The spooky season is officially upon us. If you’re looking for reading recommendations to get you in the mood, we’ve compiled some of our favorite Longreads pieces below. Consider Lesley Finn’s “Final Girl, Terrible Place,” a sharp essay on horror films, the male gaze on the female body, and the American patriarchy. Dive into Jeanna Kadlec’s commentary on the witch/mother archetype in the Maleficent films, which is part of her Deconstructing Disney series. Or try “The Corpse Rider,” Colin Dickey’s piece about Lafcadio Hearn, the famous chronicler of Japanese culture, including its ghost stories and folk tales.

We’ve also gathered editors’ picks we’ve highlighted over the past few years about haunted houses, the ghosts of history and in our own lives, famous fictional monsters, and other monsters and figures of evil on our screens—and in our bedrooms.

Sadly, toward the end of the piece, Johnson reports that Holtzhausen himself has been diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s, but ends on a somewhat hopeful note that others will follow in his footsteps — including Andrias Mangundu, the son of another accused witch, Frankilde Haingura — to continue educating Namibia’s communities about dementia, and the destructive role that witchdoctors have played in the region.

Ngombe wasn’t bewitched: Her behavior was changing in ways that match typical symptoms of early onset dementia. But she lived in a cultural landscape shaped by a deeply ingrained belief system that blames everything from heart attacks to poor harvests on the supernatural evildoings of witches and wizards. A witchdoctor had told Ngombe’s brother that his life was tethered to hers — if she died, he would die three days later. Therefore, he didn’t want to let her out of his sight. And so time passed — five years, 10 years, 20 years, and she remained alone in the hut.

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Lisa Richardson | Longreads | April 2020 | 15 minutes (4,084 words)

On a Friday afternoon, pre-COVID-19, my husband dropped some ice-cubes into glasses, ready to make us screwdrivers and cheers to surviving another week of working/parenting/wondering where the hell the years were going, only, the vodka bottle was empty.

“Oh yeah,” I said, my eyes sliding sideways, trying to not cause a fuss, “I used it for medicine.” The previous week, the kitchen counter had been cluttered with a giant mason jar full of oily plant matter. “Balm of Gilead!” I explained, brightly, as he wiped away the breakfast crumbs around it.

“But what is it?”

“Cottonwood tips in oil.”

His eyes had flicked, then, over to the brand-new bottle of extra virgin olive oil that was now nearly empty, as I enumerated the medicinal benefits of this old herbal remedy (and all this from a tree in our backyard!). Twenty-four years together means I could hear the abacus in his brain clicking, as he wordlessly calculated the cost per milliliter of a gallon jar of plant matter masticating in top-shelf olive oil, against the cost per unit of a bottle of generic aspirin tables, overlaid with the probability of me losing interest in this project.

First the olive oil. Now the vodka for dozens of little jars of tinctures — garden herbs and weeds soaking in now-undrinkable booze. My midlife quest to attune more deeply to the rhythms of the natural world was starting to incur unexpected, but real, costs.

He was quiet, as he opened the fridge and pulled out a beer instead.

* * *

In my defense, I could have pointed my finger at Natalie Rousseau, a yoga teacher living in my 5,000 person village, who I’d first encountered leading a solstice yoga class billed as a way to survive the madness of the holidays (in slightly more gracious language). Thanks to her offerings of insight I did survive the commercial horror of the “festive” season, and a few months later, as the new moon entered Aries (whatever that actually means), I plonked down $200 to subscribe to her online 13 Moons course — my foray into “slowing down and being more present,” as I pitched it to my husband when he inquired about the strange entry on the credit card statement.

But I did not deflect the simmering tension between us by naming Natalie as the instigator of these “kitchen witch” experiments. Even though I am not a member of any kind of coven or cult, (I don’t think book club counts), I know deep in my bones to never throw another woman onto the fire for helping you. That has been done too many times.

But there it is. The word. Witch. The wound.

* * *

Every day, after COVID-19 entered our world, Natalie Rousseau has responded with an offering, a teaching — a meditation, an ancient mantra of protection, a yoga practice for managing anxiety, a how-to video on harvesting poplar medicine. It’s as if she’s been resourcing herself for this moment to develop the richest arsenal imaginable, to navigate, not the public health crisis, but the billion personal crises each of us is forced to confront as life as we know it slams into pandemic mode. It’s not what I thought a witch would do, if I ever thought about them at all.

Natalie doesn’t look like a witch either — not in the way I conceived it for last year’s Halloween costume, with my long black skirt, dollar-store pointy hat, and heavy black eyeliner, walking alongside my 6-year-old vampire-werewolf. Natalie is petite, just a few inches over five feet, her long blond hair still evoking the decade she spent living in a west coast surf town, her chest and lean muscled arms bright with full sleeve flowery tattoos and Mary Oliver quotes. She moves like a dancer, demonstrating yoga poses as if she’s transcending gravity. As a teacher, she speaks exactly, even in Sanskrit, and guides movement precisely, padding gently and soundlessly through the room, making an adjustment here, offering an instruction there.

So, I was surprised when she used the word “witch” to launch her new online offering, The Witches Wheel. The lure was irresistible. Natalie was claiming the word “witch” without flinching, without anger, without provocation, not as a way to reclaim feminine power and stick it to the men, warranted as that may be: It was essentially an invitation to observe the cycle of the seasons.

A threshold beckoned.

* * *

Natalie, a recent empty-nester, lives with her husband Paul and two dogs in a modest townhome, with a creek and a dozen rogue gardens installed by various residents running behind it. The garage is full of motorbikes. The porch is swept clean on the day I visit, six months into the 13 Moons program, wanting to talk with her about this radical word and why, in a world still unsure what to do with powerful women, she’s not afraid that she’s exposing herself to pitchforks and fires, haters, and trolls.

A tea blend of her own mixing — vanilla chaga chai — is brewing on the stove in an open saucepan. She tends to it, as I settle in, sneaking glimpses around the room, looking for evidence of witchcraft — pentagrams, cloaks, bottled frogs. Nothing. The space is uncluttered, a throw-rug on the armchair, a couple of stark white deer skulls are mounted, European-style, on a wall against a reclaimed barn board — definitely more Soho chic than occult-goth. Her husband returns from town, where he has picked up fresh croissants for us. He’s tall and strong, with a tightly cropped red beard — he looks like a guy you’d run into at the gym, at the surf break, at the hardware store.

“So, what’s it like living with a witch?” I ask him as Natalie attends to our tea, a light-hearted question sprouting out of the great compost of fears I am thinking. Is it impossibly hard to be with a woman who comfortably claims her own power, magic, cycles, voice? What kind of a man can love and honor a witch? And lurking deep beneath it all: Will my husband be one of them?

