Sometimes he is disguised as a black goat with wide wicked horns. He clings onto mortal's shoulders until the mortal drops dead or blesses himself three times. His disguise is also a bird, bat, and sometimes a donkey. 

Most often he appears as a terrible black horse, huge and sleek, breathing blue flames, with eyes of yellow fire, a snort like thunder, a smell like sulpher, a stride that clears mountains and a human voice deep as a cave. With a sound sometimes like the head-on crashing of trains, sometimes like the ripping of trees from the earth, it haunts rivers and frightens fishermen and sailors so much, they are fearful and often times won't approach the land. Sometimes it follows the ships to sea. Often at night, as the black horse, the pooka will take a man for a ride clear around the country at breakneck speed until he loses his grip and flies headlong into a bog ditch. 

Yet for all its black deeds, the pooka now is a tame creature compared to what it was before A man named Brian curbed it. In ancient days the pooka was lord over all that went forth after dark, except those on missions of mercy. All roads belonged to it; and few who travlled them lived to tell. For the pooka kicked hard enough to crush human bones and could lift a man like an empty sack onto its back and jump with him into the sea, so deep that he drowned. Other times it sprang over a cliff and let the man tumble to the bottom. 

But Brian tamed the pooka, with a charm made from three hairs from a pooka's tail and thrown round its neck like a bridle. At the first pull, the hairs were transformed into threads of steel. Crossing himself and mounting, he fiercely reined the beast and rode it until it heaved with exhaustion and promised never to kill another man. 

Since then it takes only drunkards on its madcap ridings and always returns them to the ditch where it found them, no worse for some bruises and a drunken tale. 

When it rains with the sun shining that means that it will be out that night. When berries are killed by frost let it be known that it is the pooka's spit which is on them, not frost, - they shouldn't be eaten.