Last week I published an article about the “Little People,” and doing so caused me to remember a very peculiar story that I came across many years ago.
Actually, the story was contained in a manuscript I discovered among the collection of an old recluse—in Vermont, I think, or somewhere in New England at any rate—whose library of rare folios I was commissioned to catalogue and index. That was one of the ways I used to make a living, although it has rather fallen out of fashion in recent years, since there are so very few personal libraries to catalogue and index anymore.
You’ll have to bear with me, reader, since I’ve forgotten so many of the critical details. For one thing, I can’t recall who had written the manuscript; it dated to the early part of the twentieth century (around the time of the First World War, I think, or just prior to it), and recounted events that had occurred in the latter part of the nineteenth. The recluse, who was very wealthy, assured me that he had book agents scattered throughout the world, with orders and sufficient resources to acquire little-known and one-of-a-kind tomes and codices; this especial manuscript, I was told, had been acquired in Edinburgh.
I suppose I can’t recall the author’s name because the person is entirely unknown;1 it was merely the record of a strange experience, one that the writer—for the first and probably only time in his life—felt irresistibly compelled to commit to paper. I guess I must be satisfied with that: that it is only the story that matters, not him who wrote it.
I’ve been striving over the past several days to remember as much as I can of the story, but I’m afraid that’s precious little enough. It has a connection to the Little People, the Bruni of the Romans and the Prounoi of the Greeks, the fairy folk or the Daoine Sìth as the Scots call them; there was also the occurrence of that curious motif of the “White Lady” which I mentioned at the end of my article on the subject.
Now I must stress that the story I read was not a published or unpublished piece of fiction; it was recorded as a true happening that the author wished to preserve as history. I do clearly remember that the writer was most anxious to stress how baffling and perplexing the whole episode was.
It concerned a wealthy or at least quite well-off Scottish family—I think they were called MacDonald, or MacLeod, or MacWilliam, or some such quintessential Scottish surname—and they lived upon one of the Hebridean Islands…it may have been Lewis, or perhaps the Isle of Skye. They also lived in a rather sizable estate; most likely an old castle or the former residence of some Highland laird.
Maybe it was both.
The father had a distinguished record of service in the British Army, and had fought in a number of Queen Victoria’s “Little Wars” throughout the mid- to late-nineteenth century; anyhow, that’s what I seem to remember about the family itself. But the whole episode began during one of these periods when the father was away fighting in the far-flung outposts of Empire—in the 1870s or 1880s, I think. His lovely young wife (who was his junior by many years, I recall) had given him two beautiful children—twins, a boy and a girl.
I don’t remember all the details. There was something about an old ruin on the estate, a kind of prehistoric tor or dilapidated tower that was thought to be an old Pictish building, and which had acquired something of an evil reputation.2
The children were playing unsupervised in this ruin one afternoon, when the boy came running to his mother in a terrible state, crying and carrying on about his sister. The mother and servants ran out to the ruin to see what had happened, but there was no sign of the boy’s sister. When they finally calmed him down enough to explain what happened, he said she had been taken by “ugly little children” that came out of the ruin.
I think the girl was missing for several days; maybe it was less time than that. In any case, the estate’s groundskeeper (I believe that’s who it was?) heard a strange whimpering or mewling sound coming from the ruin sometime afterward, and discovered the missing girl within the decrepit tower—which had been thoroughly searched for days by men from the local village.
They recognized the girl by the clothes she was wearing, but in no other way did she seem like the lovely, high-spirited little girl she had been. Whatever happened during the missing period, the girl’s beauty and wits were utterly destroyed. The author described her as being now “cretinous” and “physically deformed;” I remember that part of the manuscript very clearly. The author, who was a witness to these events, seemed unusually affected by the whole episode, and wrote of it with unmistakable horror.
The doctors seemed at a loss, and finally concluded that the child was suffering from severe shock and exposure; as far as coaxing from the girl any sort of explanation about what had happened to her during the period she was missing—well, that was out of the question. As you can imagine, this all came as a terribly unwelcome surprise to the father when he returned from his overseas campaigns; he dearly loved his daughter, and was heartbroken by what had become of her.
My recollection is less clear after this episode. The family was forced to hire a nurse to look after the girl, who was never right again; the boy grew up, and eventually went off to Edinburgh or London to become a solicitor or physician or something of the sort. But I remember that he didn’t exactly turn out right, either; the shock of what had happened to his twin sister, which had never been explained to anyone’s satisfaction, had left an indelible mark on his soul.
During his time away in the city, he became rather dissipated and shiftless, much to the shame and embarrassment of his parents.
Anyhow, I remember that a decade or so passed, and the mother’s niece and nephew—who were very young—came to live with the family for some reason. The parents must have died…a common enough occurrence in those days. The arrival of these children was a welcome thing, and a governess was hired to look after their education.