Paul rolls his eyes, overly-dramatically, pointing up to the light fixture in the kitchen — light bulbs housed in mason jars of all sizes, evoking summer cabins and fireflies and Kinfolk magazine dinner party lanterns. “I made this for her because everything ends up in jars. Have you seen inside these cupboards?” He walks around the house, in faux-exasperation, opening doors to reveal neat stacks of jars, full of dried petals, leaves, syrups, tonics, salves, salts. “And there’s more upstairs!” If it hadn’t been for the dinner party they’d hosted the previous night, most of their apartment’s horizontal surfaces would be covered in jars, he tells me, and the front porch would have housed a dead raven and a dead Cooper’s hawk.

“She’s always sending me out in search of dead things,” he jokes. He picks up roadkill in case she can salvage feathers or skulls.

“When he first met me, I was already a skull collector, and now he goes and finds them for me and brings them back,” says Natalie. “He’s gotten really good at living with witchy stuff.”

The two of them are remarkably self-sufficient — an animal lover (“he loves animals more than people”), Paul realized veganism left him tired and undernourished, so took up hunting to procure his own meat humanely; one of the deer skulls mounted on the wall was harvested this fall, its meat now fills their freezer. They grow a garden, wildcraft, eat well. There is an ease between them — a tidal push and pull as they navigate their modest shared space and the morning routine, without evidence of fake niceness, of power trips or struggles.

Witchcraft, in Natalie Rousseau’s mind, is too non-dogmatic and non-hierarchical to submit to a single all-encompassing definition. “As a practice, it’s so highly individual,” she says, “but across the board, it is very place-based, land-based and body-based. For me, it’s about cultivating a relationship with your own body, your own mind, your emotions, and subtle sensing faculties. It’s learning how to trust your intuition. It’s about reclaiming your own instincts, but also being able to feel: this is what stress feels like in my body, this is what relaxation feels like, this is what it feels like to say yes to something out of a sense of obligation or pressure, this is what it feels like to have a boundary. This is what it feels like when I’m safe. These cues come to us from our bodies. It has to be, for it to work well, otherwise, you’re always reaching outside yourself for another authority.”

This is what she wants to help women, particularly, to reclaim: their sense that they are the first authority on themselves, that they can trust their bodies’ wisdom.

“The biggest thing I want to share with people,” says Natalie of her teaching and online courses, “is how to trust themselves. Everyone can very easily make the medicines that their household would need for common household complaints — colds and flus and chest colds and menstrual cramps — so many basic things that anyone can make very simply, quite affordably. I’m not anti-pharmaceutical. There are many medications people have to take daily to live. And if I have a serious infection, I’m going to take antibiotics; if I am seriously ill, I am going to go to the doctor; if I have any kind of trauma, I’m going to be so grateful for that form of medicine. But I believe the role kitchen medicine has is in the maintenance and prevention of illness.”

One of her biggest laments, though, as she makes videos and handouts and shares them with her online community, is that even people who have paid to do her course don’t feel that they have the time to take it into their kitchens. “Making a tincture is literally pouring vodka over plant materials and leaving it on your counter for four weeks!” she says. But it is easier for most people to just buy one online and have it delivered to their doorstep. “I am saddened by how easily women give their power over. This is the biggest thing I’ve noticed as a teacher in the past couple of years — how quickly women will say, ‘but how do you do this? I don’t know how to do this! I’m afraid to try this because I might not be good at it, I might be doing it wrong. I’m an imposter.’ I really struggle with this. Where is it coming from?”

But she knows. We have relinquished our power, over a thousand years or more, of wounding, of witch-burnings, of patriarchy either convincing us we have none or forcibly stripping it away, (hello Harvey Weinstein), until all we feel empowered to do, now, in 2020, is consume. And we’ve been doing that with all our might.

We override the listening, we ignore the nudges, we push through, like good soldiers. “Most people are running so hard,” observes Natalie. “Our culture is so focussed on productivity. We are so overly heroic — it’s all or nothing. I can’t do something unless I’m an expert. I don’t want to try. But this is a craft. It’s a path of education.”

Natalie’s invitation is gentle, and she’s crafted her online course to serve that: Start with one plant and learn its taste, its smell. Spend five minutes a day on meditation or in conscious ritual and begin to notice what’s going on in your nervous system, in your mind, in your body.

Don’t get so distracted by the word witch, that you fail to notice that it is connected to craft. Witchcraft, for Natalie, is a path of learning “how to trust and problem solve, from within, knowing that we are in a system of power that, for better, for worse, will strip us of any ability to trust ourselves and to always feel empty so we have to keep buying more stuff.”

When she says this, a deep thrill of recognition hums in me, accompanied by a shiver of fear. Those are revolutionary things to say out loud, to cast into the open air. I recognize it viscerally as the kind of talk that gets people in trouble.

* * *

Last summer, before I met Natalie, I had stepped from my backyard patio stones onto freshly cut grass and spied the sinuous form of a wandering garter snake. I leaned in quickly, excitedly, about to call my 6-year-old over to glimpse the garden visitor before it shimmied away. But it was eerily still. Ugly slash wounds marked its body. It was dead. Innocent victim to the ride-on lawnmower. Obliterated by our oblivion.

“Oh no,” I muttered. “I’m so sorry!”

I had already begun to wake up to the natural world, it’s rhythms, it’s offerings of medicine, it’s otherness, but it had come with a shadow side, a growing despair at what we were doing to the world. Even without a malicious intention, I was causing death and destruction — just mowing the lawn, drinking my coffee, wiping my ass: My actions, all our human activity, had compounding impacts that were destroying the snakes, the ocean, the atmosphere, the forests, the icecaps — beyond repair.

I wanted my garden to be a habitat. I wanted the bees to waggle-dance directions to my sunflowers to their hive-mates, I wanted the wandering garter snakes to nest in their hibernacula through the winter and bask in the long grass in the summer, I wanted to lie on my back and watch butterflies dance through the flowers and the hummingbirds zoom in and out, I wanted to inhabit innocence again.

I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. My penitence froze me in place, scared to make a move for fear of ruining something else. Then, regret overriding my squeamishness, I fetched the flat-bladed shovel and edged it under the dead snake. I carried her body over to the vegetable patch, and in a space between the beds, where the mower never goes, I laid her down. I picked marigolds and calendula from around the garden, where they’d been planted to keep the snails away, and lay the bright orange blossoms in a circle around her.

