
Boggart and Banshee: A Supernatural Podcast
So a Brit and a Yank walk into a supernatural podcast… Nattering on fairies, folklore, ghosts and the impossible ensues. Cross your fingers, turn your pockets inside out and join Simon and Chris as they talk weird history, Fortean mysteries, and things that go bump in the night.
Boggart and Banshee: A Supernatural Podcast
Household Helper Spirits: from Brownie to Hob
Simon and Chris are pixelated by household helpers, those elusive, often hairy beings like Brownies, Tomten, and Skrats who muck out stables, scrub pans, rock babies, edit podcasts and occasionally fetch the midwife, all in exchange for a humble bowl of porridge. Our domestic duo explore why these spirits have such complicated relationships with clothing, what draws them to a home (or sends them storming off), and wonder aloud if you can still hire one in today’s difficult real estate market. Along the way, the two squabble over whether houses go up or down in value with a helper, the emotional climate of homes, and the surprising requirements for crafting your own supernatural assistant (spoiler: toes and horses are involved). UK helpers are compared with their Scandinavian, North European, and North American cousins. While Simon berates Chris for her shocking ignorance of the Swiss variety, Chris lectures Simon on a brave new world of railway-building brownies on the other side of the Atlantic.
Chris: We're talking about households today, so how many houses have you lived in?
Simon: Right, so I'm now almost 52, and in my life, I worked this out this afternoon, I have lived in 14 different houses.
Chris: Oh my, that's a lot. I'd have to count up, but maybe six?
Simon: Wow.
Chris: Something like that, maybe? I haven't moved a whole lot.
Simon: Given the subject for today, what I was thinking about with my houses is the different feel that houses have. I would say of the 14 I have lived in, two of the houses were creepy, and three of the houses were warm and happily, and I can say this rather smugly, one of those three is the house where I've lived for the last 15 years here in Italy. So what about you? If you think about the houses that you've lived in, do you think of houses as having presences?
Chris: I do, definitely. I've made a point of avoiding living in houses with presences. I can remember the very first house, my childhood home, we lived there until I was about five, and there was something horrible in the basement. We had a little playroom set up down there, but nobody ever went. Then I grew up, and there's this short story called The Thing in the Cellar. I'm trying to remember the name of the author, and I can't, but it was like, that's my house, that was our house. But for the most part, I've lived in decent houses, because like I said, I've made a point. We were looking for a house in Yellow Springs, which is a little village close to where we live now, and we both walked into the cellar and were like, packing away slowly, someone's been murdered here.
Simon: This is what I need to ask you, Chris. If I come to a new house, I suppose I just have this very general feeling of, there's quite a lot of sunlight here, it's rather damp, but how does it work for someone like you? You're going to buy a house where you're going to spend quite a few years, you've only ever lived in six houses, so you've got to be careful. What are the things that send your antennae?
Chris: Well, actually, we've been looking at properties recently, and I can just look at a house and say, no way, I do not want any part of this house. There's something about it, maybe a darkness, that doesn't make any sense. These are real estate pictures.
Simon: You don't even go there, you see a picture on the internet and you say, not happening.
Chris: Absolutely, absolutely. I can also say, well, I don't want a house where there was a smoker, because that just requires too much remediation and that kind of thing. And you can tell when a basement's damp in the photos, so it's like, okay, then across that went off the list. So just silly things like that. But I remember when we did find a house we moved to when my daughter was small, and it was like the parsonage of the church across the street originally. And then we started looking for another house a few years later, and my daughter said, as we would walk into a house, oh, this is a happy house. And she just would say, you know, this one's a happy house, we want a happy house.
Simon: But that's my language of houses. When I think of those three very warm houses, I think of them as happy houses. And this may outrage you, Chris, but my suspicion is that the happiness or sadness of these houses has more to do with the disposition of some, rather than the presence of any spirits. Being a little bit sceptical, of course. And I just wondered if you had any sympathy with that, or would you generally explain things in terms of the supernatural?
Chris: Is it supernatural to say, okay, there was a very unhappy couple in this house, and they sold it because of a divorce, and those bad feelings still linger? Is that supernatural? I don't know.
Simon: Totally supernatural.
Chris: Okay, okay.
