Connecticut: The Black Dog

From Backwoods Bigfoot Stories by Backwoods Bigfoot Stories-Bigfoot Encounters

June 3, 2026 · 1h 11m

About this episode

The episode explores the legend of a haunting black dog in Connecticut's Hanging Hills and its historical origins.

This week on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, we pull into Meriden, Connecticut, and climb into the Hanging Hills, a range of ancient volcanic cliffs where a small black dog has been haunting hikers for more than a hundred and thirty years. He looks like an ordinary stray. Short hair, black coat, moderate size, nothing about him that should stop you in your tracks. But this dog never makes a sound, not even when you watch him bark, and he never leaves a footprint behind him in dust or snow. And the rule that's been passed down since the eighteen hundreds is simple and merciless. See him once for joy, twice for sorrow, and the third time, you don't come down off that mountain. We trace the legend all the way back to its source, a story called The Black Dog published in The Connecticut Quarterly in the spring of 1898 by geology professor William Harry Chichele Pynchon, grandfather of the novelist Thomas Pynchon. It was printed as fiction, but it broke loose from its pages almost immediately and became something people swear is real. We walk through the original three-act tale, the doomed winter climb of geologist Herbert Marshall, and the death that the legend later pinned on…

People in this episode

Host: Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

Topics covered

cryptids
hiking
legends
supernatural
history

Keywords

black dog
Connecticut
Hanging Hills
cryptid encounters
supernatural legends

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Black Dog, The Connecticut Quarterly

Places: Meriden, Connecticut, Hanging Hills