The Hounds are a great pack of spectral hounds with black fur sometimes wolf like and whose eyes and tongues burn with a greenish fire.  Generally, however, they are not seen, only heard passing overhead on cloudy or stormy nights.

They are usually part of the Wild Hunt together with the huntsmen and their horses but storm the night alone in some stories. Solitary hounds are usually from different myths.

Robert Graves in The White Goddess (Farrar, Strauss, and Cudahy, 1948) mentions the Cwm Annwm, the Hounds of Hell with white bodies and red ears, from a Welsh myth. They were ghost dogs which appeared only at night to foretell death, sent from Annwn to seek out corpses and human souls, described in an early Welsh poem as small, speckled and greyish-red, chained and led by a black-horned figure.

In the Welsh 'Tale of Culhwch and Olwen', Culhwych's quest for the hand of Olwen is associated with a number of tasks connected with supernatural dogs: one of his 'labours' is to seek the two whelps of a great bitch called Rhymni, who is in the shape of a she-wolf and extraordinarily swift.

In the west of England they might be known as the Yeth Hounds or Wisht Hounds;  in Cornwall Dando and his Dogs or the Devil and his Dandy Dogs, in Durham or Yorkshire they were Gabriel's Hounds or Gabble Ratchets, from the medieval word for dogs, 'ratchets,' and 'gabares,' which means corpse.

According to Henderson, in the neighborhood of Leeds the Gabble Retchets were likewise thought to be the souls of infants who had died before baptism, doomed for ever to flit round their parents' homes.

Finally, there is the case of the Seven Whistlers, a flight of birds (usually geese or swans) that deal in ill fortune and death. If you hear all seven at once then its the end of the world. Jabez Allies (1846) writes:

"I have been informed by Mr. John Pressdee of Worcester, that the country people used to talk a good deal about the 'Seven Whistlers' when he was a boy, and that he frequently heard his late grandfather, John Pressdee, who lived at Cuckold's Knoll, in Suckley, say that he oftentimes, at night, when he happened to be upon the hill by his house, heard six out of the 'Seven Whistlers' pass over his head, but that no more than six of them were ever heard by him, or by any one else to whistle at one time, and that should the seven whistle together the world would be at an end."

Their appearance was also a portent of doom. - in the North they are generally known as the Gabriel Hounds, in Devon the Yeth (Heath) or Wisht Hounds