Simon: Totally supernatural. I mean, according to science, unhappy couples are not like constant smokers, Chris. You do not need to remediate after.
Chris: No, pheromones, they love bits of skin.
Simon: Oh God, oh God, now you really are making a nightmare.
Chris: Sweaty fingerprints on the medicine cabinet.
Simon: I'm not ruling out the possibility of what you say, but I think we can agree it's not science.
Chris: Well, I don't know. Pheromones are pretty well proven.
Simon: Well, listen, we'll have to set up. This will be our next big 10,000 person study. We'll look at new houses…. Well, as you may have guessed, today's topic is about an aspect of houses in the supernatural. It's an aspect that I find a particularly interesting and perhaps even happy one, to use your daughter's word, and that is the question of household helpers. The idea that I particularly associate with Britain, and I don't know if you'll bring in foreign examples, that some houses have spirits that actively want to help the people living inside.
Chris: I do have some foreign examples.
Simon: To launch us off, do you have some helper readings for us?
Chris: I have a helper reading, yes. I don't know the source of this. Do you want to tell me what the source was for the Lancashire farmer?
Simon: This is one of two Burnley folklorists with the surname Wilkinson. They hated each other in life, and I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember which of the two it is, but it's one of the Burnley folklorists from the mid-late 1800s.
Chris: Do I have Lancashire pronounced correctly?
Simon: You do, but I hope you're going to give us this reading with a Lancashire accent.
Chris: Oh, hell no. In an evil hour, stimulated by his curiosity, the Lancashire farmer waited until the witching midnight hour in the room above the kitchen. Boring a hole through the floor, he anxiously awaited the coming spectre. Suddenly there arose a sound of footsteps passing along the porch into the kitchen, and there appeared a little old man clad in a brown russet suit of ancient cut and dark face nearly covered with hair, but without shoes and stockings. It commenced to sweep up the floor and arrange the various domestic utensils in their proper order. I wish I had one like that.
Simon: Well, Chris, you've given us immediately there a rare sighting of a helper, because, of course, one of the things that's special about helpers is that they hate to be seen, and this is one of the reasons that they're supposed to do all their work at night. And when you read folklore descriptions and even encounters with helpers, they usually begin with noise. You can hear the gentle chinking downstairs as someone is doing the washing up. Do you want to give us a little bit of a sense of what helpers do look like on the rare occasions they're glimpsed?
Chris: Pointed out, they do their work in the dark and they're hardly ever seen. In general, they seem to have been predominantly male, and if spotted, they're usually described as little men, and they're almost invariably described as hairy. I'm really kind of puzzled about that particular detail.
Simon: I think the other thing that goes together with the hair are the very ragged clothes. And in some of the accounts, I think it's hinted that they don't actually have clothes. In fact, I suspect that if we had our folk accounts from the 18th century rather than the 19th century, we would read rather more than we'd like to about helper genitals, because some of them seem to be, like you say, small, usually men, quite hairy, and with very ragged clothes or no clothes at all. So how would you start to deal with that? The hair, the lack of clothes, that for me are almost two sides of the same thing.
Chris: Oh, because they're naked, and so we're just seeing body hair? Is that what you're saying?
Simon: Yes, I suppose so. I suppose they have to be covered by something, and if it's not clothes, it's going to be hair. And the hair points to the wildness. These are like wild men.
Chris: The hair situation, they are like wild men. But are they all that way? Are there any female household spirits? Because it just seems as though they're mostly male.
Simon: There are a few. I know, for example, in Kintyre, this is Argyllshire in Scotland, there was a family helper called Little Mouth, which begs a number of questions. And she had a room in the castle that she looked after, and she basically spent a lot of time protecting the elder male members of the family from the various mishaps that they got themselves into. So that's an example of a female helper. I'm going to go on the record with this, and in a couple of years, I'll certainly regret it, and someone will write an email and laugh at me. But I think the only female house helpers in Britain are from the Gaelic-speaking parts of Scotland, including that one from Argyllshire. And I can think of a couple of others, and I think they're all Gaelic-speaking areas in Scotland. And I'm almost positive... Oh, I can already think of an exception. It's so annoying when this happens. Okay, there are very few female helpers in England and Wales, but there are a couple. I think it's also worth talking about the range of work they do. Do you want to give us a sense of what would be on the typical household task list of one of these helpers?
