In 2015, a sighting near the Barmston Drain, a drainage channel running through west Hull close to the old Wolds edge, set off a genuine wave of local reports that ran for almost a full year and had drawn national media attention by 2016. Witnesses described an eight-foot creature with an almost human face, glowing red eyes, pointed teeth, and a thick tail strong enough to knock a grown person clean off their feet, and gave it the memorable nickname Old Stinker for its reportedly foul breath, a detail vivid enough to have stuck firmly in every subsequent retelling. Close to a dozen separate eyewitness accounts were logged in 2016 alone, mostly from people walking or driving near the drain after dark.
Folklorists studying the case connected these modern sightings directly to a much older story: tales of a wolf-like creature stalking the Yorkshire Wolds are said to reach all the way back to the twelfth century, with early accounts describing livestock, a young girl, and a shepherd all killed by something wolf-shaped, in a county where actual wolves themselves had already become rare or entirely extinct by that period.
Some researchers have suggested the whole legend may function as a kind of folk memory of England's own vanished wolf population, resurfacing periodically in a landscape that still genuinely borders wild, sparsely populated Wolds countryside even today. Nothing resembling actual physical evidence, a photograph, a print, or a carcass, has ever been produced by anyone involved, and the 2015-16 sightings remain unconfirmed reports rather than anything more substantial, Old Stinker's own eight centuries of claimed history offering atmosphere without ever quite offering proof.
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