FAIRIES AND FOLKLORE

SIMON YOUNG FILES A NEW REPORT FROM THE INTERFACE OF STRANGE PHENOMENA AND FOLK BELIEF

leprechaun hunts

It is April 1908. We are in County Down, Ireland, in the townland of Killough and groups of boys are hunting for a leprechaun. The story first broke in the newspapers around 20 April, and by then several locals had seen the “man of dwarfish proportions... clad in red, with a small peaked cap” and this curious being had caused ‘the greatest excitement’. The excitement was not just about an encounter with the paranormal, but also depended on baser motives: leprechauns, of course, give up their treasure if captured.

Now there are, as it happens, several cases where groups of boys have gone leprechaun mad and torn up an area looking for diminutive shoe makers: one in 1938 from West Limerick and another from Liverpool in 1964 [see FT299:26-32] – the last case possibly explained by Liverpool’s Irish roots.

In itself, then, a leprechaun hunt in 1908 in County Down is not that surprising. But some of the twists that followed are absolutely unique. For one thing, the leprechaun hunters kept at it. Twenty days later a journalist wrote: “This week the little creature is reported to have made several appearances in the district, and these are much believed by the people... On one occasion some of the children pursued it to a moat hard by a churchyard, where it disappeared.” On another occasion the leprechaun was spotted dressed, for once, in white and sitting under a hedge playing a tiny harp.

Second, and most disturbingly, the leprechaun was caught. On 12 August two policemen were summoned to a farmhouse at nearby Mullingar in West Meath, for a small and ravenous man had been discovered there. The ‘leprechaun’, who could not speak, was escorted to the workhouse, where he was treated “with interest mixed with awe” and children besieged the building desperate to catch a glimpse.

Third, the press went mad. British newspapers sent their agents to try and get a photograph of the little man and GK Chesterton wrote a lyrical piece for the Illustrated London News. At least the press went mad until it was discovered that the ‘leprechaun’ was mentally ill and all too human. He had left home in early August, two months after the leprechaun hunt had begun and he wasn’t even, it transpired, that small. The ‘leprechaun’ was sold by his father for £10 to a freakshow in Glasgow and the story sank into local folklore. The fairyist Evans-Wentz found the countryside alive with leprechaun rumours when he passed through at the end of the summer. One sceptical newspaper ventured that the leprechaun was nothing more than a spotted badger, the propensity for that creature to sit under hedges and play harps being well known... Simon Young writes on folklore and history and runs www.fairyist.com

the leprechaun was spotted sitting under a hedge playing a tiny harp