Chris: Right. Well, you did say that they were protective spirits for the males of the family or the people in charge. And mostly they do farm chores, they do household help, they clean the dishes, they make butter, they've been known to corral the cattle, they groom the horses. It's like having a general household servant, either a farm helper or an indoor household servant.
Simon: Yeah, I'm really glad you picked up on the fact they also do outdoor work, because these were often farmhouses or houses with agricultural land thereabout. And yes, they would do the dishes, but they would also churn the milk, and they would also, in difficult moments, stack the hay, go out and actually work. Lots of lovely stories about helpers rounding up the sheep and accidentally rounding up some hares as well, or rabbits, these kinds of stories. So they did all these things. Also, several of them are recorded as taking special care of children, something that I find interesting. And then some of them seem to feel very bonded to an individual in the family, and they will actually do a great deal to help the individual in question beyond their normal remit. And I'll just give you an example of this. I talked before about Little Mouth from Argyllshire, whose Gaelic name I don't pronounce. And she actually followed the lord of the family to Jersey in the Channel Islands, and he found himself there at the time of revolutionary France's happily ineffective invasion of Jersey. And in the middle of the battle, she actually pushed him aside and a bullet went through the top of his hat. So she saved his life, and he is supposed to have turned to her and thanked her for this service to the family. So that really is going above and beyond the call. There's one Scottish brownie, I think from Dumfriesshire, I hope I've got that right. And he brings the daughter of the family out to see her lover. He actually will take her out of the house when no one's looking and take her to the grove where she and the lover met. And then when she became pregnant, I suppose, which is only fair, he was responsible for going to get the midwife. And that duty repeats itself in several accounts.
Chris: Yes, I've heard of that also. Yes. There's a fictional story in a book called Popular Legends of Brittany about the little man of the rushes. He helps a young man who had been good to him and urges him to court a woman who thinks that this young man is beneath her. But when she realises that the dwarf is going to do all the work, she says, fine, he'll make a fine husband because I want a life of leisure. But after the marriage, the dwarf takes care of all the boy's farm duties. He tells the wife that he only helped her with the household work for the boy's sake, and she now has to go to work. So she tries to burn the place down, to burn the dwarf and his friends, but then everything goes to ruin after the dwarf abandons the farm.
Simon: It's our first foreign example as well. And it's perhaps just a little reminder that we'll be talking mainly about Britain today, but that these kinds of stories are international. People everywhere have this strong bond with houses. I suppose that brings me to another general point about helpers, just trying to give an overview of what helper mythology is like. Helpers seem to fall into two types in Britain. First of all, there are helpers who feel like banshees, a loyalty to families. Secondly, and over most of Britain, helpers are connected not with families, but with houses. And so if you are a family who is lucky or unlucky enough to go and live in that house, you will have the helper to deal with.
Chris: I wonder if helpers were regarded as disclosable defects by real estate agents.
Simon: We're back to your ghost question. Do you remember our debate on the legal standing of ghosts?
Chris: Yes. Yes.
Simon: Thinking of this leads us to a very big issue with helpers that we've only hinted at so far. If you just read the words on the packet, it would seem to be that having a helper in the house would be the best possible thing you could hope for, and it would add 30% value to the house. It's like having a dishwasher machine. But folklore tells us that that was not inevitably the case, and that sometimes living with a helper could be difficult. Do you want to give us a little bit of a sense of that?
Chris: I'm sorry. You're overwhelming me with the...
Simon: When I think of relationships between families and helpers, I think there are two things that can go wrong. I break it down into mutiny and desertion. Mutiny tends to be when the helper becomes irritated with the family or someone in it and actually starts to work against their interests. There are lots of examples in British folklore of helpers particularly treating serving staff very badly when they felt that the servants were not working as they should, and probably most masters and mistresses were very glad of that. But there are also these remarkable cases of the helper actually turning against the family. This is the process that, with very confusing terminology, Katharine Briggs used to call from brownie to bogget, the idea that this rather supine, passive, helpful being would start attacking the family. But this is what happens in many cases. They'll begin to leave things dirty. They'll begin to let the horses out in the middle of the night. It will start to be impossible to churn the butter. It reminds me a little bit of our descriptions of witchcraft. Nothing in the house will work. In one memorable Yorkshire account, one farmer wakes up in the morning, goes out into the yard, and he's horrified to find the bull standing on top of his house on the roof.
