The first full description of a procession of ghosts was written in Paris about a night in January of 1092 (Ordericus Vitalis). The priest Wachlin, coming back from visiting a sick person, saw a swarm led by an enormous warrior swinging a mighty club in his hand. The shapes that followed wept and moaned over their sins; then came a horde of corpse-bearers with coffins on their shoulders -- the priest counted some 50 coffins. Then women on horseback, seated on saddles with glowing nails stuck into them; then a host of ecclesiasticals on horseback. The priest knew many of these people who had died recently. He concluded at last that he had seen the "familia Herlechini," of whom many had told him, but in whom he had never believed: Now he had truly seen the dead.

In 1123 in Saxony, Germany, in the diocese of Worms, the residents witnessed nightly a multitude of armed horsemen leaving in troops from a nearby mountain, only to return to it at the hour of nones. Bearing a cross before them, they questioned one of the riders, who said he and the rest were indeed dead, the souls of knights killed in battle.

Orderic of Vitalis, cleric of the abbey of St. Evroult in the diocese of Liseaux in Normandy wrote in 1133 of the priest Walchelin's encounter with them on the night of Jan. 1, 1091 near the church of Bonneval. Walchelin was petitioned by some of the spirits to deliver messages to their surviving loved ones, but refused to heed them; foolishly he attempted to steal one of the riderless horses to bring back as proof of his experience, but was burned by the horse's red-hot bridle, and again by the hand of a knight who caught him at it. The scar on the back of his neck proved to be the only souvenir he was able to show to Orderic. Walchelin was saved only by the intercession of his own brother, lately dead, who was part of the procession.

The description of the strange procession as a hunt first appears in England, in the Peterborough Chronicle entry for the year of 1127.

"Then soon thereafter many men saw and heard many hunters hunting. The hunters were black and large and loathly, and their hounds all black and broad-eyed and loathly, and they rode on black horses and black bucks. This was seen in the same way in the town Burch and in all the woods from that town to Stanford, and the monks heard the horns blowing, that they blew at night. Trustworthy men who watched at night said that they thought that there might lit well have been about twenty or thirty horn-blowers. This was seen and heard from when they came thither all that Lenten-tide to Easter. This was its incoming; of its out-going we can not yet say. God fore see."

In the Peterborough Chronicle, the chronicler attests the Wild Hunt's appearance at the appointment of a disastrous abbot for the monastery. Around the year 1132, the anonymous monk wrote:

Tha huntes waeron swarte and micele and lardlice, and here hondes ealle swarte and bradegede and lardlice, and hi ridone on swarte hors and on swarte bucces.... ("Then the hunters were black and large and terrifying, and their hounds were all black and broad-eyed and terrifying, and they rode on black horses and black goats....")

This particular Wild Hunt was banished by the intervention of the monks of the monastery and the local nobility.

While these Wild Hunts are recorded by clergymen, and portrayed as diabolic, late medieval English romance like Sir Orfeo, the hunters are rather from a faery otherworld, as in Celtic countries, where the Wild Hunt was the hosting of the Sidhe, the fairies; its leaders also varied, but they included Gwydion, Nuada, and Herne the Hunter. Thereafter, the description of a ghostly hunt does not appear until the folklore collections of the nineteenth century. By that time, however, it seems to have been thoroughly established.

For the Strassburger Chronicle of 1516, Jakob Trausch writes that "Not only this year, but also many years since, one has heard that thing named the Wuetten-Hor in all lands, particularly Alsace, Breisgau, and other places, not only by night, but also by day, in woods and mountains. By night they went over the fields with drums and pipes, also through the city with great shrieking, with lights ... “

in Freiburg a woman saw her man who had fallen in war, and therefore ran into the horde, to him whose head was split, she ran to him and bound his head together."

Hans Sachs' poem, "Das wutend heer der kleynen dieb" (1539) describes the furious host in gruesome detail, with the ravens flapping above and plucking out the eyes of the dead, till at last "there came one behind, who had been hanged the same day, had still his eyes and saw me."

The procession of the dead is, as one might expect, closely connected with foreboding death. In the Schwabian Zimmerische Chronik (1564-76), it is described how a nobleman, von Seckendorf, sees the grisly nature of his own death and has it prophesied by the furious host a year before the event, which duly takes place.

In Northern Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, the Wild Hunt seems to have come more and more into prominence, overshadowing the Furious Host described by Scheffes in the 1600s; the Hunt aspect never appears in Norway, however. The "Wilde Jagd" described by Flörke in Rostock, 1832, has aspects of both.

"... the Wild Hunt, also called the Furious Host and in Mecklenburg the Wohl, a thing, of which I heard many shuddersome tales in my childhood and also afterward. Our field-workers ... were set in fear by the Wild Hunt, so that they only with trembling dared to go to work in the evening. First they heard a dog-barking of rough and fine voices through one another; as these came nearer, they saw many glowing coals flying through the air, and then, if they had not already run away, roared the whole host with horrifying raging, barking, blowing, as with hunting horns, and hard breathing among them. In my youth it was considered a wholly definite thing, that these were old robberknights, who had no rest in the grave, and for a little while drove forward through the Overworld with their hunting hounds, as they had been used to in life; a pious priest told me, however, that it was no one other thou the Devil himself with several evil angels, who amused themselves by frightening humans. The Devil took on for this the shape of the old heathen god Wodan, under which he had previously been worshipped in these lands, from which also the name Wohl came, which was corrupted from Wodan."

A rare modern example of a Wild Hunt legend dates from the 1950s: a group of boys vandalizing trees in Windsor Great Park came across a horn. Two of the boys refused to touch it, but the third picked it up and blew it. The call was answered by the cry of the hunt and the baying of hounds. The boys ran for a nearby church, but the boy who blew the horn fell behind. The hounds grew closer, there was the sound of a loosed arrow and the boy who blew the horn fell dead. No arrow was found, nor was a wound.