The theme that the Hunt is led by a nobleman is common to both Scandinavia and Germany. A characteristic example of the story comes from Rugen: a great prince who loved the hunt more than anything else. When a herdboy cut the bark of a young tree to make a pipe, the prince tied the youth's guts to the tree and chased him about it. A farmer who killed a stag that was eating his corn, the prince bound living to a stag and let the animal run free in the wood until it had battered the man to death. "For such cruel deeds the monstrous man at last got the payment he had earned." He broke his neck while hunting, "and now it is his punishment after death, that he also has no rest in the grave, but must about the whole night and hunt like a wild monster. This happens every night, winter and summer, from midnight to an hour before sunrise, and then people often hear him crying: 'Wod! Wod! Hoho! Hallo! Hallo!', but his usual cry is 'Wod! Wod!' and from this he himself is called 'der Wode' in many places" (Jahn, Ulrich. Volkssagen aus Pommern und Rügen, pp. 4-5).

The Cornish legend of Tregeagle tells of a cruel and diabolical landowner in life whose spirit is placed in the charge of priests at his death, and who must perform impossible tasks like bailing out the bottomless pool of Dosmery using a limpet-shell with a hole in it, or fashioning ropes of sand, else be chased to Hell by the Devil and his hounds.

Tregeagle howls in dismay at his continual failures, and is finally taken to Land's End, where his cries cannot be heard. 'To roar like Tregeagle'  became an expression in Cornwall, and there is a Tregeagle ghost story called 'Nights On Roughtor' by Donald Rawe in the Denys Val Baker-edited HAUNTED CORNWALL (William Kimber; London 1973, and a UK Heritage paperback from 1980).

Wild Edric

Wild Edric leads the hunt in Shropshire. He led the men of Shropshire against the Normans, but betrayed his cause by making a dodgy peace with William in 1070. He was married to Godda, a faery queen, who disappeared one day. For ever more he is destined to go on galloping furiously across the Stiperstones in search of his wife. He has developed a tendency to appear on the eve of war - he was seen (with Godda for once) on the eve of the outbreak of the Crimean War, and made further appearances in 1914 and 1939.6

Black Vaughan

Related to the theme, perhaps, is the story of Black Vaughan who was beheaded during the War of the Roses. His ghost caused no end of hassle in the Herefordshire Village of Kington until twelve parsons succeeded in trapping it in a snuff box and throwing it into Hergest Pool in the grounds of the Vaughan family's home of Hergest House. Then the haunting continued in the form of a huge black dog, sometimes holding Vaughan's head in its mouth. The phantom hound's howls signalled the impending death of one of the Vaughan family. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle knew the family and based The Hound of the Baskervilles on their story.7,8

Sir Peter Corbet

Sir Peter Corbet, who owned Chaddersley Corbet and much land around Alcester, was another local leader of the Hunt. Edward I gave him a charter to hunt wolves in the royal forests of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, and Shropshire. Hearing of his daughter's secret meetings with a man in the woods, he locked her in her room and let the hounds out. The suitor was torn to shreds, and his daughter drowned herself in the mor. Peter wasn't too happy, so he hanged his hounds and threw their bodies in a pool. After his own death in around 1300, he was doomed to roam the forests with his hounds.
Sir Francis Drake
One of the earliest of these ghosts, that of Sir Francis Drake, made repeated journeys over Dartmoor in a black coach driven by headless horses and accompanied by a pack of hounds. Drake occupied the usurped ecclesiastical lands of Buckland Abbey within his natural lifetime, so the development of this ghost story may have received impetus from those who judged the status of his ownership.

Hans von Hackelnberg

A later folktale states that the leader was Hans von Hackelnberg, a semi-historical figure who died in either 1521 or 1581. It was said he had slain a boar and was then injured on the foot by the boar's tusk and died of poisoning.
As he died he declared that he had no wish to enter heaven, but instead wanted to hunt. His wish was granted and he was permitted, or perhaps cursed, to hunt in the night sky. Another version of the tale has it that he was condemned to lead the Wild Hunt as punishment for his sins.
But even behind this 16th century character, lies a more ancient element, perhaps harking back to the original traditions surrounding the hunt. Hackelnberg, it has been suggested, is simply a corruption of "Hakolberand" - the Old Saxon epithet for Woden.

Adolf Hitler

In Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will", Hitler is considered as the "a reincarnation of All-Father Odin, whom the ancient Aryans heard raging over the virgin forests". It  ends with "the ethereal passage of silhouetted figures marching heavenwards in the clouds”. The Nazis made great play of their appeal to the Mythic Past to bolster Nationalist feelings in Germany and used Mythology to reinterpret history and serve their  social and political purpose.