Fairy Abduction Legends in Newfoundland

An Analysis of MUNFLA Folklore Survey Cards: 2005-Present

Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran

Folklore 6710: Legend

March 25, 2017

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Introduction

Newfoundland is rich with fairy lore, and a great deal of work has already been done to

analyze it. Most notably, Barbara Rieti’s Strange Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland

covers this material with discussions ranging from its cultural origins to the ways it is used “…as

a vehicle for discussion about the past and a reflection on how times have changed (Rieti 1991,

181).” She also writes about fairy blasts in The Good People: New Fairylore Essays, and Peter

Narváez contributes to the same text with a discussion of the relationship between fairies and

spatial, temporal, and moral boundaries in Newfoundland. The Memorial University of

Newfoundland Folklore Archive (MUNFLA) is another excellent repository of both primary

documents and secondary research relevant to the topic; survey cards number in the hundreds,

and there are many academic papers as well.

However, the aforementioned texts were written in the 1990s, and MUNFLA’s collection

of papers on Newfoundland fairy lore is likewise dated in that much of it draws upon older

primary records. This presents an avenue for research into recent acquisitions, even though the

archive has experienced a general decline in contributions over the last several years (Cox

2017). Still, there are over seventy Newfoundland Folklore Survey Cards dated between 2004

and the present containing admonitions to carry bread, turn pockets inside out, or carry silver

to deter the fairies. Locations of fairy rings are also mentioned in these accounts, and fairy

abduction narratives are plentiful as well.

These latter records are the focus of this paper, and there are twenty three of them. In

an effort to thoroughly understand the record set, I will perform three analyses; demographic,

synchronic, and diachronic. The demographic analysis will include a discussion of the collectors’
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and informants’ ages, residences, religious affiliations, extrapolated levels of education,

occupations, and relationships with one another in order to better understand the people

responsible for the records. The synchronic analysis will explore these fairy abduction legends

and memorates with emphasis on motifs and themes. The diachronic analysis will establish an

estimated timeline of the narratives in the record set and comment upon any patterns

uncovered as a result. It is my hope that these analyses will contribute to extant discourse

about Newfoundland fairy lore with commentary about its development in recent years.

Demographic Analysis

All of the collectors named in the Newfoundland Folklore Survey cards provided their

ages, and these ranged from eighteen to twenty-eight. Three were eighteen, six were nineteen,

three were twenty, six were twenty-one, two were twenty-two, two were twenty-three, and

one was twenty-eight. All of them were undergraduate university students, and all of their

records were collected as part of a Folklore 1000 assignment. Based on a gender analysis of

names, thirteen were women, six were men, and one could not be determined. Collector home

communities were also present in every record, and all of these were in the Avalon Peninsula.

Three collectors did not include a religious preference, but of the others nine were Anglican,

seven were Catholic, three belonged to the United Church of Canada, and one was listed as

Christian. Based upon this analysis, the collectors were young, primarily Christian

Newfoundlanders from the Avalon Peninsula who were attending university when they filled

out these survey cards, and over half of them were women.
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The informants were more varied, ranging in ages from eighteen to eighty-four. One

was in his teens, six were in their twenties, four were in their forties, three were in their fifties,

five were in their sixties, two were in their seventies, and one was in his eighties. None were in

their thirties, and the age of one informant was not listed. Two records did not indicate the

names of informants, but a gender analysis of the others reveals that eleven were women, and

ten were men. Informant home communities were present in all but two records, and every

location but one is in the Avalon Peninsula. Of the sixteen survey cards listing a profession for

informants, four were students, three were homemakers, three were retired, three were skilled

industrial laborers, one was a manager, one was a salesman, and one was a writer. Seven

records did not indicate the religious preference of informants, but of the others five were

Anglican, eight were Catholic, and the rest belonged to the United Church of Canada. Based

upon this analysis, the average informant was a Newfoundlander from the Avalon Peninsula

who was probably Christian, but it is not possible to extrapolate further here.

Nine records in the set were obtained from a parent, an aunt, or the friend of a parent.

