Turn Your Cloak for the Fairy Folk

There's an old saying from England that goes something like this:

Turn your cloak

For fairy folks

Live in old oaks

It's an instruction and a warning. Fairies are mischievous, if not sometimes maevolent, and often inhabit large, old oak trees. Turning your cloak inside out will prevent them from enchanting you as you pass by their home. I'm not 100%  sure why wearing something inside out will protect you, but I think the belief is that the fairies are just so puzzled by this weird behavior that they don't know what to do.

Not a lot of European fairy lore made it to New England, so I was surprised to read the following in Caroline Howard King's When I Lived in Salem 1822 - 1866:

Judge Story used to tell with great delight, that when he was a boy living in Marblehead, his mother always warned him, when he went to the pasture, to drive home the cows, to turn his jacket inside out for fear of the pixies.

It seems likely that King is talking about Joseph Story, a famous North Shore lawyer who became a Supreme Court Justice. Justice Story was a child in Marblehead during the Revolutionary War and left in 1795 to attend Harvard. The warning against pixies would have been delivered to him by his mother Mehitable Story (maiden name Pedrick).

Joseph Story, 1779 - 1845

Why don't we have more European fairy beliefs in New England? In his new book America Bewitched: Witchcraft After Salem, historian Owen Davies proposes at least one answer. In Great Britain fairies are often associated with certain features of the landscape like ancient burial mounds, streams, or large trees. When the English settlers left their old homes for New England they left behind not only these locations but also their magical inhabitants.

The New World landscape certainly had an abundance of interesting features, but without the weight of oral tradition the fairies didn't become associated with them. Fairies didn't just live in any old tree, but specific trees back in England that had been left behind. In New England, mothers didn't tell their children about fairies living in the oak behind their house here and so the traditions mostly faded away.

New England does have a lot of natural features associated with the Devil, and I wonder if the Devil took the place of the fairies in local folklore. After all, he's not limited to one particular hill or tree, so it was easier for beliefs about the Devil to travel to North America. The various rocks, ponds, etc. named after the Devil aren't so much his home, but have instead been altered by him as he traveled across the region.

The belief about wearing things inside out did persist into the nineteenth century in New England, but without any fairies being associated with it. You were supposed to wear a dress or shirt inside out simply to bring good luck, not to avoid being enchanted by pixies. The practice survived but the fairy association disappeared.

Witches Woods in Beverly: A Headless Ghost, A Mystery Farm, and of Course Witches

I'm working on a book about North Shore folklore (which hopefully will come out in the fall of 2014), and I've found a lot of interesting stories. I'm saving most of them for the book, but I thought this was a good one to share for a gloomy early winter day.

In the town of Beverly, Massachusetts is a large wooded conservation area officially called Beverly Commons, but which has also been know for many years as Witches Woods. The story most currently told about the name is that Giles Corey supposedly hid out in these woods while trying to escape from the Salem witch trials. I'm not sure how true that story is. Giles Corey was quite elderly when he was accused of witchcraft and it wasn't easy to get from Salem Village to Beverly back in the 1600s. Still, it's a good story.

Even better stories about Witches Woods can be found in Caroline Howard King's When I Lived in Salem, 1822 -1866. This book, which is a collection of reminiscences about daily life on the North Shore in the early 19th century, is fascinating. Do you want to know what people ate for dessert in 1836? Marlborough pudding and cranberry pie, of course. What happened to a woman if she fell asleep during the interminable Sunday church services? A church official called the Tidy Man (aka the Tithing Man) would tickle her awake with a fox-tail mounted on a pole. Drowsy men weren't treated so gently - they were whacked back into consciousness with a wooden knob mounted on the other end.

Caroline Howard King's family owned a summer home in Beverly called Thisselwood, which abutted Witches Woods. She doesn't mention any stories about witches, but does write about some other spooky occurrences happening in the area.

Thisselwood, from the Harvard University Library.

 According to her book, the locals believed that a headless ghost wandered through the woods. Although they were reluctant to speak of him, many had seem him walking forlornly among the trees carrying his head under his arm. No one knew what tragedy had led him to this doom. Caroline King and her family jokingly named him Heady, but Caroline didn't laugh on late night carriage rides through the woods. She was quite afraid of seeing Heady.

She never did see the decapitated ghost, but had instead another odd experience in Witches Woods. One summer morning in 1841 Caroline (who was nineteen at the time) set off for a stroll in Witches Woods with her nine-year old cousin Nony and a maid named Lucy Anne. After walking for while the group decided to have a snack and rest under some hemlock trees a short distance from the path. When they were done eating they walked back to the path - but it wasn't there. Despite searching in all directions no path could be seen at all. It was if it had vanished.

Caroline and her companions wandered through the woods for hours, but somehow always came back to the exact same spot. They could hear the ocean and knew they weren't far from home but were unable to get there.

Trying one last time to find the path they stumbled upon a clearing in the woods, in the middle of which stood the remains of a long-abandoned house: a chimney, a cellar-hole, and a stone stoop with an enormous lilac bush growing next to it. This ruin, Caroline knew, was called by her neighbors the Homestead, and was shunned and said to be haunted.

A path led from the clearing up a small hill, and the group decided to follow it. From the top of the hill they had a view over the woods, and could see nearby at the foot of the hill a cozy farmhouse with smoke rising from the chimney. The house had a broad stone stoop, and as they watched a woman came outside and scattered feed for the chickens. Excitedly, Lucy Anne ran down towards the house to ask for directions home.

Caroline and her cousin waited, and waited, and finally a dejected Lucy Anne returned. No matter how many times she had walked around the hill she couldn't find the farmhouse. In fact, all she saw were "hateful solemn old pine trees." However, she had found a dry stream bed which they followed out of the woods to the beach and eventually home to Thisselwood.

James Russell Lowell, from Wikipedia.

The writer James Russell Lowell was staying with the King family at the time. Lowell claimed he had the second sight and had seen a ghost at Elmwood, his family's estate in Cambridge (now the home of Harvard University's president), so he set off into the woods determined to find the haunted farm. He never found either the abandoned ruin or the elusive farmhouse (which was clearly a ghostly image of the ruin as it formerly appeared).

What would have happened if he or Lucy Anne actually had found the house and asked the farm wife (if that's what she was) for directions? What if they went inside for a drink of water or a bite to eat? I think they should be thankful they never found they house, because fairy tales and ghost stories suggest they might still be inside today.