A death omen tied to a specific, named sound rather than a visible apparition is a distinctive kind of folklore, and Sheringham's Yow Yows fall squarely into that category. The cry, however it is meant to actually sound, functions in local tradition as a weather warning as much as a haunting: fishermen hearing it took it as a sign that a storm was on its way, a piece of practical, survival-relevant folklore dressed in the language of the supernatural, not unlike how many coastal communities developed their own informal early-warning systems long before formal meteorology existed.
The explanation given for the cry's origin ties it directly to the sea's own toll on the community that lived beside it. One version of the story holds that the Yow Yows are the voices of drowned sailors, and gives a specific number and circumstance: twelve men from a ship lost at sea, whose bodies eventually washed ashore at Sheringham, only to be denied the dignity of a proper churchyard burial. Instead, according to the tradition, they were thrown into a ditch in a gap along the cliffs marking the boundary between parishes, a location chosen, whether deliberately or simply out of expedience, at the literal edge of consecrated ground rather than within it.
That detail, burial denied at a parish boundary, carries real weight in English folk tradition, where boundary locations, neither fully inside one parish's care nor the other's, were frequently associated with the unquiet dead precisely because they fell outside the normal rites that were thought to let a soul rest. Whether any specific wreck and burial actually lies behind the Yow Yows, or whether the story has simply attached itself over time to an older weather-warning folk tradition in search of an explanation, the sound itself is what fishermen actually reported hearing and heeding, the explanation a layer added afterward to make sense of it.
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