Chris: Yes. What triggered this, though? Why did they suddenly turn against the family? They just weren't shown enough respect?
Simon: The classic one is that someone in the house was foolish enough to try and see the helper. Ah, yes. Because we've talked about the way that helpers wanted to be invisible. They wanted to do their work at night. Maybe they were embarrassed by their nudity in some way. I think that might be an explanation. And so if you, as in many accounts we have, bored a hole through the wood and peered through at midnight to see the person who was helping you, to see the helper, then if he found out you were in big trouble, that's the kind of thing that could turn a helper against the family. I can try to think if there are any others. There's one Welsh account where a saucy maid, after having a fallout with the helper, instead of putting milk in his porridge, puts urine in the porridge. Yes. Not advisable behaviour. Chris, can you think of any others?
Chris: We all know the story of the shoemakers and the elves. After the elves are given clothes and shoes, they dance away and are never seen again. Now, is that resentful? Sometimes, apparently, the elves resent being given the clothes, and sometimes they'll only work if you give them the clothing. There is a story of a helper who required a yearly present of clothes, but the helper left when the quality of the clothes was inadequate.
Simon: Right. And here we're moving into a different area in the sense that we're going from mutiny to desertion.
Chris: Desertion, yes.
Simon: Okay. Here we actually see the helper leave the family, and you're right that overwhelmingly it is a question of clothes being given. And clothes can be a hat, it can be shoes, it can be a pair of trousers, it can be a beautiful red shirt. What on earth do we make of this? Because you're the fashion expert, Chris, you can't say no to this question. Why are they so offended?
Chris: I have this in my notes. It's like, what is this fetish about clothing? Is it something to do with their hairiness? The hairy wild men, the woodwoses, don't wear clothes. Or the helpers don't want new clothes because they're used to wearing their archaic, if dirty and ragged, fashions. So that sort of flies out the window. You've got the Devon farmer who made suits for six sprites, who he watched threshing his corn. And the pixies take the new clothes and chant, now the pixies' work is done. We take our clothes and off we run. And of course he had to thresh his own corn after that. There was a wonderful story from Sweden about a housewife who saw the household tomte wearing a shabby grey smock, and he was sifting the meal. So she made him a new kirtle and he happily put it on, but then he sang a song saying he wouldn't sift the meal anymore because it would get his new clothes dirty.
Simon: Our traditional accounts were a little bit muddled about whether household spirits are happy or insulted when they're given the clothes. And I think that that for me causes a lot of confusion. Just what is your impression? Is it usually happiness or usually anger, or is it just very mixed?
Chris: It does seem to be very mixed, but in general, it follows the shoemaker and the elves. You give them something, or even you say thank you, or you give them food and they don't want it. And so they flee. So I don't know. There's a story from Newfoundland about a farmer who drove the fairies away with a gift of clothing. And they said, new tote, new waistcoat, new breeches, you proud, I proud, I shan't work anymore. So it's almost like I'm too good to work because I've got new clothes. But then there's others who seem to cling to their dirty, ragged clothing, and you insult them by giving them new clothes. So yeah, it's very, very mixed.
Simon: I've never really got to the bottom of this. The way I like to think of it is that what characterises almost all household spirits is that they are wild creatures. They're in the domestic sphere, but they are wild. They do things according to their own devices. They're loyal to the house or to the family, but they do things the way they like according to their invisible rules. And I wonder if in the end, giving them clothes is not a little bit like bridling the wild pony. It's something that you just shouldn't do, that the essence of the being is its wildness. And if you domesticate it too much, if you take it away, it ceases to be helpful. And in the cases of at least British legends, it ceases to exist.
Chris: Right. Well, can we talk about some non-British helper spirits?
Simon: I was really hoping to hear more. So far, we've had Brittany, Sweden, Newfoundland.