This is where the story starts to get a little strange. The author goes on a long digression about the history of this governess, who was described as a very young and very beautiful woman. Ellen or Helen, I think her name was. Anyway, she had long dark-red hair and very pale skin, and must have been remarkably lovely, for the author alludes to her extraordinary beauty on more than one occasion.
Her loveliness notwithstanding, the governess apparently had a rather sordid past, although this wasn’t known until much later. She was an orphan, and had been discovered on the streets of Edinburgh and taken in by some prostitutes about ten or so years earlier; shockingly, though very young, the girl was pregnant, and gave birth shortly afterward to a monstrously deformed child that died soon thereafter.
The whole thing was very strange. None knew who her parents were, and the girl seemed unable to speak or understand either English or even the Scottish Gaelic tongue that was still fairly common in those days. She was taught the English language, and learned it quickly and with ease, which led some to believe that she merely suffered some form of temporary amnesia.
This conclusion was bolstered by her inability to recall either her own name or the names of her parents, nor anything about who the father of her child was. The author of the manuscript, however, believed that the girl’s amnesia about these matters was calculated rather than natural, and that the authorities were less gullible than they seemed—that they were, in fact, more than happy to let the girl’s unsavory past remain a mystery.
She was eventually awarded a scholarship to a local girl’s school by some kind-hearted benefactor, but I think there was some trouble involving her attitude and behavior, though I don’t recall what that was. Still, she managed to avoid being expelled, and by the time she was eighteen or nineteen she left the school and, over the next few years, secured various governess positions in the city.
There was some trouble here, too; I think she became the governess to an adolescent boy, but was later dismissed under a cloud of scandal. The implication was that there were sexual improprieties involved, that the governess had seduced her charge, and had gotten pregnant of him; after her dismissal, the girl wasn’t seen for some months, and the author implied that after giving birth to the boy’s child, she had given it to a baby-farmer.3
Actually, I think the author implied that the boy’s parents had paid her to do so.
Again, none of this was known at the time the girl was hired to be a governess for the family’s newest additions, which must have been shortly after the abovementioned events. The new governess was charming, intelligent, youthful, and extraordinarily beautiful, and was just what was needed to enliven the family’s dreary Highland castle; keep in mind, they still lived with their cretinous daughter, who was shut away in some room and still looked after by a nurse, and their son had been away in the city for many years.
Anyhow, the governess was a great success with the family, and she was much loved by her two young charges. She was also very popular with the young men in the area, to no one’s great surprise; more than one local swain declared his undying love for her, and begged her hand in marriage, but she refused them all. The author of the manuscript seemed to hint that the governess acted as though she were saving herself for someone special.
It was at this point, I think, that the son returned from Edinburgh or whatever city he was in; either he was expelled from university or his father refused to further finance his dissolute and dissipated lifestyle, I can’t remember which. Perhaps it was both.
In any case, he returned to the family home, and discovered the beautiful governess. Naturally, he spent much time with her, and fell in love with her; this time, the governess reciprocated. But there was to be no happy ending to this story.
There were a number of scandals, and some of them were quite shocking. For one thing, the match was disfavored by the son’s parents for some reason; their opinion of the governess had soured, especially after the return of their son—his name was Arthur, I think—when it became apparent that the girl had designs on him.
There was also something in connection with her charges, I seem to remember; some vague scandal involving her instruction of the children. The boy and girl began to evince knowledge of matters that it was not proper for a little boy and girl to know, and the author of the manuscript straightforwardly suggested that the governess was suspected of instructing the children in witchcraft and black magic. The locals, ever a superstitious lot, also began to shun the governess as a witch.
Anyway, the last straw was when the mother one day discovered the son and the governess in flagrante delicto, as they say, whereafter the governess was immediately discharged and Arthur was forbidden to see her again. That had the predictable effect: there was a great row between father and son, and the latter left the home for good.
The young man married the governess in a secret ceremony shortly thereafter, and the two settled into a cottage or something in a nearby town, where the son went into business as a lawyer or doctor or whatever it was that he had studied to become. The governess later bore his child—a daughter who was fully as beautiful as she.
I don’t think there was much more to the story, though its ending was terrible. The son, Arthur, became increasingly erratic in his behavior, and his domestic situation was apparently not a happy one. He told friends and clients that he feared and loathed his wife, and hinted to some that he had learned a terrible secret about her, though he never said what it was.
One evening, the governess and her daughter appeared at the home of her parents-in-law, and she begged for help—if not for her sake, than for that of her daughter. Their son had gone mad, the governess informed them, and had threatened to kill both her and her daughter. Though doubting the story, the kindly old couple of course took them in, for though they reviled their daughter-in-law, they dearly loved their granddaughter; besides, they were certain their son would appear the next day, and the whole matter would be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
That night, the whole household was awakened by the screams of the governess and her daughter—it was the son, Arthur, who had somehow broken into the house and was threatening to murder his wife and child. But he was prevented in this aim by the arrival of the servants and the groundskeeper, as well as the father; they succeeded in restraining the madman and confined him to another room in the house.
