Gytrash

No cosmological creation narrative is recorded in the cited sources. The Gytrash appears in regional dialect and family tradition (notably the Brontës of Yorkshire) as a locally named supernatural category: a spectre or spirit that manifests in nonhuman forms along solitary roads. Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary records the term as a dialect label for a ghost that takes animal form, while Branwell and Charlotte Brontë's notes and fiction place the term within Yorkshire household and roadside memory.

Sources consistently describe the Gytrash as taking nonhuman forms, most commonly as animals: horses, mules, large dogs or 'great black dog,' and in dialect material even 'a running or evil cow.' Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre describes horse, mule, and large dog forms and presents a literaryized, composite vision; Branwell Brontë's unpublished note expands forms to include a 'Black Dog dragging a chain,' 'a dusky calf,' and—in his localized account—an 'Old Dwarfish and hideous Man' (sometimes headless) and even inanimate objects like a rolling stone or self‑impelled cart wheel. The humanlike/headless and inanimate embodiments are explicitly attributed to Branwell Brontë's note.

The central trait in the sources is shape‑changing into animals or other uncanny forms. The Gytrash haunts solitary ways and encounters belated travelers: accounts state it may lead people astray, though some sources allow ambivalence—guiding lost travelers in certain tellings. It is also connected in some records with omens: Joseph Wright notes a belief in an 'evil cow' form as a sign of death, and Branwell Brontë links visits to the fortunes and bad omens surrounding a household. There is no evidence in the provided material for large‑scale or cosmically altering powers.