Fairies: A Dangerous History by Richard Sugg

Author:Richard Sugg [Sugg, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780238999
Google: uxBdDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1780238991
Goodreads: 36376764
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2018-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

Fairy Poltergeists

An implicit link between fairies and poltergeists dates back to the Romans. Roman spirits of the dead (manes) were divided into two classes: those beneficial household spirits, the lares, and those problematic ones which made mysterious noises, the lemures. While fairies would later be bribed with bread and milk, the Romans had a whole festival, lemuralia, every May, to placate the lemures. Here activities which later would both be attributed to fairies are credited to two different types of household spirit. In 1518 the Scottish theologian John Major spoke of brownies as ‘jocular spirits who do odd jobs about a house, throw stones and other objects, and are apt to provoke curiosity rather than alarm’. Citing this in 1963, Roger Lancelyn Green notes that this brownie ‘owes something to the poltergeist’. In 1575 the influential French surgeon Ambroise Paré wrote of spirits which ‘howl in the night . . . move benches, tables . . . children in the cradles . . . walk up and down rooms’ and much more – adding that these entities were ‘called by divers names, as devils . . . hobgoblins, fairies, Robin-good-fellows’ and so forth.

As Paré already implies, poltergeists resemble fairies in that both are capable of very controlled activity, as well as chaotic and destructive outbursts. When children are moved in their cradles, for example, they are usually put down carefully, often unwoken. I know this, because that happened to Mike, my old sociology teacher, when he was a young parent in the 1960s. And, yes – this is the point where I state my belief that poltergeists are real. As a lifelong atheist and rationalist, I had almost no interest in them until they ambushed me in 2013, during research on vampires. It took me a long time to get my head around this subject, and if what follows gives you a headache, I sympathize. I have studied some very difficult things. But nothing ever made my head hurt like poltergeists. When I did begin to take them seriously, I found that people I had known for many years suddenly told me their own poltergeist stories. Mike had told his to our class in 1989, but back then it was too strange and isolated for me to begin to get to grips with it.

The barest guide to the poltergeist will assist us through what follows. The phenomena – including unsourced noises, inexplicable movements of objects, fires, invisible pinchings or beatings, and stones hurled from nowhere – typically involve not a haunted house but a haunted person. This is usually a child aged between about eight and fifteen. If the family flees the ‘haunted house’, the events therefore often follow them. The person on whom the events centre (hereafter ‘agent’) is almost always suffering emotional trauma of some kind. In modern cultures this can be sexual, interpersonal or the result of bereavement. In vampire and witch societies it is usually sheer supernatural terror. In each case, a ritual which calms the agent, whether psychoanalysis or the staking of a vampire, can stop the poltergeist activity.

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