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

In an earlier post about the hobgoblin Robin Goodfellow, I mentioned the widely reported phenomenon of folkloric beings starting out as neutral or benign and becoming, in the history of folklore, increasingly demonic (that is, monstrous or allied with the Devil). This process may occur under the influence of church authorities, secular courts, or the prevailing Christian culture. The process can also occur in reverse: beings that start out as demonic entities, such as the Devil himself, can be rehabilitated—that is, become neutral, playful, or even good.

In this post, I offer some examples of these processes taken from the New England context, particularly as it relates to fairies and other Little People from Indigenous and non-Indigenous folklore.

Monstrous Little People

In the Wabanaki context, evidence suggests that the Little People (mikummwessuk) underwent a process of demonization at some point during the first half of the twentieth century. The evidence comes from interviews that the anthropologist Willard Walker conducted with Passamaquoddy elders and teenagers in the 1960s.

In nineteenth-century folklore, the Little People had been powerful, magical pygmy spirits who played pipes in the woods and created alliances with Passamaquoddy shamans. They were essentially benign beings who occupied an important place in the natural/magical world. In contrast, descriptions of the mikummwessuk in the 1960s incorporated monstrous or diabolical traits that distanced them from human beings in ways that weren’t apparent in the testimony of nineteenth-century storytellers.

These descriptions—found in Willard Walker’s article “Wabanaki ‘Little People’ and Passamaquoddy Social Control”—depict the mikummwessuk as “little hairy men who try to buy people’s souls.” They can only be seen by witches and have “faces covered with hair” as well as “horns on their heads.” These traits (that is, the possession of horns, the purchasing of souls, and the association with witches) may have been borrowed from the Passamaquoddy’s twentieth-century Catholic culture.

That being said, the mikummwessuk have never been straightforwardly diabolical beings: they’ve always retained many of their older mythological traits as nature spirits.

Pukwudgies

In an earlier post, I pointed out that modern-day depictions of pukwudgies differ a great deal from depictions of the same beings found in Wampanoag stories of the 1930s. In the latter stories, the pukwudgies were magical Little People who resembled the Wampanoag in many important ways, including living in tribes. The pukwudgies’ portrayal in nineteenth-century Ojibwe folklore also points to their similarity to other Indigenous Little People found throughout the New England region.

In the modern day, people who tell stories about the pukwudgies aren’t always familiar with the origin of these beings in Little People folklore. (Paranormal investigators have told me that I’m wrong to call the pukwudgies Little People because they’re actually “elementals,” an anachronistic term drawn from European occult philosophy).

That the pukwudgies have undergone a process of demonization in modern-day stories can be seen in their glowing green or red eyes, the hair that covers their bodies, their horns, and their resemblance to porcupine-like trolls, none of which are found in the older tales. In these modern encounters, the pukwudgies are threatening, solitary cryptids usually found alone in the deep forest. The source of this demonization appears to be texts originating in the paranormal investigation community in the late twentieth century.

Jimmy Squaretoe

Back in 2017, historian Chris Woodyard drew attention to an interesting story from Hampton, New Hampshire, in which the Devil was said to have appeared to the niece and daughters of a man called Nathaniel Johnson in the late eighteenth century (cf. Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, August 17, 1843).

Most interesting for our purpose is the form the Devil took when he appeared: as Woodyard pointed out, his appearance incorporated many features associated with fairies. First, he appeared as “an unknown cat” (a shape-shifting ability found among the lutins or elves of Northern Maine) and then as a “little man in leather” called “Jimmy Squaretoe.” Apparently, “many persons of the highest respectability” saw the little man “walking about in the adjoining graveyard” or following Nathaniel Johnson’s daughters.

Interestingly, the writer claimed that the little man in leather was the same being (the Devil) who appeared famously to Hampton resident, General Jonathan Moulton, a man believed to have entered into a Faustian pact. This “little man in leather” often appeared in Moulton’s company, said the writer, and even took the general’s body back to hell with him when he died, leaving his coffin empty. In a clear example of folklore diminishing the Devil, the writer’s story alters an older tale about General Moulton in which the Devil appeared to Moulton as a full-size “man clad in black velvet” (I quote from Peter Muise’s post on the story).

