From the village of St. Kassian a young fellow went one evening to a distant farm to visit his sweetheart, and it was getting already dark. The youth heard several times the Orco calling out from a distance, but he paid no attention to it, and continued quietly his way. All at once he saw a little empty cart, dragged by four cats, run across the road; at this sight he was rather frightened, but still continued his way, not being able to make out what it all meant, when, on a sudden, there arrived a big black dog, with fiery lynx eyes, which grew bigger and bigger the nearer he came. “That is the Orco,” thought the boy; so he crossed himself, and ran home as fast as his legs could carry him.
The dog bounded constantly after him for about a distance of three miles, and his fiery tongue hung for more than half a yard out of his jaws. The saliva which dropped from his mouth was like blue flaming fire, and burned like sulphur, filling the air around with a suffocating smell. The boy reached home, unharmed by the dog; but he had run so hard that his lungs became diseased, and he was always suffering, till death released him a few months afterwards.
“The cats which dragged the cart over the road,” said the people who recounted this legend, “were hags, of whom there were thousands about at that time.”
One day two young men of Ornella, in the Buchenstein valley, started on a brilliant night to pay a visit in a neighbouring village to their loves. They had scarcely left home when they noticed that they were followed by the gigantic Orco, in the form of a wild bull, who first walked quietly behind them, and then, as they began to run, changed himself into a huge ball, which rolled after them, bounding over high rocks, and alighting again on the ground close to them, with so much force and such a terrible noise that they were afraid of being crushed to death.
In their anxiety, they took the way over the meadows to the village of Valazzo, and jumping over the fence, which they had no time to open or break down, fell into the yard, at the foot of a large crucifix, which stands there, and embraced the cross, in a dying condition, with their arms. The Orco appeared at the fence, though now in human form; but the poor youths were so terrified that they dare no longer regard him, and therefore were unable to describe his appearance. He beat with his hands upon the fence-bars so furiously, that the marks of his blows remained for years afterwards, as though they had been branded in by red-hot irons, until the wood decayed and a new fencing had to be put up; but the saving cross still stands upon the same spot.
A peasant boy of Enneberg, walking through the deep and vast forest of Plaiswald, heard from afar the voices of men shouting, and took them for woodcutters, so, according to the usage of the country, he answered them, and shouted several times just in the same tones as the voices he had heard. But then the horrible idea rushed into his mind that it might have been the Orco, and, at the same instant, he heard it quite close, for if one imitates the Orco, the monster arrives as fast as lightning. The youth tried to run away, but he felt as though petrified; all around him became darkness, and he fell senseless to the ground.