Seven were obtained from cousins, partners, or friends. Six were obtained from grandparents.

One record did not indicate a relationship between collector and informant. It would be easy to

conclude from this that Newfoundland fairy lore is primarily transmitted among family

members, but it is more likely that these student collectors sought material from informants

they knew well. Still, it is interesting to note that all but four of the records can be traced to

families, whether they be those of the collectors or those of their informants. It might be

fruitful to study Newfoundland fairy lore transmission patterns outside the present context.
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Synchronic Analysis

Twenty of the records were legends, and three were memorates. Among the legends,

there were five primary motifs; five accounts of abductees who disappeared and never

returned, four accounts of abductees who returned with injuries, seven accounts of abductees

who returned uninjured, two accounts of abductees who were transported or led from one

place to another, and one account of an abductee taken from his basket and replaced with a

changeling. Among the memorates, there were two primary motifs; one abductee was led

astray during a familiar walk home at night, and two abductees heard unusual voices or other

noises.

A discussion of these motifs requires that we first explore the complex issue of belief as

it relates to them. In “Ambiguity and the Rhetoric of Belief,” David J. Hufford writes that a

heterogeneity of personal meaning often underlies a tradition but can give the appearance of

considerable homogeneity. This ambiguity allows individuals to speak with one another about

the supernatural with a feeling of mutual understanding that draws upon a cultural consensus,

when in fact the participants in such a conversation might hold different levels of belief

(Hufford 1976, 17). This means that in communities where belief in fairies is held in common,

individuals might use this belief in various ways; to seek consensus about a supernatural

phenomenon, to explain an unusual occurrence, to sidestep censure, to avoid stigma, or for

other reasons. So even when it is possible to trace a Newfoundland fairy abduction narrative

back to its source, as in the case of a contemporary memorate, we might still not arrive at a

unified understanding of it. I would argue that this ambiguity is good cause for a conservative

analysis of the aforementioned motifs.

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Of the five legends where an abductee disappears and never returns, one of them might

have been a tale told to frighten children:

“My grandfather told me a story of a ‘fairy that took young children from there [sic]
beds that were not sleeping.’ The children were never seen again. This was suppose [sic]
to have happened in Dildo in the 1880s. My grandfather said he belived [sic] this story
and still believes in fairies to this day (Brown 2006).”

Without researching Newfoundland news archives from the late 1800s, it is not possible

to know if actual child abductions underlie this legend. However, I would argue that because

the only children in danger were those not behaving as they should, the narrative functions to

encourage obedience. Other legends containing this motif include one of a child who sees

fairies in her garden and disappears and two of men who disappear in the woods.

A notable legend from the “returned with injuries” category contains a much older motif

involving displacement in time:

“I can remember my grandmother telling me a story about a little girl who was playing
in the woods and she sat down under a tree watching these little people play music and
dance and what seemed like 20 minutes to the little girl was actually years later because
when she returned home her parents were [sic] after dying of old age (Hobbs 2006).”

Here a child enters the fairy world of the woods, where time operates differently than it

does in the human world, and returns after twenty-minutes to find that decades have passed.

This corresponds with the many narratives where time is decelerated among the fairies, often

with disastrous consequences for human visitors (Bottigheimer 2010, 15). Other legends

containing this motif include one of a man who returns from the woods with a fairy blast and

one of a man thrown into a marsh who emerges crippled for life.
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Of the “returned without injuries” legends, one stands out for two reasons. First, it

depicts the fairies as benevolent, and second, the man mentioned in the narrative is drunk

when he encounters them:

“Another story about fairies on Witless Bay Line I heard a few years ago. It happen [sic]
to Ralph Copper. He actually told me this. One night he was leaving another cabin to go
back to his, walking. It was dark and he was pretty drunk, not sure if he would make it.
Then he fell. When he got up he felt something on his back. He wouldn’t turn to look. He
said that is how he got home safe. He can’t remember walking but he made it home, all
he remember [sic] is something was on his back and it guided him home (Duff 2005).”

