The goblins.

The intervention of incorporeal beings in the affairs of private life forms part of the popular beliefs of all times. Certainly it cannot enter into the thought of any sensible person to take literally all the legends, all the diabolical stories, and all the ridiculous tales that are told with pleasure by the fireside. Nevertheless, the phenomena of which we are witnesses prove that even these tales rest upon something, for what happens in our day must have occurred in other epochs. Take away from them the marvelous and the fantastic with which superstition has covered them in ridicule, and one will find all the characters, facts, and gestures of our modern Spirits; some are good, benevolent, obliging, taking pleasure in rendering service, like the good Brownies; others, more or less malicious, mischievous, capricious, and even wicked, like the Gobelins of Normandy, known by the name of Bogles, in Scotland; of Bogharts, in England; of Cluricaunes, in Ireland, and of Pucks, in Germany. According to popular tradition, these goblins penetrate into houses, where they take advantage of every occasion for pranks of bad taste. “They knock on the doors, displace the furniture, deal blows upon the casks, hammerings on the ceiling and the floor, whistle softly, let out plaintive sighs, pull the sheets and the curtains of those who are lying down, etc.” The Boghart of the English exercises its mischief principally against children, of whom it seems to have an aversion. “It frequently takes from them their slice of buttered bread and their bowl of milk; during the night it agitates the curtains of the bed; it goes up and down the stairs with great uproar; it casts plates upon the floor and provokes many other damages in the houses.

In some places of France the goblins are regarded as a kind of familiar demon, which one takes care to feed with the most delicate dainties, because they bring to their masters wheat stolen from the granaries. It is truly curious to find this old superstition of ancient Gaul among the Borussians of the twelfth century (the Prussians of today). Their Koltkys, or domestic genii, also went to steal wheat in the granaries in order to bring it to those whom they liked.

Who will not recognize in these devilries, setting aside the indelicacy of the stolen wheat, for which the guilty ones probably excused themselves at the expense of the reputation of the Spirits — who, we were saying, will not recognize our rapping Spirits and those whom one may, without committing an injury, call disturbers? For, if a fact similar to the one we related above, of the young girl of the Passage des Panoramas, had happened in the countryside, it would, without doubt, have been credited to the account of the Gobelin of the place, after being amplified by the fertile imagination of the gossips; nor would there even have been lacking someone who had seen the little demon hanging from the bell, laughing and making faces at the fools who went to open the door.