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The Púca: The Shapeshifter of the Irish Night and the Blackberries After Samhain

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Ireland's fairy world is a hierarchy of great precision—courtly sídhe at the top, solitary craftsmen and keeners below—and then, outside every ranking, running the night roads on its own errands entirely, comes the Púca . The name may share an ancestry with half the sprites of northern Europe—the English Puck, the Welsh pwca , the Norse púki —but the Irish night-goer outgrew all its cousins in strangeness and in stature. The Púca is the shapeshifter : appearing now as a sleek black horse with sulfur-yellow eyes and a mane like falling night; now as a goat, a hare, an eagle, a great black dog; now—rarest and most unsettling—as a lean old man in rags with animal patience in his face. It comes after dark, in the waning of the year above all; it talks—the Púca is a speaking spirit, with a taste for naming men aloud on empty roads; it spoils the last of the blackberries on the first of November and claims the unharvested fields; and it performs, upon the unwary and the deserving ali...
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The Klabautermann: The Hidden Carpenter of the Ship and the Rule That He Is Seen Only Once

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The sailors of the Baltic and the North Sea, who trusted no man entirely and no weather at all, nevertheless shipped one crew member on pure faith. He appeared on no muster-roll and drew no wages in coin; he stood no watch that the mate could inspect; and yet the old hands would tell you, in the smoky forecastles of the timber-brigs and the Hamburg traders, that he was the hardest-working soul aboard. He was the Klabautermann : the ship's own spirit—a little man in sailor's clothes, red or yellow jacket, tarpaulin hat or red cap, pipe in his teeth and a caulking hammer in his fist—who lived in the dark of the hold, under the windlass, or inside the very timber of the hull, and who spent his nights doing the one thing that keeps wooden ships and living souls afloat: maintenance . Through the dog-watches the men heard him at it—the knocking, tapping, hammering deep in the hull that gave him his name, from the Low German klabastern , to rumble and knock, or from kalfatern , to c...
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The Tarasque: The Dragon of Provence Tamed by a Maiden's Ribbon

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Between Avignon and Arles, where the Rhône runs broad and strong through the white limestone of Provence, there lived in a den beneath the river-bank a creature that the sober Latin of the medieval hagiographers describes with the relish of men who knew a good monster when they inherited one. It was the Tarasque : bigger than an ox, longer than a horse; head of a lion with teeth like swords; six legs, each armed with a bear's claws; the body of an ox sheathed in a turtle's carapace ; and a serpent's tail ending in a scorpion's sting. It lurked in the river and the wood by the crossing, sank boats, devoured travelers and horses, and defied every armed force sent against it—weapons broke on the shell; it crushed twelve lions, say the texts, and shrugged off engines of war. The terrorized town beneath its rock bore, then, the name Nerluc, the Black Lake. It bears now, and has borne for eight centuries, the name of its monster: Tarascon . And the manner in which the monste...
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The Nuckelavee: The Skinless Rider of Orkney and the Breath That Blights the Fields

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Every coast breeds its terrors, but the Orkney Islands—those green, treeless, wind-scoured stepping stones between Scotland and the old Norse world—bred the one that their own storytellers refused to describe except under protest. The Nuckelavee was, by the unanimous verdict of a people rich in monsters, the worst of them all : the devil of the sea, whose very name the islanders would not speak without immediately adding a grace— and may He deliver us —for naming, on those islands, was summoning. The old man Tammas, the only Orcadian on record who met the thing face to face and consented (after years of refusal, and only under holy persuasion) to say what he had seen, gave the description that has chilled readers since the folklorist Walter Traill Dennison set it down in the 1880s. It came along the shore road in the dark between sea and loch: a rider fused into his horse, one creature , for no seam divided them; the horse-part wide-mouthed as a whale's gape, its single great eye...
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The Mari Lwyd: The Gray Mare's Skull at the Midwinter Door and the Battle of Rhymes

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In the dead nights between Christmas and Twelfth Night, in the valleys of south Wales, a knock would come at the door—and outside in the dark stood a dead horse, singing. The Mari Lwyd : a horse's skull, exhumed or kept from year to year, bleached and beribboned, its eye-sockets set with bottle-glass baubles, its jaw hinged with a spring to snap at the unwary, the whole mounted on a pole and carried by a man hidden under a white sheet, so that the creature stood taller than any living thing at the door. Around her clustered her party—the Leader with his staff and ribbons, Sergeant, Merryman, sometimes Punch and Judy with blackened faces—and what they wanted was entry . But entry, by the iron rule of the custom, could not be forced and could not be begged. It had to be won in verse . Through the closed door began the pwnco : the battle of rhymes, stanza against stanza, the dead horse's party singing their claim to come in, the household singing back their refusals, insults, and...
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The Mandrake: The Root That Screams, the Gallows Herb, and the Servant Spirit in the Jar

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No plant in the world's garden has gathered more legend to itself per ounce of root than Mandragora officinarum : a low, unglamorous perennial of the Mediterranean nightshade family, stemless rosette of dark leaves, dull flowers, small golden fruit—and beneath the soil, the thing that made its fortune: a thick, forking taproot, often split into two legs, sometimes with side-arms, brown-skinned and pale-fleshed, which needs only a credulous eye and a knife's discreet assistance to become a little buried human being . Upon that resemblance, and upon the very real powers of its flesh—for the mandrake is a serious pharmacological engine, laden with the alkaloids of sleep, vision, and death—the old world built the most complete plant-mythology it possessed: the root that shrieks when torn from the ground , killing the man who hears it; the dog sacrificed to draw it; the herb sprung from the drippings of the gallows ; the pampered homunculus bathed in wine and wrapped in silk that...
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The Lambton Worm: The Well, the Serpent, and the Curse of Nine Generations

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The great dragon-legends of the world tend to begin in treasure-hoards and end in glory. The legend of County Durham begins in a skipped church service and ends in a debt unpaid for nine generations —and that difference is the whole character of the north of England, which never trusted glory and always kept accounts. The tale of the Lambton Worm is England's most complete dragon story: it has a sin at the root, a monster grown from the sinner's own carelessness, a penance, a hermit... a witch, a battle engineered like a millwright's problem, and—unique among the dragon-slayings of Europe—a bill presented after the victory , which the victor refuses to pay, and which his house then pays in installments of death for a century and a half. It is not a tale about killing a monster. It is a tale about what a monster is : the small discarded wrong, thrown down a well on a Sunday morning, and met again, thirty years later, wrapped nine times around the hill. The Catch That Was...
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