Grandmother snake, I whispered, hoping that some force that exists beyond the definitively dead snake at my feet, might spread the word among the entire species, “I’m sorry. We didn’t mean it. I will try to be more careful.”

It was a made-up ritual, the kind that a kid might perform deep in her dream world at the bottom of the garden, and it made my 44 year-old-self feel a little bit better. At least I’d made a gesture of repair, had expressed my desire to return into balance with the living world around me. If it had any effect, I’d never know. I went back inside, said nothing.

A few days later, out in the garden, my husband tripped over the skeleton of a decomposing snake, ringed by wilted flowers, half consumed by ants.

“That was spooky,” he confronted me. “What’s going on? Are you some kind of witch?”

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Natalie has always been comfortable with the word. Now she’s having fun inviting people to consider the archetype, circle it, unpack it, stumble upon some kind of recognition: Wait a second! Maybe I am a witch! 

“It’s cool how people in the western world can take a description that has been used mostly as a slur, and turn it around to use as something empowering,” she says.

For thousands of years, witch was a term used to incite violence against women. By the most conservative estimates, half a million people, mostly women, were executed in the European witch craze between 1300 and 1650. Accusations of witchcraft were used against women, says Rousseau, “in ways that were extremely dangerous and terrifying. It was really about getting power from them, and getting land back. So, to use a word like that in an empowered way, even today, you have to know you’re safe to do it. And it’s important to realize that in many places in the world, it’s still not safe for women to say that. But if we can, in safe places, take that word and turn it around, that, to me, is extremely powerful.”

Natalie herself embodies empowerment. Not in the traditional way I have come to recognize power — as someone standing over, dominating someone else, her source of power comes from within.

She doesn’t need to take any from her partner.

“Do you find this relationship at all emasculating?” I joke to Natalie’s husband.

“I don’t. Not at all. No,” he replies.

“We’ve always given each other space to be ourselves.”

But that’s not always a guarantee of safety.

If it is dangerous to be an empowered woman in the world, then it’s dangerous, too, for the men who love them.

Lyla June Johnston is an author and activist of Diné and European heritage. Her inquiry into her disowned European heritage led to a realization: The millions of women burned alive, drowned alive, dismembered alive, beaten, raped and otherwise tortured as so-called, “witches,” were not witches at all. They were the medicine people of old Europe. Her lens, as a contemporary indigenous woman, and as a survivor of sexual violence, helped her identify that those were the women who understood the herbal medicines, the ones who prayed with stones, the ones who passed on sacred chants. And the all-out warfare of the witch burnings didn’t just harm the women. It had a profound effect on the men who loved them, their husbands, sons, brothers. She recognizes the echo of this in the story of her own time, of her own people. “Nothing makes a man go mad like watching the women of his family get burned alive. If the men respond to this hatred with hatred, the hatred is passed on. And who can blame them? While peace and love are the correct response to hatred, it is not an easy response by any means.”

How many men have kept their women down, tried to keep them at home, have become the handcuffs that the women fought against because they were answering to their own unarticulated primal instinct to keep them safe?

Natalie Rousseau speculates, “I am sure historically you had lots of husbands telling their wives to tone it down, not because they didn’t respect their power, but because they were genuinely afraid. I’d apply that to any women described as uppity — getting involved politically, or getting involved in local stuff that’s happening, fighting for the environment: Stop getting noticed so much. This could be dangerous.”

Some dangers are too great to be able to protect each other from. And so we turn the fight on each other — little domestic power-trips that distract us from the fact that we’ve relinquished all our power any way to the Great Machine.

* * *

My tentative inquiries into witchcraft, becoming fluent in my own moods and emotions, and paying attention to the seasons, barely prepared me for the abrupt slow-the-fuck-down order that came when COVID-19 landed in British Columbia, in my village, as school broke for spring break. The emergency handbrake was pulled. Everything came to a squealing stop — all my plans, canceled; all the stores, closing; the whole damn world, under house arrest and in a panic. The whiplash from the stunning speed of that shift has left my whole being hypersensitive to any sudden movement, to being jerked around. But the first things I have staked my trust in, in that space of uncertainty, were Natalie’s teachings: First, trust your body. Pause. Listen.

In self-imposed isolation with my husband and just-turned-7-year-old, I dance with anxiety and curiosity and disconnection and too-much-information. The well-trodden pathways we have all been racing along, flexing our power and exercising our entitlements as consumers, are suddenly bordered up with emergency tape. This invitation that Natalie has been dripping out, month after month, takes root. There is far more potency available to us, than shopping, driving, holidaying, consuming, endlessly moving around the planet.

There is potency in all the feelings that have been showing up at my door. Oh, good morning frustration. Ah grief, yes, I suppose you’d like a cup of tea. Hello there, existential terror, I wondered when you’d pop by. There is potency in sitting with my back against a huge cedar tree and listening, in slowing down so much that I can give my 7-year-old my full attention. There is potency even in my words, when I soothe him down from a tantrum by saying, “you know, this is a really hard time for everyone in the whole world right now because no one knows what’s going to happen and no one can play with their friends. I’m really proud of you.” And I can feel his body relax into this space of being acknowledged in his struggles and his efforts.

I don’t know if there are any medicinal properties in the tincture of St John’s Wort and valerian that I drop into water and hand my husband, to gentle his nervous system. Or in the jar of immune-boosting oxymel, that I brewed up with grated ginger and turmeric and orange peel, and shake every day. But even if it’s a placebo, there’s a relief for me in feeling I can do something, can offer my people some kind of healing intention in a little glass, that I can acknowledge that this is hard for my husband too, and that acknowledgment isn’t a concession that takes away from my own sense of struggle.

For decades, we’ve bought into the illusion that our power is as consumers. Now that stores are closing and the shelves are emptying and we have to stay home and not immediately indulge every whim that arises, we all feel powerless. But that was never our truest source of power. There’s another source that we can all plug back into, our deep relationship and interbeing with the life force. Maybe, this is our threshold moment. Maybe, this is a chance to craft a few little spells, to speak the words of the world we long to inhabit — a place where the currency of kindness and wonder flow, where humans return to a deep memory of belonging among the plants and creatures, and to brew up a cup of tea, light a candle, and dream it into existence. Maybe it’s an invitation to say, “I’m sorry, we didn’t mean to, I will try and be more careful,” and to build a little altar, even if you feel kind of cray cray doing it. Let your nervous system settle as you invent some small ritual, (just ask your inner 5-year-old for guidance, she probably remembers exactly what to do), and make a gesture of repair.