While much of Newfoundland fairy lore depicts the fairies as mischievous at best and

malevolent at worst, they do sometimes act to preserve or protect humanity. In this case, they

guide Ralph Copper home, which is interesting as it relates to the complexities of

Newfoundland belief in fairies. Even in 2000, when the informant received this story, there was

enough homogeneous belief in the community to support Copper’s heterogeneous use of

fairies as the reason he was able to stay on his feet after drinking so much. Other legends

containing this motif include several involving people who become lost in familiar territory

under unusual circumstances and later return unharmed.

Because the other two legend motif categories and the memorates are explored as part

of a thematic discussion below, I will not continue this part of the study except to conclude that

all of the records in the set contain familiar motifs in new contexts. Homogeneous communal

belief and heterogeneous narrative construction are intertwined in these accounts, and I would

also argue that in some cases familiar terms for unusual occurrences help to define experiences

retroactively. In this way, phenomena that cannot otherwise be named become encounters

with fairies.
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A predominant theme emerges upon examination of the record set; namely, that all of

the abductees suffer one of three intrusions into their mental and physical lives. They are either

disoriented by what they believe are supernatural encounters, transformed by these

encounters, or transported because of them.

Disorientation is by far the most common of these intrusions. In one legend, two

children follow a pink fox into the woods. In another, one sister loses the other in a fog. In a

recent memorate, a young man on a short walk home from a bonfire wanders in circles for

hours. In another, a daughter hears her mother calling from the woods behind her house but

moments later finds her asleep inside:

“I was down in the yard chopping wood with my young daughter when she began to
walk away from me. I called out to her and asked her where she was going and she said
that her mother (my wife) was calling out to her. I heard it too. We started back to the
house to see what she wanted, but she was asleep. There was a lot of strange things
and stories surrounding the woods behind my house. And to this day I swear that it was
the fairies trying to lure my daughter into the woods (Brown 2016).”

Barbara Rieti writes that according to Newfoundland lore, fairies are skilled in comical

tricks and delusions, are able to cast glamour, can contrive hallucinations, and can cause

apparitions (Rieti 1991, 15). Disorientation is the natural result of this sleight-of-mind, so it

stands to reason that people predisposed to belief in fairies might blame them for episodes

such as the ones found in these accounts.

Transformation is a physical intrusion, and there are three of these in the record set.

Two are mentioned above; that of the man lifted off his feet and deposited into a marsh from

which he emerges crippled for life, and a fairy blast account of the kind Rieti would label a

supernatural explanation for teratoma or osteomyelitis (Rieti 1997, 285). But the most

fascinating of these is a changeling legend:

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“My family lays claim to my grandfather being a fairy: When he was a baby his mother
took him berry picking & left him in a basket while she gathered her berries. When she
returned he was missing from the basket. In a tizzy she searched for him and only when
she walked away from the basket & returned to it did he reappear. They say he was
taken by fairies. As an adult Stewart Taylor grew to be no taller than 4 foot tall. An avid
horn player Stewart was often invited to parties to play. On one occasion, his friends
played a joke on him & locked him in a room with no other doors or windows. At
midnight when they went to let him out he wasn’t there. He was known to mysteriously
disappear and reappear out of nowhere without explanation, hence being known as a
fairy (Thistle 2007).”

There may be several reasons for belief in a supernatural reason for ailments, and Rieti

cautions that folklorists should be careful not to limit lines of inquiry to ignorance on the part of

the “folk” as it concerns medical reasons for them (Rieti 1997, 284). For example, in the account

quoted above, the woman might have either constructed a heterogeneous changeling narrative

or believed the boy was replaced with a changeling. In a community where the physical

intrusion of fairies is held as a homogeneous belief, a mother might blame her son’s dwarfism

on the supernatural even if she knows the condition sometimes has a natural cause.

