Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

Fairy abduction is often mentioned in British and Irish folklore. Many people have read stories about fairies stealing men’s wives or taking women to act as midwives to a fairy baby. Sometimes people enter fairy mounds, enticed by the music, and dance the night away, only to find that, in the morning, they cannot leave. Sometimes people attend a fairy feast where they accidentally eat the food, causing them to become trapped in fairyland forever.

But what about New England? Do we find such tales here?

Fairy abduction is rare in New England folklore

The folklore of New England offers few comparable instances of fairy abduction. While many European immigrants who arrived in New England between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries must have been familiar with the notion of fairies stealing humans, references to the phenomenon are largely absent from recorded folklore (of British, Irish, Scots Irish, and French origin, that is).

The descendants of British fishermen and sailors who settled in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in the seventeenth century may have told stories about fairy abduction. However, only a hint of these stories has survived.

In the early-nineteenth century, fishermen moored in Marblehead’s port warned the young Joseph Story, a future Supreme Court justice, to run home at twilight so the bogles wouldn’t steal him (a bogle is a type of goblin or household spirit). If Marblehead’s residents told other tales of fairy abduction, they unfortunately haven’t survived.

As Peter Muise has pointed out on his blog, anxieties about supernatural abduction usually centered on witches rather than fairies in New England folklore. This is because the Puritans who settled the region more readily believed in witches and other diabolical entities.

A Mount Holyoke legend

One example of fairy abduction in New England can be found in an urban legend from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. The story involves an Irishwoman who lived in a brick building that now houses the Pearsons Annex dormitory. The woman believed the fairies had stolen her baby and replaced him with a “changeling,” i.e., a fairy baby. The changeling wouldn’t stop crying and had a ravenous appetite, causing the woman to suspect it wasn’t her child. In an attempt to have the fairies return her baby, she murdered the suspected changeling and was then killed by her husband in self-defense.

It’s unlikely the Mount Holyoke story arose from a genuine culture of fairy folklore in the town of South Hadley where the college sits. In its original form, recorded in the 1970s, the story didn’t mention the changeling child at all and resembled a simple ghost story. Real-life events in New York City in the 1860s may have inspired storytellers to introduce the fairy changeling into the tale, something I explain in my forthcoming book.

A short summary of Native American fairy abduction tales

Fairy abduction is mentioned frequently in Native American folklore, particularly among the Abenaki in New Hampshire and the Passamaquoddy in Maine. One story involves a beautiful Abenaki woman who lived with her family near the source of the Ellis River in New Hampshire. One day, when the woman was walking in the woods around her home, a solitary mountain spirit stole her and kept her as his bride. In the years that followed, the spirit brought game and left it at the parents’ door by way of thanks.

Among the Passamaquoddy in Eastern Maine, the Little People were believed to transform themselves into beautiful men and women, seduce members of the tribe, and never let them go. Meanwhile, in Connecticut and Massachusetts, Mohegan and Wampanoag parents sometimes told their children the Little People’s leader, Granny Squannit, would take them if they misbehaved. Granny Squannit was a two-and-a-half-foot woman usually identified with an ancient goddess of the Narragansett Tribe.

In the wetlands of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, the Western Abenaki and Penobscot people told stories about spirits who stole children by luring them into swamps. These spirits were like the will-o-the-wisps of European folklore who used lights to attract passersby into dangerous marshes. In another Abenaki story, the children of local townspeople in Warren, New Hampshire, were stolen when they ate “fairy bread.”

One final story involves a highly respected Wampanoag medicine woman who lived at Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard. One day the woman followed a small brown man into an underground fairyland and found that when she wanted to leave, the Little People wouldn’t let her go; the son and heir of the Little People’s king even wanted to make her his queen.

Conclusion

Fairy abduction is clearly not unheard of in New England, and it may well have appeared in the stories of early British and Irish immigrants. However, only a hint of these stories has survived in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

In recorded folklore, the topic is mainly a Native American concern.