Chris: Okay. We've got the Norwegian Nysa and the Swedish Tomte. And they've both been reported as they wear green with pointed red caps. And at least from late in the 19th century, they were particularly associated with Christmas, like Santa's elves. And a few years ago, I attended a Swedish Christmas Eve feast with a young man who noted that his family still believed in putting treats out for Tomte at Christmas. And like you said, these are attached to a particular farm or house rather than the family. And they usually live under the floorboards of the house or in some outbuilding. And they have very short tempers. You offend one, they may kill your livestock. There's also a variant of the Tomte called the, and I hope I don't butcher this too badly, the Hogbonder, which is said to be the ghost of the first inhabitant of the farmstead, who then becomes its guardian. It's kind of like the last person buried in the cemetery gets to be the guardian. Estonia. And I just love this one. And I hope, again, I'm not mispronouncing this. The creature was a skrat, and they did all the hard labour of the house for food. And supposedly, you could make your own skrat. It could be manufactured out of a tin pipe, a bit of toe, part of a pair of scales, part of a harrow, and some other ingredients, which they don't specify. It's set up on three successive Thursday nights in the middle of a crossway. And on the last night, the skrat manufacturer cuts his finger and allows the blood to fall on the creature, which immediately becomes endowed with life. So then he provides a slow horse for the skrat and a swift horse for himself, because he has to outrun the figure. And if he gets home first, then he gets the skrat to be the servant. They guard the house against thieves. They even will steal for their owners. They'll bring food or vegetables or money if they were required. And in this narration, I wish that more explicit directions had been included. I mean, Ikea would make a fortune with DIY skrats. Absolutely. Then there's a Russian household helper. And again, I hope I don't butcher this name too badly because I've seen it pronounced different ways. The Duma boy. He was supposed to be a very, very hairy creature. Even the palms of his hands and soles of his feet were furry. So you might see the tracks of his shaggy feet in the snow during winter. And he had a really unpleasant habit of running his hands over the faces of his sleeping humans. And if the hand feels soft and warm, good luck will follow. But if it feels cold and bristly, look out. So the Duma boy looks after his own household. And he keeps all the malevolent spirits away, doesn't allow the witches to injure the cows. Supposed to be dwelling in the fire on the hearth originally. But later he was said to live behind the stove and he hides all day. And when the house is asleep, he comes out and eats whatever food's been left out for him. And you better leave food because he'd set the house on fire and burn up everybody if he wasn't fed. Apparently, there are similar domestic spirits in Lithuania. And again, I don't know if I've got the pronunciation correct. Kaukas. They're supposed to be little creatures about a foot high. And I love this detail. The peasants make tiny cloaks and bury them in the ground under the floor of their huts. And the Kaukas put them on. And after that, they're the friends of the master of the house and look after all his interests.
Simon: So it's gone in reverse there. Instead of getting rid of a household spirit, you almost bribe them in.
Chris: Right. Yes. Yes.
Simon: Interesting.
Chris: And all of the pre-mentioned household spirits in Sweden or Russia or Estonia, when properly rewarded with a bowl of cream or a mess of porridge, will work harder and longer than the best human servant. I'm ready to term them the scabs of the supernatural world because they work harder for lower wages than humans would require.
Simon: Look, Chris, if I can just share my outrage. I'm speaking here on behalf of Bern. But how is it that you haven't given us a Swiss example, given your famous ancestry?
Chris: I haven't looked for Swiss household helpers. I think it's because the Swiss are very self-sufficient.
Simon: I knew you were going to say this. I knew it. I'm feeding you lines.
Chris: No, I haven't found any Swiss household spirits, but there may be. I just may have not discovered them yet.
Simon: So look, let me ask you a question. I'm finishing editing a book on European changeling law, and I would love to do in the future a European-wide survey of household spirits. And what would be a useful workable definition for a household helper?
Chris: Hmm. It's not easy. It's not easy because are they a spirit? Are they a fairy? Are they their own type of entity? Are they a little wild troll creature? I don't know. But all I know is that they do perform the same household tasks. They do the drudgery and aid anybody they're loyal to. That's the best I can do.
Simon: So we could say maybe something like, I need to jot this down, a supernatural being, just to keep it general, who undertakes house or farm work. And then I would want to add on behalf of a family, but I think that there you start to get into this problem that many of these beings seem to be loyal not to people, but to places.
