CHAPTER VII.

FAIRIES AND BOGGARTS.

Puck or Robin Goodfellow. Peris, Pixies, and Ginns. Queen Mab. Lancashire boggarts and fairies. The bargaist. The fairy of Mellor Moor, Lancashire. Lumb Farm boggart, near Blackburn. "Boggart Ho' Clough," near Manchester. George Cheetham's boggart. The devil made a monk. The headless dog or woman at Preston. Raising the devil. "Raw head and bloody bones." Edwin Waugh's account of the Grislehurst boggart. The laying of boggarts. Driving a stake through the body of a cock buried with the boggart. Sacred or lightning birds. Superstitions about cocks and hens. Killing a Lancashire wizard. Cruel sacrifice of chanticleer. Divining by means of a cock. Boggarts scared by a cock crowing. The cock an emblem of Æsculapius. The black cock crows in the Niflheim, or "land of gloom." The lion afraid of a white cock. Father Morolla's account of the revivification of a dead cock. The cockatrice. A cruelly slaughtered cock and red cow's milk a sovereign remedy for consumption. The Scandinavian golden coloured cock's crowing the signal for the dawn of the Ragnarock, "the great day of arousing." The Hindoos "cast out devils" by the aid of a cock slaughtered as a sacrifice. Modern Jewish custom. Game cock feathers in the bed cause a dying person to linger in pain. Hothersall Hall boggart, Lancashire, laid beneath a laurel tree, watered with milk. Rowan, ash, and red thread potential against boggarts, witches, and devils. Scandinavian and German boggarts. The Hindoo pitris or fathers. Zwergs, dwarfs, "ancients" or ancestors. Good fairies, elves, etc. Lord Duffin transported by fairies from Scotland to Paris. Classical ghost story. Singular superstition, of Eastern character, at Darwen, Lancashire. A somewhat similar one in Australia. Fairy rings, their imaginary and real origin. Page 124