Brittany's Servant of Death

The Ankou is a death-figure specific to Breton folklore, imagined as a tall, gaunt figure, sometimes described as the spirit of the last person to die in a parish within the past year, obliged to serve for the following year as death's attendant, driving a cart or wagon that collects the souls of those about to die. Unlike a personification of Death itself, the Ankou is understood as an office or duty passed from the recently dead to the next recently dead in a continual rotation parish by parish, a detail folklorists treat as distinctive within the wider European death-personification tradition, which more often imagines Death as a single unchanging figure such as the Grim Reaper rather than a role filled by an ordinary rotating local person.

Sightings and warnings associated with the Ankou, the creak of his cart wheels heard at night, or an encounter with him on a lonely road, function in Breton oral tradition as omens of an impending death in the community, and the figure remains genuinely current in regional Breton folklore and identity rather than existing solely as historical record.