The Black Dog of the Hanging Hills

The legend has an unusually clear origin for a piece of regional folklore: in the winter of 1898, The Connecticut Quarterly published a short story titled "The Black Dog," written by W.H.C. Pynchon, a Harvard-educated Trinity College professor, and clearly labeled as fiction at the time. The story describes a small black dog seen around the traprock cliffs of the Hanging Hills — silent, leaving no footprints — with the rule that seeing it once brings joy, twice brings sorrow, and a third sighting means death. Despite its openly fictional origin, the tale was gradually taken as real local legend, and for more than a century, hikers around Hubbard Park and the Castle Craig tower have reported genuine sightings of a small black dog that vanishes without a trace.