The Redcap: The Murderous Goblin of the Border Castles
There are haunted places that merely remember violence, and there are places that feed on it. Along the old frontier between England and Scotland — that windswept corridor of moss and moor where, for three centuries, cattle raiders burned one another's farms by moonlight — the ruined towers do not simply remember. Something lives in them still, the old people said. Something short and broad-shouldered, with long grey hair streaming down its back, eyes that glow like embers in a draught, and iron boots that ring on the fallen stones. It carries a pikestaff in its left hand. And upon its head sits a cap the color of a fresh wound, because that is precisely what dyed it. This is the Redcap, called also the powrie or the dunter, and among all the goblins of British folklore he is perhaps the most unrepentantly murderous. The brownie labors while the household sleeps. The knocker taps warnings to miners in the dark. Even the Kelpie , that drowning horse of the Scottish lochs, kills fr...