Chris: So I don't think you can give a complete single definition because you do have that dichotomy between family and farmstead.
Simon: I mean, just to throw another little grenade in there, I know that in the Baltic, we've talked about this in a recent episode, there are household spirits that are snakes. And so they're spirits, but they're also physical creatures. They're actual snakes. And we have very good evidence of this in sources as recent as a century ago. Would they be included as well?
Chris: I think you'd have to do a whole separate chapter on non-human household helpers. I think of Jeff the mongoose, who would kill rabbits and leave them on the household doorstep and told them all the gossip that was going on because he'd cling to the bottom of the omnibus and hear the gossip.
Simon: But that leads me on to another point. Something that I'm very confused about in the British sources is that you talk about the different possibilities of where these household helpers come from. But it seems to me that a surprising number are actually ghosts. They're the spirits of the dead. And I'll just give you one of my favourite examples. There is a brownie on the west coast of Scotland who works for a family called the Lurgy MacDonalds. And he was a MacDonald himself several centuries ago who was killed by the great enemy, the Campbells cursed them. And so he helps the MacDonalds. And if he ever catches sight of a Campbell, then woe on them. So what do you think about this with helpers and ghosts?
Chris: That would have to be a whole chapter in a book if you were writing a helping spirit or household spirit book, because there's definitely a category of that. The called lad of Hilton, County Durham. I always thought he was just an ordinary luminous ghost, but he was the ghost of a servant and he's still carrying out his domestic tasks. And you've mentioned before a ghost of a murdered wife in Edinburgh used to come back to sweep and light the fire on the morning for her husband and his new spouse. Wow. That's devotion.
Simon: That's devotion. You also get quite frequently in Scotland, that story that I'm sure you're familiar with, where a mother dies, the father loses interest in the children, perhaps even finds a new potential wife or even gets married. And at a certain point, he discovers that the children are being looked after by his first wife. And this, of course, shakes things up considerably in the family.
Chris: I have several stories like that from the United States. Well, I've also run in some other accounts of ghosts who suddenly turn into house servants. This was a relatively late story. In 1848, two young friends, Barbara and Shirley, were spending the summer at a house near Lake Erie. They were on vacation. They just let the dirty dishes pile up and they went to bed thinking they'd do them in the morning. And Barbara woke up hearing the sound of running water and clattering dishes. And she thought, oh, Shirley must have decided to do the dishes after all. I really should get up and help her, but I'm just too tired. So she fell back asleep. And in the morning, they found the dishes washed and dried and stacked neatly by the sink and each thought the other had done it. The house was locked up and the only explanation they could come up with was a ghost. This is a place called Camp Beaumont. This was 1993. It's a Boy Scout camp. And these guys had gone out hiking. It started to get dark. They got a fire going and decided to build the fire higher for the night. Collected enough wood, they thought, and settled in. And then they noticed it was getting unusually cold and they saw that the firewood was nearly gone. But they didn't really want to go out and forage in the dark. So they just climbed into their sleeping bags and they heard somebody walking in the woods. And they looked out. They couldn't see anybody, but it seemed to be getting closer and closer. And they saw a man wearing a red flannel shirt and he was carrying wood. And according to camp legend, a long time ago, a man was camping there and the day had been warm, but the temperature dropped drastically and he hadn't collected enough wood and he froze to death. But now he appears at campsites running low on wood. So he brought several piles of wood to them and smiled and then went off. So they were sure that the ghostly woodman had saved their lives. That's a lovely story. The other ghost sort of thing that you find is there are some helpers that seem almost like poltergeists and they seem to alternate between destruction and helpfulness. Again, this is another story from Ohio, Trumbull County. The John Richardson family was subjected to raps and screams and furniture tipping and the smashing of household crockery. But even despite this, the spirit could be helpful. And the creature actually spoke to them. And here's what they said about it. At one time, the voice speaking to my wife said it, the spirit, could bake cakes for George, little boys eating at the table. Mrs. Richardson stepped away from the stove when the batter already prepared for baking cakes was from some unseen agency taken from a crock sitting near the stove and placed upon the griddle and turned at the proper time and when done taken from the griddle and placed upon the boy's plate at the table. The boys then proposed to bake a cake for Jane, my daughter, who was at work about the house. The cake was accordingly baked in the same manner as before stated and carried across the room and placed in the girl's hand. So they've had conversations with this creature and they said that the spirit, the voice gave us as a reason for breaking crockery and destroying property that it is done to convince the world of the existence of spirit presence. And the family swore out affidavits before a justice of the peace that story was true.