“I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have on my Apocalypse team,” I tell my husband, the night the global virus countertops 400,000. He’s been chopping wood, auditing the pantry, getting our kid across the finish line of the LEGO project that has absorbed him for four days. My husband was a farm kid. He’s always been practical, my polar opposite. Even when we have battled each other, (am I giving up too much of my power to him? If I acknowledge his pain and his needs, will that cancel mine out?) I’ve always known he would do anything to keep me safe. “Not that I can request an upgrade now,” I joke. “But I bet you’re glad to be stuck with me. One always wants a daydreamer at your side in a pinch.”

“Oh yeah,” he spoofs me: “’ The stock market is collapsing, let me just go check my Tarot cards.’”

We laugh. And hold each other. We can’t buy our way out of this. None of us. Our entire species, our global community, is being vividly reminded that we are all in this together, inextricably connected, epidemiologically entwined, in our vulnerability and our sweet potential. We didn’t need Amazon and airlines and online shopping to know what the witches have been telling us all this time. All the power we need is right here — between us, around us, within us. We just have to remember it.

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories (and some of her friends’ favorites, too). 

What is a witch, anyway? Is it an old woman with green skin stirring a pot of something weird and stinky in an animated fairy tale? Is it a man who lives in the wilderness in isolation and emerges only to perform specific rituals to bring the rains? Is it a hippie chick in Berkeley in flowing fabrics appropriating cultural totems and symbols in order to get a desperate wealthy tech couple fertile and baby-ready? Based on my research, the answers seem to be “sure,” “yes,” and “I mean, I guess so.”

The witch trend is real, and it’s spectacular. It’s also annoying, boring, ridiculous, and silly by turns. It can be beautiful. Witchcraft is lived spirituality that doesn’t fit into the prescribed rubric of mainstream religion in a given societal setting. In my experience, it is not incompatible with a belief in science, in the concrete world, or even with other religious beliefs. I was raised Catholic, and knew plenty of Catholics who engaged in tarot, scrying with a crystal ball, or reading tea leaves. For all the ways in which Catholicism messed me up, I’m grateful that I was raised surrounded by beautiful images of a divine mother goddess, whether or not she was actually just a scared teen mom who came up with a really great backstory and conned a village and, by proxy, the world. (God, teen girls really are magic.)

I’m a middle-class white woman in Los Angeles, and it’s easy enough for me to put on pretty crystals of indeterminate origin and burn some incense and tell everybody I’m a witch while doing Stevie Nicks cosplay and talking about feelings. In 2018, that’s on trend for women who look like me, live near me, and have my type of education and background. And my path to witchcraft is not particularly dramatic or fascinating: the religion in which I was raised did me very few favors as a queer woman, I rejected it as a corrupt international corporation, and I kind of made up my own thing with some help from psychology books, cognitive behavioral therapy, the occult shops I began visiting in middle school, mainstream American English translations of Buddhist and Hindu texts, yoga classes taught by women with expensive tattoos, AA meetings and literature, and a hippie partridge in an organic local pear tree. Nothing mind-blowing or inventive, and that’s okay — it’s my own path to the sacred, and it helps. Also, I’m a sucker for candles.

But in seeking to create this list of articles and essays on witchcraft, I wanted very much to include a diversity of voices beyond blog posts about how “The Craft” was fun to watch. So here you are, and may you enjoy all the weirdness that follows.

1. “[Protection Edition] Uplifting Tituba: Protecting Witches of Color Then and Now” (Brianna Suslovic, Witches Rise, December 2016)

Suslovic recounts the tale of Tituba, a slave brought from the West Indies to America to serve in the settlement of the radical religious sect that dominated colonial New England. Tituba became the scapegoat for the Salem witch trials, but too often ignored is the fact that Tituba was beaten until she “confessed” to witchcraft: Suslovic writes, “As a slave in the colonies, Tituba acted in self-protection. One might call it self-preservation at the hands of a physically-violent and systemically-violent scenario.” It’s a short piece, and one well worth your time — Suslovic handily connects the notion of witches and witchcraft to wider society: “To me, witchcraft as a practice promises not only survival and healing, but also liberation  —  from respectability, from internalized oppression, from the apparent necessity of resilience that often blinds us from observing the real necessity for structural change.”

2. “Love Notes From The Universe: An Interview With Diego ‘Yung Pueblo’ Perez” (Bri Luna, The Hoodwitch, June 2017)

I first found Diego Perez’s work through writer/producer Travon Free’s Instagram account. Luna describes Perez aptly: “Diego offers beautiful short poems and messages that feel as if they were left behind for you via sticky note by a divine guardian angel.” It’s good to get to read him in longer sentences rather than the snippets one gets on Instagram, though those are lovely as well. Here’s what resonated most with me: “My advice to people is to find a healing technique that gives you real results, one that challenges you, but does not overwhelm you. There is a great variety of techniques out there, different types of meditations, yoga practices, energy healing techniques, and so much more that can really give us tangible benefits in our lives. What matters is that we find one that suits us and that we use it consistently.”

3. “The Year Of The Witch” (Pamela Grossman, Huffington Post, July 2013)

I was at Pam Grossman’s wonderfully witchy wedding outside New Hope, Pennsylvania, several years back, and it was a hell of a good time. As an author, the host of the Witch Wave podcast, the creator of the WitchEmoji sticker pack, the organizer of academic symposia on witchcraft, and more, Pam marries the practical with the ethereal every day. She writes, “The archetype of the witch is long overdue for celebration. Daughters, mothers, queens, virgins, wives, et al. derive meaning from their relation to another person. Witches, on the other hand, have power on their own terms. They have agency. They create. They praise.”

4. “The Rise of the L.A Art Witch” (Amanda Yates Garcia, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, November 2016)

I like Amanda Yates Garcia very much personally and professionally. As a client, I can say that I’ve benefited enormously from her work — she does not cross the line into therapy or medical work, but is a truly helpful, thoughtful and creative spiritual consultant for those of us who don’t much like the idea of “confessing” to a priest or who may feel uncomfortable in an anti-queer, anti-woman religious setting. She’s branded herself as The Oracle of Los Angeles, and does justifiably popular work as a tarot reader, educator on myths and symbols, feminist writer, and more. She writes, “Given that many of the art witches practicing in Los Angeles today are women, people of color, and/or LGBTQ, for them an interest in systems of power, who has it, and how that power operates is of particular consequence.”

5. “Why We Write About Witches” (Sarah Gailey, Tor.com, October 2016)

I love this piece by Sarah Gailey for Tor.  One moment in particular stood out: “Witches serve as a tidy packet of expectations for our consumption, and outcomes go hand-in-hand with those expectations. Here, the stories say, is a woman with power. Finally! What you’ve all been secretly wanting, all your lives! Power! Even more power than mortal men. Now that this woman has that power, what will she do with it? What will become of her?”