Finally, there are transportation intrusions in the records, which are both temporal and

physical. The single temporal account is detailed above; that of a child in the woods who

watches the fairies and returns twenty minutes later to find several decades have passed. The

most striking physical account is that of a teenage girl who goes to sleep in her bed and wakes

up somewhere else:

“The informant was asked if he knew any mysterious tales about St. Mary’s Bay. He told
the following story about his sister-in-law. One night Karyn (his sister-in-law) was in bed
and fell asleep. She was an adolescent at the time. When she awoke she found herself
about a kilometre away from her house, alone in the dark in a wooded area near
Timbercove. She had no idea how she got there and would have had to cross a few
small rivers to get there by foot. Apparently, she was taken out of bed “by the ferries”
[sic] who brought her to the woods. It is unknown why or what they do to someone
when they “take them”(Peach 2016).”
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The temporal account is common in fairy lore on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but

the physical accounts are more immediate. In most of these, fairy abduction is offered as a

reason for the permanent disappearance of community members except in the case quoted

above. Here again, the legend sits at the intersection of homogeneous belief and

heterogeneous narrative construction. Did Karyn fall asleep in her bed, wake up somewhere

else, and blame it on the fairies? Was she out after curfew and needed an excuse for being

somewhere she should not have been? We do not know, but this knowledge is not necessary

for us to thematically identify this account as a physical transportation intrusion, to understand

that the narrative contains an “abducted and returned uninjured” motif, and to see the

interplay of both the community and the individual in the maintenance and transmission of

fairy abduction narratives.

Diachronic Analysis

It is not possible to situate most of these accounts on a timeline with any specificity.

Some, such as Chris Brown’s contributed legend list a date in the context of the narrative, and

others provide information in the “Date of event” field on the survey card. However, the rest

required estimation. In these cases, I looked at the age differences between collectors and

informants, taking into consideration any clues that might be present in the account itself. For

example, if an informant was sixty-five and heard a particular legend when she was fifteen, and

if the date on the survey card was in 2005, I subtracted fifty years from 2005 and placed the

legend in the 1950s. Using this method, I arrived at an estimated timeline for the record set of

between 1880 and 2000, with two records outstanding because no estimated date could be
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determined. Of course, the legends among these accounts might be much older than my

estimations of them indicate, and again we come to the problem of ambiguity in the genre. So I

would stress that my intention here is only to provide a foundation for diachronic analysis and

not to argue that all of the narratives in the record set can be traced to a specific decade.

In the oldest of the accounts, dating from between the 1880s and 1900s, I found a

prominent relationship between fairies and children. There are three of these, and I have

already mentioned them all at least once; the legend of children taken from their beds when

they aren’t sleeping, the legend of two sisters playing in a garden when one of them sees fairies

and disappears, and the changeling legend. Each of them depicts a physical intrusion of fairies

into the lives of children, and each of them also contains a “disappeared and never returned”

motif, since the human Stewart Taylor was ostensibly replaced by a changeling.

There are no accounts dating to the 1910s, but there are four in the 1920s and 1930s,

and I have already mentioned two of them. All but one of these are straightforward abduction

narratives, and they all involve adults. In one, a man goes out to chop wood and never returns.

In another, a man goes missing for three days, is subsequently found on a small island, and

does not know how he arrived there. In a third, a woman goes berry-picking, is gone for three

days, and later claims to have been taken by the fairies. In a fourth, a man is lifted off his feet

by the fairies during an evening walk home and dropped into a marsh. The first three of these

depicts a transportation intrusion, and the last depicts a transformation intrusion. In terms of

motif, the first falls into the “disappeared and never returned” category, the second and third

fall into the “returned uninjured” category, and the fourth falls into the “returned with injuries”

category. So there is less similarity among these accounts than there was in earlier narratives.
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There are no accounts dating to the 1940s, but there are six dating to the 1950s and

1960s, and I have already mentioned some of them. In one, a boy is dragged away by the fairies

while berry-picking because he has no bread in his pocket to give them and later returned,

scratched-up and delirious. In another, a girl watches little people play music and dance in the

woods and later returns to find her parents dead of old age. In a third, a man gets lost in the

woods and returns with a fairy blast. In a fourth, a young girl and her friend follow a pink fox

into the woods while berry-picking and get lost for a time. In a fifth, a girl loses her way in

familiar territory and isn’t able to find her way home until she swears, and the fairies let her go.