Arguably, the Devil’s appearance as a man in “black velvet” is already evidence of an early-modern “rehabilitation” of the Devil, for it differs radically from the pre-modern depiction of the Devil as a monster with horns. Although the Devil’s attractive appearance belies his true evil nature, it also represents a movement away from monstrosity. For the purpose of this blog, it’s the Devil’s littleness in the Jimmy Squaretoe story that’s of most interest, for it brings that being into the orbit of fairies. In this case, the Devil’s transformation into a fairylike being coincides with a diminution of the Devil’s authority. As Chris Woodyard pointed out:

Although the Devil sometimes shape-shifts and the cat is the favored familiar of his minions, the little-man-in-leather does not seem to possess the full-sized authority of His Satanic Majesty. How can he, being only the size of a “grown cat?”

When we compare the example of Jimmy Squaretoe to the examples drawn from Indigenous Little People folklore mentioned earlier, we appear to be dealing with a reverse process: whereas the mikummwessuk and pukwudgies became more monstrous or diabolical over time, the Devil came to resemble one of the Little People.

The Imps of the Selee Sawmill

The final example I want to mention here represents a case of demonization that had evidently been completed long before the being in question appeared in New England folklore. I’m referring to the “imps” of Nathan Selee’s sawmill in the town of Easton, Massachusetts. A story shared widely on the Internet but originating in a late-nineteenth-century history book, it tells of a crew of imps in the service of a diabolical wizard. When I say that these imps are the product of an already completed process of demonization, I mean that they cannot be traced to any benign or neutral being existing before them in New England folklore.

The most tangible record of the Selee Sawmill legend can be found near Easton’s eighteenth-century cemetery, where a historical marker (placed in 1997) locates the site of the now-demolished mill and its pond:

Site of the sawmill built by John Selee in the 18th century and continued by his son, Nathan, a wizard who purportedly used satanic imps to run the mill at night.

Various websites mention these “imps,” suggesting that their action in running the sawmill is an established, important feature of the tale. However, the text in which these imps first appeared deals with them only cursorily—as a possibility rather than an integral aspect of the tale: According to William Chaffin’s History of the Town of Easton (1886), superstitious townspeople believed that Nathan Selee, the heir of the Selee sawmill, had sold his soul to the Devil and had received in return the power to run his mill without workers, which he did throughout the night, thereby multiplying his profits. As Chaffin wrote:

strange stories were told, and even believed by superstitious people, about the Devil or his imps running the mill at night, Nathan Selee being reported as knowing too much about magic arts… (p. 287)

On close inspection, it’s clear that the Devil is at the heart of this tale and that the imps occupy a minor role, mentioned only in the phrase “or his imps.” The imps’ function in the tale is to explain, in passing, how the Devil could have run a sawmill; i.e., he must have used diabolical familiars. Nevertheless, every modern telling of the tale has put the imps in the foreground, making the story synonymous with them. (It should be noted, too, that the imps’ role in the tale is to perform human labor in the night, an activity they share with household fairies such as brownies).

That imps are a demonized type of fairy (originating in the sixteenth and seventeenth century) is clear from the interchangeable use of imp and fairy at that time, as fairy folklore expert John Kruse has pointed out. Gradually, the word imp came to refer to a demonized type of fairy—a fairy understood within the context of a Calvinist culture that didn’t allow for the existence of neutral supernatural beings. By the time folklore about imps arrived in North America and was popularized in tales about “wizards” such as Nathan Selee, the relationship between imps and fairies was forgotten. Despite both fairies and imps being diminutive beings with magical powers, imps at the turn of the twentieth century were exclusively associated with the Devil. This is why the character imps took in New England folklore was a product of demonization completed long before their arrival in this land.

Read about more fairy folklore in my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.