* * *

I’m a witch because it’s fun and because it suits me. It improves my life and helps me be kinder and more compassionate. I perform rituals as the spirit moves me. To do a ritual is to make something abstract real and special and important, at least for the few minutes or hours that the ritual lasts. These are things most humans crave: the idea that we are not just alone; the feeling that Something Kind is listening and gives a shit about our pain; the sensation of relief after we release a tough relationship, project, job, belief. For me, witchcraft is as much a psychological and philosophical practice as a spiritual one. As a writer, it helps me unblock.

Witchcraft gives me a break from the mundane and a brief trip into the magical realm. And I don’t hear the dead or see the future or move objects with my mind. I remain a fan of vaccinations for children, of real climate change science, of STEM careers for women, of respect for the law of gravity.

Being a witch grounds me in reality and makes me a more down-to-earth human. So whether or not Something Kind is listening, I’m talking, and chanting, and meditating, and praying, and lighting candles, and doing the damn thing. If nothing else, I look hot in heavy kohl eyeliner and elaborate fringed scarves, so hey. Blessed fucking be.

* * *

Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs, DC Trip, Great, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group,” which she also wrote. She also hosts the podcast “Where Ya From?”

Editor: Michelle Weber

Richard Sugg | Fairies: A Dangerous History | Reaktion Books | June 2018 | 19 minutes (4,969 words)

Fairies were dangerous. Not to believe in them was dangerous. Not to respect them or take them seriously was dangerous — hence all the carefully euphemistic or indirect names one used in speaking of them, from “the Gentry” to “the Good People,” “Themselves,” “the fair folk” and “the people of peace” through to the charming Welsh phrase bendith û mamme, or “such as have deserved their mother’s blessing.” Fairies stole your children. They made you or your animals sick, sometimes unto death. They could draw the life, or essence, out of anything, from milk or butter through to people. Their powers, as we have seen, were almost limitless, not only demonic but even godlike in scale and scope.

While ordinary people still believed this less than a century ago, the educated had also believed it in the era of the witch persecutions. Witches did these kinds of thing, and fairies or fairyland were quite often referenced in their trials. Although Joan of Arc was tried as a heretic, rather than a witch, the latter association naturally clung to such an unusual woman, and it is notable that in 1431 her interrogators took an interest in the “fairy tree” around which Joan had played in her childhood in Domrémy. In the Protestant camp, Calvin later emphasized how “the Devil works strange illusions by fairies and satyrs.” In early modern Sicily one distinct type of witch was the female “fairy doctor,” the phrase donna di fuori (“woman from outside”) meaning either “fairy” or “fairy doctor.” Here Inquisitors encouraged people, including suspected witches, to equate fairy and witch beliefs. In 1587 they were especially interested in one Laura di Pavia, a poor fisherman’s wife who claimed to have flown to fairyland in Benevento, Kingdom of Naples.

In many cases, educated witch-believers saw fairies and fairyland as sources of dark power for witches. Lizanne Henderson lists 38 Scottish witch trials (1572—1716) featuring references to fairy beliefs, including that of Isobel Strathaquin (Aberdeen, 1597), accused of using skills which she “learnt . . . of an elf-man who lay with her.” At the 1616 trial of Katherine Caray the accused spoke of meeting not only “a great number of fairy men” on the Caithness hills at sunset, but “a master man” — a figure which in this context could have been seen as “the King of the Fairies” or “the Prince of Darkness.” After a Scottish girl, Christian Shaw, suffered hysterical fits in 1696, the ensuing trial featured a veritable cauldron of lurid evidence, from a mysterious black man with cold hands through to the eating of “a piece of unchristened child’s liver,” and a charm of blood and stones used by one Margaret Fulton, a reputed witch whose “husband had brought her back from the fairies.”

Like witches, fairies were powerful, uncanny and unpredictable. And like witches, or vampires, or any of the world’s numerous magical figures, fairies were scapegoats. They could be blamed for almost anything.

One particular case of demonized fairies is so intriguing that it merits a little space to itself. Its protagonist was Ann Jefferies, a maidservant of the Pitt family at St Teath, Cornwall. In 1645, aged nineteen, Ann was “one day knitting in an arbour in our garden” when “there came over the garden hedge to her six persons of a small stature, all clothed in green, which she called fairies: upon which she was so frighted, that she fell into a kind of a convulsion-fit.” So related the bookseller and printer Moses Pitt fifty years later, having been six at the time of Ann’s encounter.

What followed looks in many ways like the career of a fairy doctor. Ann seemed to suffer some kind of neurosis about food and allegedly took none from the family for several months, claiming that the fairies themselves fed her. Ann presently cured Mrs Pitt’s leg after a bad fall merely by stroking it, and soon became so famous that numerous people flocked to the house for cures from as far south as Land’s End, and as far north as London. All cures seemed to be done purely by touch, without medicines. Ann showed psychic ability, knowing of her visitors before they arrived. Moses himself never saw the fairies but his mother and sister both did.

This case is already interesting for the way that it echoes those of other fairy doctors, despite the Pitt family (and other affluent patients from London) having no concept of such figures. The element of danger initially seems brief, being limited to Ann’s fear at the first encounter. But presently local ministers began to insist that the fairies were “evil spirits” and that the whole affair was “a delusion of the Devil.” A warrant appeared; Pitt’s family and Ann were questioned by local authorities; and magistrate John Tregeagle had Ann locked up — first in Bodmin Jail, and next in his own house, where he kept her without food. Although witchcraft was not explicitly mentioned, it is hard not to suspect that this was on people’s minds. The instability of the Civil War may have further aggravated such fears: the female prophet Anna Trapnel had sparked controversy in January 1645, and Sarah Wight had a similar effect in the weeks after February 1647.

Like witches, fairies were powerful, uncanny and unpredictable. And like witches, or vampires, or any of the world’s numerous magical figures, fairies were scapegoats. They could be blamed for almost anything, from human deaths through to mass famine. In one sense, the fairy as scapegoat was potentially a good thing. For fairies, real or not, could not be harmed. Women taken for witches certainly could be, and were — and after official persecution ended there were hundreds of serious vigilante assaults on them throughout Britain, right through to the end of the nineteenth century. In reality, however, fairy scapegoats did produce a great deal of human suffering. The problem, here, was what people did to real human beings who were believed to be fairy changelings.

