Oxhay Farm Road, on the edge of Bradnop in the Staffordshire Moorlands, carries a phantom black dog tradition with a considerably more specific backstory than most of the county's other black dog sightings recorded elsewhere throughout this collection: the animal is said locally to represent the spirit of a man murdered during the Jacobite period, tying the haunting directly to a real and turbulent chapter of eighteenth-century British political history rather than leaving it entirely anonymous.
Its appearance is treated locally as a genuine omen of coming misfortune for whoever happens to see it, entirely in keeping with the black dog's usual role throughout English folklore as a death or ill-luck portent rather than functioning as a simple, harmless animal ghost.
No date for either the supposed original Jacobite-era murder or for any specific modern sighting survives in the sources repeating the story, which leaves both the murdered man's own identity and the precise timing of his continued appearances genuinely unresolved, even as the dog's basic role as a warning of misfortune remains consistently understood by everyone who tells the story locally.
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