Jenny Greenteeth: The River Hag Who Pulls Children into the Water
There is a particular kind of pond, common in the flat green counties of northwest England, that wears a perfect unbroken skin of duckweed — a surface so smooth, so vividly green, that to a small child it does not look like water at all. It looks like a meadow. It looks like something you could walk on. Lancashire and Cheshire folk had a name for what waited under that innocent green: Jenny Greenteeth — Ginny, Jinny, or Wicked Jenny in the local tellings — a water-hag with green skin, streaming weed-hair, long arms, and long teeth, who lay just beneath the weed-skin of pools, ponds, and sluggish rivers, and whose whole occupation was to seize children who came too near the edge and drag them down. She is one of the classic English "nursery bogies" — frights kept by adults for the protection of children — and at the same time something considerably older and stranger: the local English face of the drowned world's appetite, given a woman's name and a mouthful of green ...