Cannock Chase: how a real tragedy grew a folklore
Staffordshire's strangest landscape has black-eyed children, a werewolf and a pig-man. It also has three murdered girls, and the order in which these things arrived matters.
Cannock Chase covers around seventy square kilometres of Staffordshire heath and woodland.
Cannock Chase is around seventy square kilometres of heath, forest and old mining ground in Staffordshire. It attracts reports of the black-eyed child, a werewolf or upright black dog, and a figure called the pig-man.
It is the best British example of a phenomenon this site keeps meeting: a landscape that acquires a folklore, where the folklore can be dated.
What actually happened there
Between 1965 and 1967 three young girls were abducted and murdered in and around the Chase. Raymond Morris was convicted of one of the killings in 1969 and is widely held responsible for the others. He died in prison in 2014.
That is the real history of the place, and it is the reason the Chase carries a genuine weight for people who live near it. Any account of its folklore that omits it is not describing the same landscape.
Where black-eyed children come from
Not Staffordshire.
The motif traces to an account posted online in the 1990s by the American journalist Brian Bethel, describing two children with entirely black eyes who approached his car in Abilene, Texas, and asked to be let in.
It spread through online forums and then into television and books. It is one of the most cleanly traceable pieces of modern folklore in existence, because its first telling was published, dated, and by a named person who has never claimed it was anything other than his experience.
The Cannock Chase reports appear in 2013 and 2014, gathered and publicised by a local researcher, and were widely covered in the press. They come roughly two decades after the motif entered circulation.
Why forests produce reports
The perceptual conditions in woodland at night are specific and well understood, and they matter more than any local factor.
In low light, vision shifts to rod cells, which are absent from the centre of the retina. Detail and colour drop away, peripheral sensitivity to movement rises, and the visual system fills gaps from expectation.
Sound behaves oddly among trees: direction is hard to judge, and deer, badgers and foxes make noises that are startling if unfamiliar.
Add an expectation supplied by having heard the local stories, and the conditions for a sincere and mistaken report are complete.
The other creatures
The werewolf reports describe a large upright canine figure, often near the German war cemetery on the Chase. Black dog traditions are old and widespread in England, and the Chase has a long-standing one; the upright, wolf-like version is recent.
The pig-man is local and appears to be a modern legend of the kind that attaches to any large area of woodland near a population centre.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
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Why did the motif attach to this landscape?
Black-eyed child reports cluster in a handful of places worldwide. Why Cannock Chase became one of them is a question about media coverage rather than about the Chase.
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Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
The National Archives
The National Heritage List for England
Historic England
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