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Modern parents have plenty to fret about, but go back a few hundred years and your biggest worry wasn’t to do with screen time or gender roles, it was that your baby had been snatched by evil faeries and replaced with one of their own kind.
Changelings feature heavily in European folklore, and while the first thing that had parents fearing that their baby had been swapped was that it was ugly.
Due to ignorance at the time, if the newborn was disabled, had unusually large or small features, or simply looked like a little old man, it would also spark panic.
This stemmed from the belief that the faeries took a healthy baby and replaced it with an ageing member of their community. Safe in the crib, the ailing faery would die in comfort and peace cooed over and fed by humans.
But there were other clues that people were always looking out for. Some people believed that if a child didn’t grow or was generally sickly it was a changeling, and a baby with a huge appetite, or was suddenly much louder or quieter could be an imposter.
And a child thought to be growing a beard or having ‘long teeth’ sparked panic, as could a youngster appearing to have a wisdom beyond their years or great intelligence.
Other tell tale signs of there being a changeling in the family was if the baby or child displayed unusual behaviour like leaping around, singing, or dancing when it thought it was alone. In Irish and Scottish folklore, it was a red flag if they developed the ability to play an instrument.
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Having a changeling in the house wasn’t just bad news for the missing baby, now a faery slave, it was a harbinger of doom, death and ruin for the entire family.
It was imperative that the imposter be banished back to its own world as quickly as possible – but some of the methods were incredibly cruel.
The parents could try beating the baby, the idea being that their cries would bring the faeries back to rescue their family member, and return the human at the same time.
Drowning and leaving them in the woods to be taken by wolves or swapped back under the veil of darkness were also seen as surefire ways to see if your baby was actually an evil faery.
But the most outlandish of all the ways to be rid of the changeling was to try to scare it aware.
Here Be Monsters claims that threatening to burn it with a poker or boil it in a soup were popular threats.
They add: “The least aggressive of the methods to get the changeling out of there was to make it reveal its name or age. Usually, this involved shocking it by doing something confusing or unexpected.
“A mother might crack eggs and throw the insides away while putting the shells in the soup pot. The point was to get the kid to say, ‘Well I, (insert fairy name) haven’t seen such a sight in all my (insert absurdly long-not-baby-years).’ Then the changeling would be whisked away and the true child returned.”
But the ‘motives’ of the faeries wasn’t simply to get their elders in to a 1700s version of Dignitas.
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Folklore historian Katharine Briggs, wrote in her 1976 book An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Brownies, Boogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures: "A human child might be taken due to many factors: to act as a servant, the love of a human child, or malice.
"Most often it was thought that fairies exchanged the children. In rare cases, the very elderly of the fairy people would be exchanged in the place of a human baby, so that the old fairy could live in comfort, being coddled by its human parents.
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"Simple charms such as an inverted coat or open iron scissors left where the child sleeps, were thought to ward them off; other measures included a constant watch over the child."
Terrifyingly, it was believed that the faeries also wanted to drag adult women to the mystical netherworld to marry their men and to nurse their babies. In cases of 'adult abduction', it was said that an enchanted log that resembled them was left in their place.
It wouldn’t be long until this object decayed and had to be buried – while the missing human remained enslaved with the faeries.
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But it seems not every adult who was taken by the malevolent imps was swapped for a log.
In 1895, Irishwoman Bridget Cleary was brutally murdered by her husband Michael who became convinced that she was a changeling after she fell ill with bronchitis.
Michael went as far as to either burn her alive or burn her body after murdering her in a vain attempt to bring his “real” wife back to the human realm. Ten people stood trial for her horrific killing – including her own dad, who was also convinced that she had been exchanged for a magical doppelgänger.
- Conspiracy theories
- Parenting
- babies
- Loch Ness Monster
- Alien
- Family
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