Good accounts of the Northumbrian Dunnie can be found both in the Denham Tracts (Vol.II, pp.157-159), and in Henderson's Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties (p.263). According to Denham, the Dunnie is an individual spirit, from Hazelrigg on Belford Moor. It is surmised that he was originally the ghost of a Border reiver, who was caught and killed robbing a granary. He had a considerable amount of plunder hidden in one of the caves in a crag called Bowden Doors, and he died without disclosing it, which is one of the prime reasons for haunting. The rhyme which he was in the habit of reciting, and which is given by Henderson, certainly bears out this assumption:

Cocken heugh there's gear enough,

    Collier heugh there's mair,

For I've lost the key o' the Bounders,

    An' I'm ruined for evermair.

But if he is a ghost he has all the shape-shifting powers and the practical-joking tastes of the regular goblin, the Picktree Brag, the Hedley Kow and others of their tribe. A favourite form he took was that of a horse, though Mrs Balfour in County Folk-Lore (Vol.IV, p.14) seems to have come across him more often as a donkey. He would assume the form of the farmer's own horse, and one of his favourite times to play pranks was when the farmer rode to fetch a midwife. He would carry the farmer to fetch the midwife prosperously enough, but on the way back after the birth he would slip from under them with a loud whicker, dropping them in the stream. Or he would pretend to be the ploughman's steady old plough-horse, allow himself to be harnessed, led out and hitched to the plough, and then suddenly disappear, leaving his harness fallen to the ground, and be seen galloping and plunging away into the distance. He seemed sometimes to be seen in semi-human form, for a crag above one of the quarries was shown as a favourite spot for him to sit through the night dangling his legs over the cliff. Even in 1870, however, he was spoken of in the past rather than in the present.