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In August 1909 an old woman of Donegal, Annie McIntire, applied for a pension. She told the Pension Committee that although “she did not know the number of her years,” she “remembered being stolen by the ‘wee people’ (fairies) on Halloween Night, 1839.” Was she certain of this?

“Yes, by good luck my brother happened to be coming home from Carndonagh that night, and heard the fairies singing and saw them dancing round me in the wood at Carrowkeel. He had a book with him, and he threw it in among them. They then ran away.” The applicant added that the people celebrated the event by great feasting and drinking. The committee decided to grant her a pension.

Whatever actually happened that Halloween night, McIntire clearly believed her version until the end of her days. So, too, would many of those around her, young or old. For everyone knew that fairies stole children.

More broadly, fairies again resembled vampires or witches in that all three, very basically, attacked life. The latter pair could suck out your blood, soul or breath, or extract the essence from food. Much later, that iconic Other of our own times, the alien abductor, updated this basic assault with clinical probings or the removal of human eggs or sperm. In the pre-scientific cultures of the fairy or the witch, however, the most potent emblem of life was simply one’s own baby or child.

One ironic result of this was that, for most of history, no child was delighted by fairies. Old people in Cornwall told Evans-Wentz:

if we as children did anything wrong, the old folks would say to us, “The piskies will carry you away if you do that again.” . . . In Tintagel I used to sit round the fire at night and hear old women tell so much about piskies and ghosts that I was then afraid to go out of doors after darkness had fallen.

At Cwmcastellfach farm in Wales a seventy-year-old man told Evans-Wentz that “in his childhood days a great dread of the fairies occupied the heart of every child. They were considered to be evil spirits who visited our world at night.” Even in the less typically fairy-haunted flats of Norfolk, young children growing up around the First World War were told, “if naughty . . . that the ‘hightie sprite’ was at the bottom of the garden and would get them.” On the whole, this distinctive East Anglian spirit evoked far less terror than Celtic fairies. There again, one 1980s informant recalled it as “a black bat-like figure, man-size, hovering silently in the twilight, waiting to snatch away disobedient children.” While many boys and girls were being enchanted by Rose Fyleman’s “fairies at the bottom of our garden,” others still feared vampiric kidnappers at the bottom of theirs.

Writing in 1960, the Dutch scholar Jacoba Hooykaas found child-stealing fairy or elf types were feared in Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Moravia, Greece, Lithuania, Bohemia and Hungary, with a modern-day variant in Bali. In Celtic territories, fairies stole babies and children — especially boys, and especially those with blue eyes and fair hair — leaving fairy substitutes in their place. Having identified such a switch, people did everything they could to make the fairies reverse it. To the end of the nineteenth century, and probably later, such children were ritually abused by their own parents to this end. Immersed in rivers or placed at the margin of coastal tides, stood on hot coals or hung over fires, exposed in freezing weather, bathed in poisonous foxglove essence, beaten, threatened and subjected to forms of exorcism, these babies and children sometimes survived, sometimes not. Ironically, part of the logic of this treatment was the sense that the fairies cared enough about their offspring to rescue them from such abuses and restore one’s child in the process. Even as they tormented these supposed changelings, parents were projecting their own familial love onto fairyland.

Certain of these conditions only manifested some time after birth. This, surely, was the smoking fairy gun: you had known your own baby, and this, now, was not him.

Let us imagine a large rural family in which an initially normal, healthy new baby presently begins to seem suspect. He cries almost incessantly, fails to grow, walk or talk, has oddly wizened features and is constantly hungry. At one very basic level, a child continually crying and demanding food, and unable to work like its six- or seven-year- old peers, is a liability in such circumstances. But these problems almost certainly took second place to the real and frightening belief that it was not yours, and that your child had been stolen. Hard as it now is to credit, parents in such cases very probably felt just as distraught as the modern mothers and fathers making television appeals about their missing or abducted children.

While it was clear to educated Victorians that many changelings were disabled children, much more precise clinical parallels were detailed in 1988 by the interdisciplinary scholar Susan Schoon Eberly. The case given above would fit especially well with a genetic disorder affecting metabolism, phenylketonuria (pku). This and other similar conditions predominate among male children of Irish and English descent. Even brief references from fairy believers give clues to these disorders, talking of children like “old men,” perhaps suffering from progeria. Obvious physical deformity, such as the oversized heads of hydrocephalus, or “water on the brain,” would be singled out; yet so too might the pretty, blue-eyed, snubnosed, “elfin” children afflicted with Williams syndrome. Here, as in every magical culture the world over, it was never a good idea to stand out. Eberly also adds that certain of these conditions only manifested some time after birth. This, surely, was the smoking fairy gun: you had known your own baby, and this, now, was not him. All of this painstaking detective work can, in one sense, be collapsed into three letters: “oaf,” a word broadly cognate with “elf,” once meant not a clumsy or stupid person, but, literally, a changeling.

Plain and axiomatic as the real medical causes now seem to us, the majority view, from the ancient Romans to the Edwardian Celts, was intensely superstitious. When Martin Luther recommended drowning a changeling, it was because the child’s appearance showed it to have no soul. In the seventeenth century, even the most rational Christians used “changeling” as a loose synonym for the mentally disabled, with dramatist Elkanah Settle echoing Luther when he talked, in 1694, of “some coarse half-souled fairy changeling.” The relatively enlightened physician and philosopher John Locke probably did not believe in fairies, yet did speculate at great length on the souls of the mentally disabled, and whether or not they should be classed as a different species.

With these kinds of attitudes lodged at the heart of Christian and proto-scientific elites in the early modern period, what could changelings expect from true fairy believers? In all households, there were routine precautions aimed to prevent child theft. A very common one involved putting fire tongs over a cradle, because of the fairies’ well-known antipathy to iron. As in McIntire’s case, books also had power over them, and religious ones especially — hence the placing of a Bible or prayer book under a child’s pillow. In Ireland into the 1930s, babies were not believed safe from fairies until they (the babies) had sneezed, so that many infants had pepper thrust under their noses minutes after birth. In Connemara at the same time people still dressed boys and girls alike in red flannel petticoats until the age of twelve, a disguise used to trick those fairies who liked to steal boys in particular.

If such measures failed, the changeling met with violence — this often being advised or performed by the local fairy doctor. In some cases, such rituals were used on actual sick children thought to be “fairy-struck” — though, as we will see, they too could be seen as in danger of abduction. Carole Silver cites changelings killed by foxglove baths in Wales in 1857, and in Donegal in the 1870s and 1890s. Eberly tells of a Scottish case, in Caerlaverock, where the ceaselessly yelling and ill-tempered baby was thrown onto hot coals. In 1952 the Australian-born classical scholar Gilbert Murray (1866—1957) recalled how,

in Ireland, in my own lifetime, a child, who was for some reason reputed to be a changeling, was beaten and burned with irons, the mother being locked out of the room while the invading fairy was exorcised, though unfortunately the child died in the process.