Simon: So Chris, let me stop you there. You excited me for a moment with poltergeists. Can you think of other examples where poltergeists could be said to be helping a family?
Chris: Again, we go back to Jeff, the mongoose, sorry. Because there were features about him that were definitely poltergeisty. The bell witch was looking out for the mother of the household and there was lots of poltergeist activity associated with that case. I've got examples, but not on my forebrain, let's say. There's a lot of cases where the household helpers make the racket in the night and things seem to be thrown about. I've also heard of stories of where you have a tidy room and then two minutes later it's all turned upside down. And then you've got an untidy room and two minutes later, it's all in order. So something's doing that sort of thing. And those frequently, I've found those stories to be associated with hotel ghosts.
Simon: That's interesting. Often in the 19th century, and when I say often, I think I know maybe four instances, that exact formula is used. That a helper, if a room is put beautifully tidy, will wreck it. But if the room is left in a very disordered state, it will clean it to perfection. So similar idea there. But look, that's interesting. We played around with the idea of helpers a little bit on our Facebook page, and I made the faux pas of suggesting that household helpers are a thing of the past. And it struck me how several of the readers on the Facebook group stated that they know, they actually think they have household helpers in their life. And that shocked me to some extent. I think of household helpers as being something that were already dying out in the 19th century. I certainly don't think of as being around today. And yet clearly for some people, they're a feature of day-to-day life. What would you make of that? Do you think household helpers are dead?
Chris: Well, I have one. I think I can easily explain the decline of the helper, the traditional helper. It comes down to the simple case of central heating. The household helpers predominantly lived by the hearth. They lived either in the fire or behind the stove. No more stoves, no more helpers. And if the helper lived below the floorboards, what's he supposed to do with a slab foundation or a basement set up as a media room?
Simon: I was just thinking that we used to have video killed the radio star. Instead here we have, I don't know what, gas killed the household helper.
Chris: Central heating.
Simon: The arrival of central heating. I understand why the fire and the end of the fire is a particularly important thing because it comes up again and again in accounts. But let's also throw in dishwashers, washing machines, dryers. These things that we only notice are desperately important when they break down and we suddenly have to look after ourselves for a week.
Chris: Right. Robo vacuums and that sort of thing. But we do have a few. This story was from 1921 and this guy was tossing his hay and he heard some funny noises and he looks around and he said he saw 50 little men dancing around a pile of hay, about six inches tall, dressed in red suits with black belts. And their language was a foreign one. I don't know what that means. He ran to get his wife to show the fairies. And when he came back, the fairies were gone, but all his hay was dry and stacked nicely in piles. So that's pretty late. And also across the ocean.
Simon: That's a very striking example. And you've given us two from Atlantic Canada now, but can you think of any others from North America?
Chris: Well, there's Stillwell and his brownies. Arthur Stillwell. He came from a family of entrepreneurs, eventually made a fortune in printing. He also had a dream of building railways and he organised several of them and founded a couple of towns, Stillwell, Oklahoma and Port Arthur, Texas. And he revealed in his autobiography that his success wasn't just down to luck, but to his association with brownies. They advised him on business decisions. They told him to avoid Galveston as the terminal of one of his railroads because that city was doomed. And they recommended a different site. And four days after the Port Arthur terminal was completed, Galveston was destroyed by the 1900 hurricane. So he says, I have built more than 3,000 miles of railroad. Every part of every route had been determined by spirits who have come to me in my dreams and told me what to do. They have never given me a false message. Now, do those count as domestic spirits since they're so business minded?
Simon: No, they're absolutely not domestic spirits. For me, household helpers cannot help you build a railway. What would you say to that?
