I was recently invited to speak at London’s respected esoteric bookshop, Atlantis, and during our discussion, one participant asked the difference between boggarts and poltergeists. I had to think hard about this, to put it into words, and I thought it was worth sharing my conclusions.
Poltergeists are generally defined as noisy- usually mischievous- ghosts which are held to be responsible for unexplained noises (such as rappings) or that move furniture and throw objects such as crockery around inside a house; sometimes they are responsible for stones being thrown outside. They have traditionally been described as troublesome spirits who haunt a particular person- instead of a specific location. References to poltergeists are international and became more common from the early seventeenth century. Psychic investigators from the later nineteenth century onwards established that there generally seems to be a single human agent responsible for or connected with all the disturbance, whose removal will terminate the phenomenon. This may be a person with a physical or mental abnormality, or it may just be a pubescent child in a heightened emotional and physical state. No clear motivation seems to exist for the phenomena (unless, with the aforementioned adolescents, it is connected to an teenaged desire to be the centre of attention).
Regular readers will immediately see the contrast with the boggart. The latter is a being who’s tied to a specific location and family; even more importantly, the boggart has a personality and character- they’re more than just a source of nuisance noise (although they can certainly cause it). They speak, the interact, they undertake household chores; they can come almost to be a part of a family. In short, they’re not just a ghost in the house.
The majority of boggarts are unfriendly and unpleasant beings. The more malicious of these creatures will attempt to pull people down into their underground lairs, as with the Boggarts of Hellen Pot and Hurtle Pot near Chapel-le-Dale, in Yorkshire. At the Bee Hole area of Burnley there used to be a boggart who lurked in wait for solitary people. It was said to have once killed a woman there and then to have hung up her skin on a rose bush. The boggart at Horbury near Wakefield also attacks the unwary but most seem to be more likely simply to alarm travellers. For instance, at Bunting Nook, in Norton outside Sheffield, a boggart haunts the place where three roads meet and has been a particular terror to children passing by there. In fact, even the helpful boggarts we’re about to discuss might spend their leisure time elsewhere, scaring innocent travellers. There was a tradition that boggarts would disguise themselves as stones on moorland tracks, deliberately to trip up passers-by. Animals, especially horses, can see them better than people can and often when they rear up unexpectedly it’s because they have ‘taken the boggart’- they’ve spotted one, even if it doesn’t look like a boggart to the human observer. Another trick of the beings was to shrink to the size of a flea and then to scare horses by speaking inside their ears. It will be noted that all these beings are, as it were, ‘wild.’ They live independently of humans outside in the countryside, interacting with people when they choose. In this respect, they seem to be very clearly differentiated from poltergeists.
The foregoing examples notwithstanding, not all boggarts are bad, by any means. Some will take up residence in and around people’s homes or farms and will undertake the labouring roles usually performed by brownies and hobs. They can work for free for humans and, by doing so, make them rich. The helpful boggart at Hackensall Hall near Fleetwood in Lancashire assumed the shape of a horse, it was said, solely so that it could enjoy a warm stable and a hot pie at night. However, unlike the hobs, most labouring boggarts do not seem to have expected any sort of recompense at all for their gratuitous labours; in fact, it’s said that thanking or acknowledging the boggart is just what you shouldn’t do.
Boggarts may appear looking like large horses and, in that disguise, will work well for farmers and hauliers if they are well-used by them. If they are mistreated or neglected though, they will complain- loudly. They can be touchy, too. At Levenshulme in Lancashire a boggart helped out an elderly farmer with his reaping and gleaning but the pair fell out when the man half-seriously questioned whether the boggart had tired out his best horses whilst getting in the harvest overnight. In consequence of these careless words, the crop ended up back in the fields and the peevish boggart refused to perform any more tasks about the farm. Even so, he carried on doing the household chores until he overheard a neighbour asking the farmer whether he missed the boggart’s help with the farm work. The man confessed he did- and invoked a blessing upon him. With a shriek, the boggart abandoned the farm entirely.
Unfortunately, it is most common for boggarts to combine both desirable and alienating qualities. It’s in this guise that they probably most approach the poltergeist. The boggart of Syke Lumb farm near Blackburn was known as a very hard worker when he was content- he would milk the cows, bring in the hay, fodder the cattle, harness the horses, load carts, and stack harvested crops. However, when he was irritated by some casual remark or unintended insult, he would smash the cream jugs and prevent the butter churning, interfere with livestock- such as setting them loose (or even driving them to the woods)- make it impossible to get hay out of the stack, upset loaded carts and pull off bed clothes and drag hapless sleepers down the stairs.
The boggart resident in the farm at Boggart Hole Clough, near Manchester, had even fewer redeeming qualities than that at Syke Lumb. He undertook small domestic tasks, such as churning and scouring pots and pans, and he could be very merry, playing with the children and joining in the laughter and jollity at Christmas. Nonetheless, his interminable pranks were very wearing- he’d put buckets up chimneys and would crack table legs. He’d scare the domestic servants and worry the farmhands, frighten the children and drive everyone to bed early to avoid him. He became more and more presumptuous, snatching the children’s bread and butter out of their hands and interfering with their porridge, milk, and other food- for example, putting spiders in the buttermilk and cinders in the bread. In the same manner, the sole occupation of the boggart at Greenside seemed to be disturbing the people in the house he shared with them: he would drum on an oak chest, shake the bed hangings and drag off the sheets during the night. These japes were unquestionably trying, but they were not intended malevolently. As said at the start, the essential difference with the poltergeist seems to be that these nuisance boggarts have a personality and a reason for the things they do, rather than being more purely a psychic process. These examples also highlight the fact that the boggart is very much of denizen of the north of England- especially Lancashire- as against the international nature of the poltergeist noted earlier.
It’s when domestic boggarts turn wholly against their former masters that the real problems arise and life can become miserable, if not intolerable. It’s been suggested that an angry boggart is in fact little different from the modern idea of a poltergeist and there are indeed many similarities- except for the clear motivation and sense of grievance of the former. In West Yorkshire some homes were so notorious for the trouble caused by the vexed household sprite that they came to be known as ‘boggart houses’- quite a few of these can still be found, for example at Midgeley, Luddenden, Brighouse, Elland and Leeds. Some ‘boggart chairs’ are also known, stones on which the boggarts would sit outside these houses. Misbehaving boggarts seems to have caused such a nuisance in West Yorkshire that the little town of Yeadon took desperate measures- the ‘town book’ records payments expended on boggart catchers.
Curiously, the same methods can be used to get rid of nuisance boggarts and poltergeist. Both can be laid, or exorcised, as I’ve described in an earlier post and in my book, Beyond Faery
Before concluding this posting, I should, however, recognise that the Reverend Robert Kirk differs from my opinion on the differentiation between the fae and poltergeists. In the Secret Commonwealth he stated that “the invisible wights which haunt houses seem rather to be some of our subterranean inhabitants (which appear to men of the second sight) than evil psirits or devils; because, though they throw great stones, pieces of earth and wood at the inhabitants, they hurt them not at all as if they acted not maliciously, like devils at all, but in sport, like buffoons and drolls.” (A Succint Accompt of My Lord Tarbott’s Relations, section 8).
British Fairies 