The 2019 Boggart Census: Surveying the Supernatural
Simon Young is gathering in material for a boggart census, a survey of the last people who grew up with talk of the north’s most mysterious folk monster. Can you help?
The Weardale Fairies
‘The Weardale Fairies’. Extracted from English Fairy Tales and Legends by Rosalind Kerven, published by Batsford. Illustration by Arthur Rackham, Mary Evans Picture Library.
Il Gatto Mammone: The Italian Legend of the Cat King (Or Cat Demon?)
The Gatto Mammone is an influent folktale that very few people remember.
Fairy Folklore: Come Away, O Human Child
To be led astray, Peter Pan style, by a fairy – ‘pixie led’ – is an old fear from isolated communities where weather and terrain seemed to judge and punish.
Piskies, Knockers and Tommyknockers – Cornwall’s Misunderstood Folklore
The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation addresses everything from piskies – south west Britain’s fairies – to mermaids, harvest festivals, a corpse visiting his betrothed, and the giants long noted for making the Cornish peninsula their home. And amid all this are the spirits of the mines – knockers together with the tommyknockers, their New World descendants.