Chris: Well, it's a new world. It's the brave new world. We're all very business minded over here. So why wouldn't the brownies be business minded? Seems logical. But I will say one story you mentioned where the household helper rounds up the cows and rounds up hares with the cows. I guess the motif of that is the sheepherder and the rabbits. And the ones over here just talk about some cow hand who's a tenderfoot, who's told to round up the cows. And he's like, oh man, I had so much trouble with those rabbits. And there's no supernatural involved. It's just some human going out to try to round up the cows. Lost that supernatural helper there.
Simon: I didn't know that story across the Atlantic. That's beautiful. It's good to see that that story survives. And it's also nice because another of the themes of helpers in Britain is that they're not perhaps the sharpest tools in the shed. And there you use the word tenderfoot that gives you a similar idea, perhaps someone is a little bit slow on the uptake.
Chris: Okay. That could be.
Simon: So Chris, let's move on to the question of reading in this area. And I just have a couple of things I wanted to throw out there and we'll see if you know these or not. I would start by saying that Katharine Briggs, who is reliable for so many things, has quite a few good helper stories. I think she had a bit of a soft spot for the helpers. And then there's a book which has been translated from German into English called Hausgeister. So they actually use the German word even in English. And the subtitle is Household Spirits of German Folklore. And it's by Florian Schaefer and Janine Pizerak and Hannah Gritsch. I know the first two of the authors. And what I think people would love about this book is that it is not just folklore. It's also a sustained work of art because they have moulded and created different household helpers from German folklore and taken photographs of them in the home.
Chris: Oh, lovely.
Simon: And it sounds a little bit Fraggle Rock, but it means the book is a real treasure. After that, I can't think of many areas of the British supernatural that would more deserve a longer study than this. What about you, Chris? Any books to add?
Chris: I don't really have that many books. I've got many stories about helpful ghosts, but they're not necessarily household helpers. There's a book called Ghosts Helpful and Harmful by the notorious Elliot O'Donnell. But the title is a bit misleading because most of the helpful ghosts are actually warning dreams or premonitions or ghosts rescuing friends from dire situations rather than just helping out at home. Let's see. I've got an article on the sheep herder and the rabbits. I've got a blog post on Arthur Stilwell and his brownies. So, I really don't have a whole lot. There's also a novel, Lob Lye by the Fire, which is a fictional story about a household helper.
Simon: But this leads us, of course, to the greatest work of fiction ever on household helpers. And this is, of course, Katharine Briggs' Hobberdy Dits.
Chris: One of my favourite books.
Simon: It is a lovely, lovely book by someone who had immense folklore knowledge and a great generosity of spirit and a poetic soul.
Chris: She just worked so many folkloric themes in without really being pretentious or anything. They just naturally fit into the story. Like we talked about in our feather folklore about not being able to die if there's pigeon feathers in the pillow or the mattress.
Simon: And so, this brings us to our final reading. And rumour has it that you may actually be drawing on Catherine Briggs for this.
Chris: This is from Hobberdy Dick by Catherine Briggs. Hobberdy mustered all his strength for he was shaking and picked up the clothes. As he did so, his own rags shrivelled away and he thrust thin naked limbs into the unaccustomed garments. Even as he put them on, however, the mortal cloth thinned and formed itself into a part of him. He stood up, thin and a little taller than he had been, glowing in the red firelight. Then a dreadful heat shot through him, not like the pleasant external warmth which he had felt from fire or sun, but the consuming heat within running through all his veins, which humans carry about with them all their lives, burning up their youth into old age within the span of a few short years. A few moments after the heat, a weight came upon him which bore him to the ground. It was a weight of care and sorrow and a doubleness of mind which seemed to be cutting him in two. But this only lasted a moment, for it seemed that something reached down and thrust the weight aside in his own good deeds, so patiently performed for so many hundred years, reached up towards it and drew him to his feet. It seemed as if the weight was still there in the air all around, but it no longer pressed on him. He moved freely within an invisible tower which moved with him. He ran and danced about the room, blessing it as he went, and his hempen hempen song was taken up and changed by a chorus all about him until it became the air that the spheres sang. Joel and Anne heard a snatch of it and saw a glowing shape dance past them out of the house. That was the last they saw of Hobarty Dick so long as they walked this earth, and the cream platter was the last thing that ever he washed. But for all that, Widford was a lucky place and well guided in their time and their children's, and for many a long year after that.