The headless dog of Coltishall Bridge

Coltishall Bridge after dark: a black dog trots across, and where its head should be, there's nothing.

Glyde's 1872 collection of Norfolk superstitions records that a headless dog was said to cross Coltishall Bridge over the River Bure at night. It is one of the stranger versions of the Shuck tradition, because even without a head the animal still terrified anyone who met it. Coltishall Bridge is also named in the same book as one of the bridges Sir Thomas Boleyn's phantom coach has to cross. The Broads Authority's modern folklore page repeats the claim that Shuck haunts Coltishall Bridge and adds a twentieth-century sighting in the village. We have kept that later sighting out of the summary because only one secondary page reports it.