This killing does not seem to have been prosecuted, and many of those which escaped public or legal notice must now have been lost to us. This was nearly the case after the tragic death of a nine-year-old boy, son of Kilkenny labourer Patrick Kearns. Late at night on April 7, 1856, a police patrol met the Kearnses taking their son’s body to an unused burial ground, and insisted on examining him. Thus, instead of an unknown secret burial, there came to light the tale of how the child, confined to bed for three weeks past, was judged to be suffering from a “fairy-blast.” Although he was not himself a changeling, it was said that he was “being gradually carried off by the fairies”; if he had died naturally it may have been believed that They had taken him. Versions of this affair vary. But it seems that a man called Thomas Donovan, assisted by Patrick Murphy, attempted a ritual test, giving the boy water and getting him to cough. When the boy could not cough, he was dragged violently out of the house and around the yard, strangled and badly beaten. He died early the next morning from his injuries.

Even as they tormented these supposed changelings, parents were projecting their own familial love onto fairyland.

Some accounts have Donovan as the “fairy doctor” making the initial diagnosis; others mention an unnamed “wise woman” as doing so. Although one report has Patrick Kearns apparently trying to rescue his son from Donovan, the versions which claim the parents to have agreed with the procedure, even after the boy’s death, match other known cases better. Interestingly, during the trial, the judge briefly mentioned delusions about fairies, emphasizing that these could in no way absolve Donovan (Murphy having by now fled to America). A qc, meanwhile, could see no motive for the crime, and wrongly inferred that perhaps there had been some delusion about the boy being “possessed by the Devil.” This already shows the gulf between educated and popular perceptions of fairies. Moreover, we also learn that the Kearnses resorted to the fairy rituals despite their son having previously been under the care of two licensed doctors — one of whom confirmed after autopsy that the boy, though killed by Donovan, would have died of a tumor and water on the brain within a week. Donovan was sentenced to a year’s hard labor. A few years before, the parents of six-year-old Mary Anne Kelly, allegedly “in a dying state” for six months prior to September 1850, turned from the dispensary physician to a Roscrea “fairy doctress” named Bridget Peters. Peters seems at one point to have declared Mary Anne “fairy struck,” and at another that the child was a fairy. She gave the girl verbena and foxglove, and ordered that she be exposed naked outdoors for three nights on a shovel. This was done, despite Mary Anne’s cries being audible in the house. On the third night she died.

Here again fairy ritual took on demonic overtones. One report claimed that a prayer had to be said over the girl “in the name of the devil,” and several carried the headline “Witchcraft.” In this instance the mother, Mary Kelly, seems to have been unusually complicit (and was initially tried along with Peters). If uneducated, the Kellys were by no means desperately poor. A key witness in the trial was their servant, Mary Maher, who was sacked after refusing to put Mary Anne out on the shovel, and who may have been the only reason the crime came to light. Mary Kelly seems ultimately to have been acquitted. Peters, described as “respectable looking” and evidently literate, was found guilty.

Cases such as these now seem so extraordinary as to be almost unreal to us. Eberly has argued convincingly that modern-day responses of parents to disabled children still sometimes mingle anger and guilt, and that such emotions could well have fed into the violence directed at changelings. Silver has suggested that one benefit of the changeling belief was the way it shifted blame for the child’s condition into a thoroughly separate, supernatural realm, beyond human control. With these points in mind, it bears emphasizing that Mary Anne had from birth been blind, brain-damaged and partially paralyzed. Having said all this, we need to grasp that such modern rationalizations were largely alien from the fairy cultures in which changelings suffered or died. Most parents really, unshakably believed that this was a dangerous, uncanny fairy creature, and very possibly feared it too.

In some cases, this level of terror was also apparent in the “fairy child.” In April 1840 James Mahony, a man living on the country estate of Charles Riall, at Heywood, County Tipperary, was influenced by his neighbors into the belief that his son, John (aged six or seven), was a fairy. This was partly due to a curvature of the spine which had kept the boy in bed two years, and partly to his being a suspiciously “intellectual child.” On the night of Tuesday, 14 April, Mahony, with the connivance of neighbors, held the near-naked boy over a hot shovel, threatening to put him on it, and dragged him halfway to the water pump, proposing to drown him under it if he did not reveal the whereabouts of Mahony’s true son. John seems to have become so terrified by this that he presently “told them that he was a fairy, and that he would send back the real John Mahony the next evening, if they gave him that night’s lodging” — even going so far as to specify that the real John was in a farmer’s house, wearing corduroys and a green cap. Next morning, John was found dead in his bed. Although a doctor decided that this had resulted from the boy’s spinal condition, this fatality looks as though it may have been caused by sheer terror. We have seen that voodoo death can occur in such cases in around one to three days, while vagal inhibition can kill in seconds or minutes, when shock affects the vagus nerve, the autonomic nervous system, and ultimately the heart. We have to wonder, here, if John’s parents ever doubted the child’s terrified “confession.” Did they remain convinced that they had actually killed a fairy?

Similarly, Westropp remembered from his boyhood, in 1869, “a very old woman, Kate Molony,” from Maryfort, County Clare, who, many years before, being anxious about her daughter’s failing health, “went to a ‘wise woman,’ who assured her that the child was ‘changed.’ She spoke of this on her return, and unfortunately the patient was old enough to understand the fearful decision. The poor child turned over on the bed with a groan, and was a little later found to be dead.” This sounds unmistakably like vagal inhibition. If so, the child must have died either because of her sheer terror of her own fairy status (in which she apparently believed) or because of the ensuing tortures which she knew this diagnosis would bring.

Such dangers were not entirely confined to the uneducated inhabitants of the Celtic countryside. Writing around 1865 about the fairies of Cornwall, Robert Hunt had recently heard from a friend of how, “the other day . . . an Irishwoman . . . was brought before the magistrates, in New York, for causing the death of a child by making it stand on hot coals, to try if it were her own truly-begotten child, or a changeling.” Meanwhile, Westropp’s family — affluent landowners at Patrickswell, Limerick, since the sixteenth century — had a much closer brush with changeling superstitions than the one recalled above. For Westropp’s “second sister, whose delicacy, when an infant, excited remark, was, about 1842, taken out by a servant to be exposed on a shovel on the doorstep at Carnelly. The angry and hasty intervention of another servant saved the child, but the would be ‘exposer’ was convinced” of the rightness of her attempt to “‘get back the child’ from the fairies.”

