The night mare walketh
I was staying in an old hunting lodge, high above the confluence of those two great Dales rivers, the Cover and the Ure, and was visited by a dream.
I was on the moor edge at night, the wind screaming cloud across the hillside, when I noticed, over the course of a minute, a form revealed by the dashing tatters of fog, a hurried shape – not a coherent moving form, but a staccato impression disclosed by the ebb and thickening flow of the fog, now here, now a little further on; something of a broken shape, the shape of something flayed, and which proceeded towards the small town further along the dale. Just as it began to disappear from view over a rise, a twist of cloud made it turn, and it stared straight through me. I jumped from the dream, shocked, and with the night sweats.
It was only several weeks later I read the following in (1936) Wensleydale:
The river here is haunted by the Kelpie or Waterhorse. He comes only a few times in the year, when he rises like a white wraith from the water, and rushes over the meadows eager for prey, his object being to frighten his victims into the river. If you see nothing in the Kelpie but mist rising from the river, you will escape the terror, but then you will never know the thrill of having eluded him...
19 Apr 2025