In a sixth, a teenage girl goes to sleep in her bed and wakes up kilometers away in the woods.

As with the previous record subset, there is little similarity among these accounts. The first,

second, and sixth depict transportation intrusions, the third depicts a transformation intrusion,

and the fourth and fifth depict disorientation intrusions. In terms of motif, the first, second and

third might be categorized as “returned with injury,” while the fourth, fifth, and sixth might be

categorized as “returned uninjured.”

There are no accounts dating to the 1970s, but there are eight situated between 1980

and 2000, and all three memorates can be found in this date range. This record subset is

markedly different from those preceding it in a couple of key respects. First, the details

provided in the accounts are more specific, and they serve to add verisimilitude to the

narratives. Second, rather than situating belief in the fairies among an older generation, some

of the informants are contemporaries of their Millennial collectors. Another interesting pattern

can be found by examining themes and motifs in the subset. There is only one straightforward

abduction legend with a transportation intrusion theme and a “disappeared and never
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returned” motif. The rest are combined legends and memorates containing a disorientation

intrusion theme and a “returned uninjured” motif. This is interesting because it suggests that

the nature of homogeneous belief in communities might have shifted in recent years from a

willingness to accept that permanent disappearances, physical wounds, and other such events

can have supernatural causes to a belief that fairy intrusion is more subtle. The nature of

heterogeneous narrative construction might have shifted accordingly, so that supernatural

agency is limited to relatively harmless pranks:

“Nan Mercer’s next door neighbor’s son, who was a bit “slow,” went in the woods one
day. He didn’t come home, so the mounties [sic] and a crowd of people went looking for
him. They couldn’t find him. The next day they all went in the woods again. They found
him sitting behind a big rock. He had his clothes on inside out. They said it was the
doings of the fairies. My Grandmother and older people believed there were fairies in
the woods (Dyke 2006).”

Nan Mercer’s next door neighbor’s son is not harmed in the above legend; he merely goes

missing overnight and is found the next day with his clothes turned inside out. This is a far cry

from the temporal displacements, fairy blasts, and permanent disappearances of earlier

narratives.

From this diachronic examination of the record set, it is possible to identify an early

pattern and a late one. Earlier legends depict the permanent disappearances of children or

changeling replacements. Later legends and memorates are more specific and demonstrate a

contemporary belief in fairies. However, while narratives from the 1880s to the 1960s might

blame fairies for everything from missing people to teratomas, narratives from 1980 onward

tend to depict fairies as subtle pranksters who do no permanent harm.

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Conclusion

I should note that while I did not directly employ Catherine Ann Schwoe Efermann’s

1978 work on fairy abduction, I was indirectly influenced by her use of motif categories, which I

found helpful. Her paper “A study of Newfoundland fairy abduction narratives” may be found in

the MUNFLA. Thomas J. Bullard’s “UFO Abduction Reports: The Supernatural Kidnap Narrative

Returns in Technological Guise” was also indirectly helpful, and his paper may be found in The

Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 102, No. 404.

To my mind, the most interesting part of this study is the diachronic analysis of recent

legends and memorates, which demonstrates an ongoing shift in homogeneous belief in and

heterogeneous construction of fairy abduction narratives. I had hoped to find something of this

sort when I limited the scope of my inquiry to recent records, and I wonder how the narrative

landscape will change in the next ten or twenty years.

I began this paper with the assertion that “Newfoundland is rich with fairy lore,” and I

am more surprised by this regional bounty of tales than I was in the beginning. From twenty

local, Millennial collectors came twenty-three legends and memorates provided by informants

of all ages dating from the 1880s to 2000. Five motifs and three themes were noted, and an

estimated timeline revealed both pattern and variance in the narratives. Of course, my

approach is only one of many a future researcher might take with this material, but I hope that

my comfort with ambiguity and my tendency toward conservative analysis are useful to the

scholars of fairy lore who come after me.

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