This incident partly echoes the 1884 case of three-year-old Philip Dillon of Clonmel, severely burned after two neighbors put him to a changeling test in his mother’s absence. In such contexts, “changelings” were at risk from others besides their parents, with these people very possibly acting “for the good of the community.” It is easy to forget, looking back from a thoroughly medicalized world, how profoundly extra-scientific these people’s lives were. The disabilities and illnesses of these children perhaps seemed just as fundamentally wrong. Changeling beliefs therefore offered two important benefits. First, they allowed people to shift from being helpless victims to active combatants of the perceived problem. Second, and probably more importantly, they gave an otherwise frighteningly arbitrary condition a meaning — a known and accepted place within a shared framework of explanation.

Immersed in rivers or placed at the margin of coastal tides, stood on hot coals or hung over fires, exposed in freezing weather, bathed in poisonous foxglove essence, beaten, threatened and subjected to forms of exorcism, these babies and children sometimes survived, sometimes not.

Yet, if this helps us make some sense of the majority of popular changeling cases, it fails to shed any light on the abuse suffered by Walter Trevelyan of Penzance. On Monday, July 10, 1843, local magistrates and residents heard of how the upper-middle-class Trevelyans had routinely tortured Walter, now aged two years and nine months, for at least a year at their grand Georgian house, The Orchard. Servants and visitors testified that Walter had been kept without food or water for hours, had been left outside in a tree during winter, been made to lie face down on the gravel walk, kicked over a slope in his baby carriage by his father, and tied upside down in a tree until he was black in the face. After the miseries of the day Walter was put to bed on a mattress filled with corks, lest he should gain any comfort in the few exhausted hours of night.

Some of this was specifically ordered by Mrs Trevelyan, and all of it seems to have been the sole responsibility of Walter’s parents. Indeed, although the hearing was catalyzed by local vicar Reverend Le Grice, all of the evidence was supplied by working-class servants or visitors, with gardener Francis Dale stating that Walter’s cries were so heart-rending as to force him to move away to another part of the garden, where he could not hear them.

Was all this really inspired by the belief that Walter had been “changed by the nurse”? Simon Young, to whom I am indebted for answering various queries on the original newspaper reports of the case, thinks not. He suspects that this phrase refers not to fairy changelings, but to the belief that a child’s nurse might change her affluent charge with her own baby, so that the latter could have the benefits of an elite upbringing. He adds that servants may have heard the parents remark facetiously that they thought the naughty Walter to have been “changed at nurse” (that is, so naughty that he could not be their natural child). They then took this literally, as partial explanation for the cruelties inflicted on him.

For educated parents to act on fairy beliefs in this way would be very unusual. We can further add that not all of the abuse looks precisely ritual — as, for example, John Trevelyan kicking Walter over the slope. But much of it, though different from popular habits in detail, does seem to fit the same broad logic: treat the child so badly that its fairy parents will reverse the switch. Ultimately, this case seems to me too unclear to permit a decisive judgement on its origins. One reason for this is that, bizarrely, the Trevelyans themselves seem to have given no evidence at the hearing. We therefore have not a word from them on why Walter was treated in this way. The impression that local magistrates essentially connived to spare the powerful family is grimly reinforced by the final verdict: “we are unanimous in the opinion that the child has been most cruelly and shamefully treated, but there is not sufficient evidence to connect Mr Trevelyan with the ill-usage, for us to send the case to a higher tribunal.” If ever there was an instance of the Victorian elite shamefully closing ranks, then clearly this was it.

If we accept, hypothetically, that the parents’ cruelty was purely mundane, we are left with some curious ironies. Was it worse for people like the Trevelyans to torture their child than for fairy believers to do so, actuated by supernatural terrors? I would say yes. Second, we have the reaction of the household servants. It is not quite clear if they understood Walter to have been a human changeling or a fairy one. Given the popular fairy beliefs then prevalent in Cornwall, the latter notion would be plausible. In this case, we would have to assume that the mundane sadism of upper-middle-class parents was so appalling to ordinary people as to persuade them that it must have a supernatural origin.

Whatever Walter suffered in adult life (and fighting in the Afghan War, as he later did, was probably a walk in the park by comparison with childhood), we can assume that he did not find people around him looking askance and muttering “changeling” whenever he passed by. But this was the fate of a handful of mentally or physically disabled adults — people who were held by their neighbors, even parents, literally to be “fairies” throughout their lives. John Rhys heard in the late nineteenth century of a woman called Nani Fach at Llanover, Wales, supposed to be one of the fairies’ offspring, and also, more specifically, of a farmer’s son called Elis Bach at Nant Gwrtheyrn, northwest Wales. All of the large Bach family were quite ordinary, save for Elis, whose legs were

so short that his body seemed only a few inches from the ground when he walked. His voice was also small and squeaky. However, he was very sharp, and could find his way among the rocks pretty well when he went in quest of his father’s sheep and goats . . . Everybody believed Elis to have been a changeling.

Meanwhile, in Yorkshire in 1884 Mr J. Cocksedge recalled how, as a child, he had often looked in wonder at hat-maker Fanny Bradley, the tiniest woman he had ever seen. Fanny’s brother Tom was of similar stature, and it was said that when they

were infants their mother took them with her to a field adjoining Almscliff Crag, where she had occasion to go to shear or reap some corn . . . While this woman was busy at work these fairies came and stole her children. When she found that her children had gone she cried and was so much troubled that the fairies brought them back, and placed them where they found them. And they said that that was the reason Fanny and her brother were so little.

Other writers, including a niece or nephew of Fanny, stated that she was so small as to have once stood in a man’s pocket when measuring him for a hat. Whatever the exact size of Fanny and Tom, their quasi-changeling status (the fairies did something to them, before handing them back) seems to have been reinforced by the fact that they and one other Bradley child had this appearance, while all the others were quite normal. We can only guess how such people made it into adulthood at all. Perhaps their parents were too kind-hearted to subject them to potentially fatal changeling tests; perhaps they underwent them but survived. Such cases also raise the question of when parents stopped trying to get their real child back, and what it felt like to accept that you would live with a fairy for the rest of your life.

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Richard Sugg is lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Durham. He is the author of several books, including John Donne and The Smoke of the Soul.

Reprinted with permission from Fairies: A Dangerous History by Richard Sugg, published by Reaktion Books Ltd. © 2018 by Richard Sugg. All rights reserved.

Editor: Dana Snitzky