Fairies, Folklore and Forteana

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

SHAPE-SHIFTER SHORTAGE

The encounter took place in early January 1851 in northern Lancashire. The local newspaper reports that a carter, coming home in the dead of night, saw that “his horse suddenly stopped and appeared much frightened”. (You should now feel like you do when watching an expendable character going down a dark alley in a serial killer drama.) “On looking to ascertain the cause, [the carter] perceived as he imagined a large sheep lying in the middle of the road, to which he proceeded with the intention of applying his whip to force its removal. He struck, the blow fell upon vacancy, the supposed sheep aroused itself and as if with indignity at the insult, swelled out as the man affirms, into the size of a house, and then giving him a look of ineffable contempt flew away in a flame of fire.” I have my doubts about that word ‘house’. Is it possible that the printer mistook a ‘u’ for an ‘r’ (a minim more, a minim less) and that the sheep actually became a horse? But horse-size or house-size the carter’s vision was pretty extraordinary even before the blaze started.

Congratulations, carter, you have just had a close encounter with a bona fide British shape-shifter, as many did in the 1800s. There is no member of the British supernatural petting zoo that I would rather get my hands on. You get fear, you get amazement, you get the sublime and you get something like a firework display at the end. These monsters date back to 11th-century saints’ lives, turn up in mediaeval ghost stories, Elizabethan plays (e.g. Puck), folk stories (Hedley Kow, anyone?) and 19th-century encounters and then… nothing. I know of no example of shape-shifters being seen in the UK after the Great War. There are some fairies described in unusual forms – one imagines they had changed, but the act of changing is not described. Then there is “the large slimy creature on the A628 at Devil’s Elbow” in Derbyshire, in, I think, the 1960s: which suggests some shapechanging potential perhaps. Chris Woodyard points out to me that the Occult Review, April 1920, has a dog that seemed like a calf. But doesn’t that suggest size rather than shape-shifting? Not sure.

The point is that here we have yet another example of the supposedly immutable supernatural itself taking a different form. In the 20th century, ghosts lose their chains; fairies gain wings; shape-changers cease to exist; and demons, don’t even get me started on poor demons... What went wrong for shape-shifters? My guess is that they became just too, well, silly for modern tastes, and that they were demoted into black dogs.

Simon Young’s new book Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies is out now.

“THE SHEEP AROUSED ITSELF AND AS IF WITH INDIGNITY AT THE INSULT SWELLED OUT INTO THE SIZE OF A HOUSE”