Charles Walton is remembered today, when he is remembered at all outside Warwickshire, for one of England's most notorious unsolved murders, killed on Meon Hill in 1945 in circumstances that Detective Superintendent Alec Spooner and generations of writers since have read as disturbingly close to ritual. Sixty years before that death, though, Walton was simply a boy of the parish, a young ploughboy walking home near Alveston in 1885, and it was then that he first reported the sighting that would later become part of his own case file.
He described being regularly followed on his walk home by the apparition of a black dog, an encounter unsettling enough on its own but one that repeated itself often enough to become, for him, an accepted feature of the route rather than a single frightening incident. On one particular night, though, the dog was not alone. It appeared accompanied by a headless woman, and it was on arriving home after that specific sighting that Walton learned his sister had died. The story was written down decades before anyone connected it to anything darker, recorded by the Reverend James Harvey Bloom in his 1929 study of the district's folklore, at a time when Walton was simply one more local man with a strange childhood memory.
It only became something else entirely when Detective Superintendent Alec Spooner, reinvestigating Walton's 1945 murder, turned up Bloom's decades-old account and recognised the boy in it as the same man now lying dead on Meon Hill. Black dog apparitions are common enough across English folklore that on their own they would barely merit a second look; what makes Alveston's version genuinely unusual is the documented, traceable line running from a boy's 1885 sighting to a police file opened sixty years later on his own murder. The fuller story of Walton's death, and the case that still has no solved ending, is recorded separately in this collection.
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