Black Shuck

Perhaps our most disturbing spirit. Unlike the spectral black dogs that haunt other counties' crossroads and churchyards, our Fenland Black Shuck - known also as Old Shuck and in the oldest tongue as 'scucca' - walks in two worlds. The ghost's glossy surface recalls not just the creature's water-slick fur, but the transformation itself: they say the change begins like oil spreading across water, a rippling darkness that transforms human flesh to something ancient and terrible.

Presented in the deepest black ceramic and polished to a mirror shine like the limpid waters of the fens themselves. Its glowing red eyes appear to shift between human and bestial - sometimes warm and knowing, sometimes feral and hungry - capturing the dual nature of the fenland's unique shapeshifting Shuck.

This particular spirit, they say, took the form of a striking woman who appeared at the Rutland Arms in the 1830s. She would sit for hours with Tom Aspland and other lightermen, learning the secret ways through the fens. They noted she would only eat raw meat, delicately dabbing blood from her lips with a fine lace handkerchief. The lock-keeper's wife thought it strange that on full moon nights, the lady's clothes would be stained with peat-black water, though no rain had fallen.

The murders began in the spring of 1837 - lone travellers found in the fens, their bodies savaged in ways no natural wolf could manage. Tom Aspland himself was the last to see her human form, on a fog-thick night when she asked him the way to the ancient burial grounds deep in Wicken Fen. He later swore he saw something large and dark moving through the water beside his boat, keeping pace easily, its eyes glowing like rose gold in the darkness. Neither woman nor wolf was ever seen again, though to this day, fenland folk whisper of a creature that is both and neither, hunting in the places where water meets land.

This vessel's mirror-black surface seems to ripple with an inner darkness all its own. On full moon nights, some say they catch glimpses in its glossy depths of a transformation that should not be possible - the moment when human eyes turn bestial, when fingers lengthen into claws, when the ancient blood of the Wuffingas kings awakens in fenland veins.

Porcelain ghosts - all individually numbered. All ghosts are unique and may differ from the image on the ghost page.