Goblin Tales of Lancashire

These are not the gentle fairies of English fantasy. The goblins of Lancashire are something older and far more dangerous: creatures of the dark, shape-shifters who haunt the moors, steal children, and whisper death in the ears of travelers caught after midnight. James Bowker collected these tales in the late 19th century, when the factories were spreading across England's north and the old people who remembered these stories were growing scarce. What he preserved is a fragment of something ancient, a window into a world where the boundary between the human and inhuman was terrifyingly thin. The tales pulse with raw supernatural terror. A man walking home through snow encounters the Skriker, that most dreaded of omens. A woman alone near a churchyard sees a white hare with blood-red eyes gambolling in the darkness, feels an icy breath on her cheek, hears the terrible whisper of the Dobbie. Bowster, Caul, the Terrors of the Night - these are not whimsical folklore but the real beliefs of a rural people, tales told to explain the unexplained and to keep children from wandering too far from the hearth. The introduction provides context on the region's Celtic and Scandinavian heritage, but it is the stories themselves that linger, dark and vivid as a Lancashire winter.