Fairies, Folklore and Forteana
CH-CH-CHANGES
There were, in times gone by, three different kinds of British shape-changers: the furries, the mischief-makers and the scarers.
The furries (so named for their two main characteristics, fur and fury) were four-legged with shaggy coats and had great eyes: their appearance portended death or some other calamity. The mischief-makers liked to lead humans down the wrong path or, in horse form, they tricked humans into riding them (the rider usually ended up in the ditch). We have, then, the scarers, whose joy it was to terrify night-walkers by rapidly changing form. The furries did not shift shape in a dramatic way. They were often compared to dogs, sometimes to bears, donkeys, horses, lions, sheep, bulls, cows and calves. They were ‘in between’: not really belonging to any of these species. If they slid, with decorum, from one form to another, they remained mammalian. Mischief-makers and scarers had a much more impressive range and made more radical jumps. They did dogs, donkeys and sheep, of course. But they also managed other animals (cats, rabbits, fish, birds), fire and the human form. There were, too, weirder options in their repertoire including houses, carts and rags on hedges. If there was a difference between the mischiefmaker’s and the scarer’s form-flipping it was that scarers had a penchant for the grotesque:
THE SCARERS HAD A PENCHANT FOR THE GROTESQUE: IF YOU WERE A DOG, YOU WERE A DOG WITH NO HEAD
if you were a dog, you were a dog without a head; if you were a woman you were dressed in black and lacked legs… There was a logic of sorts here: the scarer was usually a spirit of the dead and was, in some senses, incomplete.
The reader will have noted that I have put these three types of shape-changer in the past tense. I have done so for the simple reason that they no longer exist. In the 19th-century there are striking first-hand experiences of encounters in the British countryside with all three of these types. We should no more dismiss encounters in the 1800s than we would dismiss a UFO experience in the 2000s. By the Great War, though, the British shape-changer had all but disappeared. The furry of yore has been hammered down into one form: ‘black dogs’ no longer moonlight as horses or lions. The mischief-maker has entirely vanished, save possibly in some descriptions of walkers at night being pixy-led. The scarers are now the impoverished ghosts of road and lane, their shape-changing glory days past. The lesson? Fortean experiences are a human constant; but like the 19th-century shape-changers, they balloon and shrink into new forms.
All this leads me to wonder how things will be different when FT reaches 800 issues. My confident prediction? Expect change, not progress. New forms, but no answers.
Simon has edited Sheridan Le Fanu’s Scary Fairy Tales: Four Tales of Fairy Horror (2020).