Gello: The Child-Stealing Demon Bound by Her Twelve and a Half Names
She is one of the oldest named terrors in European history — old enough that Sappho knew her. In a fragment of the poetess of Lesbos, from the seventh century before Christ, a woman is described as "fonder of children than Gello": already, that early, the name needed no footnote. Everyone on Lesbos knew Gello — the ghost of a girl of the island who had died young, unmarried, childless, and who returned from that unfinished death with an unbearable hunger for what she had been denied. She came for the infants. She came for the young mothers and the brides. Where a baby sickened without cause, wasted at a breast that had milk, or was found still in a cradle that had held a living child at dusk, the women of the Greek world said her name — and kept saying it, in an unbroken chain of whispered diagnosis and written counter-magic, for the next twenty-five centuries. Ancient Greece feared her as Gello; Byzantium fought her for a thousand years as Gylou ; the Greek villages of the ...