around for ideas local to Yorkshire and I was intrigued. These days, with so much folklore on the internet and used in so many ways, it’s nice to find something a little less known.

Image from Unsplash, taken by Jamie Davies and described as Yorkshire. It looks close enough to the Calderdale Valley where the Gabble Ratchets roam

If you ask around Huddersfield or Halifax, Gabble Ratchets are Gabriel Hounds – supernatural dogs that hunt lost souls across the skies on stormy autumn nights, foreshadowing death. There are two explanations for this. The first is that the sounds of migrating geese could be heard as the baying of a ghostly pack of relentless hunting dogs. Another story concerns a lord who was so possessive and obsessed with his pack of hunting dogs that he ordered that they be buried with him – which I think is awful and I can’t help but hope that his last wishes weren’t carried out. According to the story, it is the ghosts of those poor dogs that can be heard, baying in a supernatural hunt. 

Around Leeds, however, Gabble Ratchets are the noisy souls of unbaptised children who haunt their desperate parents. That must have been an unnerving story to tell as families huddled around the fire when storms rattled the slate tiles on the roof. There was the horror of the dead but not departed, the fear of what happened without baptism and an awful warning to parents who were slow to baptise their child in a society where the Christian faith was the only way of thinking. 

Image from Unsplash, taken by Jonny Gios and described as Leeds Dock. It seems as good a way of showing the small streets and ginnels where these stories would flourish

There is something uncanny about strange, dark noises in the night as the wind is howling and rain rattling at the window. The feeling of bad things are happening out there away from the light of the home can make things feel so much cosier inside. Neither the supernatural hounds nor the spirits of unbaptised children were a direct threat, though they were a wonderfully chilling story and a reason to stay inside when the weather turned wild. 

As these were little known and generally reduced to noises, no matter how spooky, I had no hesitation in stealing them and changing their nature to suit the story in my novel Digging up the Past. That’s the fun of being an author. You can read some tiny corner of folklore or even just superstition and shamelessly loot it for your own ends. If you are interested in picking up some of the old stories, I recommend Sabine Baring-Gould who was a collector of old and unusual stories in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Those old tales are so different from the supernatural stories we see today and it’s great to get a different perspective. 

Image from Unsplash, taken by Sergiu Valenas and described as an old book. It looks like it should contain some good horror stories

And as I write this, the wind is wild, the rain is hard against the window and I can imagine the Gabble Ratchets could fly across the sky tonight, chasing lost souls. That is far more satisfying to think about than the weather report.