CONFESSIONS OF A BOGGART HUNTER
Seven or eight years ago I started to read compulsively about an English folk monster, the boggart. Studies, writing, articles and surveys followed. I launched my Boggart Census in 2019 in Fortean Times (more of which below) and there are now two books with Exeter University Press, one of which is free online.1 It has been exhilarating chasing fragments of nightmare through the darkling Pennines, the Cheshire plains, the grim Fylde and the Lincolnshire Carrs. But all good things end. I’m almost 50 and there are redcaps and mermaids, bullbeggars and pixies clamouring for attention. I hang up, then, not without some regrets, my hunting nets, my poaching bag and my boggart whistle. But before shutting the door I look one last time over the twilight valleys and remember some of my favourite bits of boggart forteana.
BOGGART BASICS
What is a boggart? What did the Victorian serving lad mean when he came crashing through the kitchen door to announce: “There’s a boggart in the lane”? When I began my studies, I thought of boggarts as a fairy crossed with a sasquatch: a kind of troll. I was misled, in part, by supernatural dictionaries that define boggarts as bad-tempered goblins. Wikipedia, meanwhile, comes closer to the truth (or at least it did in late 2021). Boggarts, it insists, are “either a household spirit or a malevolent genius loci (that is, a geographically-defined spirit) inhabiting fields, marshes, or other topographical features.”
‘Boggart’ was, in its heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries, even simpler. Over the north-west of England and some parts of the Midlands and the north-east a boggart was any spirit (see map on p33). You called a will o’ the wisp a ‘boggart’. You called a water demon a ‘boggart’: Jenny Green-teeth (FT374:57) was often so described. You called a phantom black dog (padfoot etc) a ‘boggart’. You called a domestic hob (FT330:58-59) a ‘boggart’. You called a ghost a ‘boggart’. Demons were regularly called ‘boggarts’. In fact, perhaps we would save time if we say what supernatural beings could not have the boggart label hung on them: fairies (traditional boggarts are solitary) and angels (too conceited and good).
A DECAPITATED PHANTOM WOMAN WHO KEEPS HER HEAD IN A BASKET
In short, then, ‘boggart’ – see also the related ‘boggle’ – was a glorious catch-all term, meaning essentially ‘scary crap’. Indeed, a close synonym were If someone ran into the kitchen saying: “Good God, I’ve just seen a boggart!” the imagination could run riot: and that often was the point. There was a smorgasbord of the supernatural to choose from.
