In her collection of Lincolnshire folklore in the archives of the Folklore Society, Mabel Peacock gives a tradition from Snakeholme current probably in the later nineteenth century. She writes:
A.G., a Lincolnshire girl, was told some years ago that a spectral huntsman with his hounds, is to be heard by night at Snakeholme, a hamlet in the parish of Bardney: ‘There are people who say they have listened to them in the wood, and along the railway side; and they say that they come because a pack of hounds was once run into by a train.’
The explanation that the spectral hounds are the revenants of once-living dogs is perhaps a late one: in the Middle Ages no such explanation was needed for phantom hunts, which were thought to be demonic spirits existing in their own right as omens. The earliest recorded such phantom hunt appeared not far off at PETERBOROUGH, Huntingdonshire and Peterborough.
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SOURCE:
Haunted England : The Penguin Book of Ghosts – Written by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson –
Copyright © Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson 2005, 2008