Shortly afterward they discovered that although he had failed in his design to murder his wife and daughter, he had succeeded in breaking into the room where his sister had been shut away for well over a decade and had hacked her to pieces with an axe.
It was an awful story. None knew what had caused Arthur to snap. The author of the narrative says that an inspector was sent for in Edinburgh, and a doctor was fetched from the nearby town; from the diagnosis of the latter, it was clear that Arthur’s mind was gone, and that he would have to be confined in an insane asylum for the remainder of his life.
Now that should have been the end of it all—but it wasn’t, not by a long shot.
Arthur had been sedated, under the care of the doctor, and was restrained in a remote chamber of his parent’s home; nevertheless, he somehow disappeared. The doctor—who was staying in a nearby room—opened the door to Arthur’s room the following morning and found on the bed not the young man he expected to be there, but instead only a strange, crude wooden manikin.
And that’s all there was to the story. At least for the main narrative. The inspector from Edinburgh arrived eventually, but no one learned what happened to Arthur. There was something about small, dirty footprints—as of children—found near the door to Arthur’s room and leading down the stairs to the basement, but nothing seemed to come of that.
As for the governess and her daughter, they left and never returned; I think the author mentioned that the last anyone heard of them, they were living in the Orkneys, and the governess had remarried. Significantly, she had changed her name, and none in her new home had the slightest knowledge of her sordid past.
The author of the manuscript spent a great deal of time discussing Highland Scottish legends and scraps of folklore, especially that concerning the so-called “White Lady” motif, which I mentioned in the earlier article. Actually, this is where I first learned of this fascinating figure.
Basically, the White Lady was said to be a preternaturally pale (whence the name) and beautiful human woman, and was a rare glimpse into the horrible fate of those human children the fairies, or Bruni, were said to abduct, and replace with changelings. Sometimes, the story goes, when the fairies abscond with an especially beautiful girl, they instruct her in their wicked arts and send her back to the world of mortals to seduce young men and secure them a further source of human children—presumably to recruit their flagging genetic fortunes.
Anyway, that’s how the story goes. The White Lady, I suppose, is a lot like the “Queen of Elfland,” who seduced Thomas of Ercildoune; you can see for yourself just how degenerate and over-sexualized this sinister being really is by reading some of the sixteenth-century “dittays” against suspected witches, which are reproduced in The Miscellany of the Spalding Club.4
So what do the Little People and the White Lady have to do with this awful story of the Scottish governess? Nothing, I suppose, to an objective observer. It’s just another sordid late Victorian murder mystery.
But the author of the strange manuscript seemed to think differently. He seemed convinced there was very much a connection, having witnessed many of these events at first hand, and having spoken to the doctor who had attended Arthur just before his disappearance.
You see, according to the writer, the doctor said that Arthur had raved in his delirium. He ranted that his cretinous sister, whom he had hacked to death, was not really his sister at all; it was a changeling, substituted for his real sister by the Things that had abducted her. He seemed to hold to the original story he had always maintained in his boyhood, when he said that ugly little children—wizened and wrinkled like old men and horrible to look at—had stolen her.
Arthur had further raved that his twin sister was no cretin, though her mind was warped and twisted by the horrors she had suffered; she was beautiful to look upon, though her soul was hideously ugly, and she had returned to revenge herself upon the brother and family that had forsaken her to the horrible creatures that lived beneath the ancient black ruin or tor. He knew this because he had married her, all unknowing who she really was, and had gotten her with child; but this, he swore, had been his sister’s design from the beginning, since she hated him violently, and blamed him—rightly or wrongly—for leaving her that day when the Things came out of the ruin and took her.
Apparently, her vengeance was to destroy his life as hers had been destroyed, and ruin what little happiness was left to her old family.
Moreover, his wife had introduced Arthur to her new “family,” whom she said still lived beneath the black ruin upon his parents’ estate. It was this, at any rate, that caused Arthur’s mind to break, and precipitated his current state of madness. That, I guess, and the fact that he had committed incest with his own beloved twin sister; that was why he had tried to slay his wife and daughter—for the one was unspeakably wicked and implacably malevolent, and the other was the misbegotten fruit of a sinful and blasphemous union.
That was all there was. The author wrote that the strange manikin in the bed was called a “stock” in the folkloric tradition, and that it was sometimes left in the place of the one kidnapped by the Little People. The author also included newspaper clippings, pasted to the endpapers of the book, which must have come from a period much later than the events in the narrative, and which described a series of archaeological excavations beneath a Pictish tor in the Hebrides—evidently, it was the same ruin described in the manuscript.
The articles mentioned the discovery of a network of subterranean passages beneath the ruin, which were seemingly built by a very small-statured people of the Neolithic or later Palaeolithic. There was also a curious assortment or cache of tiny artifacts, which could only have been useful to a diminutive race. The passages ran in all directions, including toward a nearby derelict and uninhabited castle or manor.
I wish I could remember more from this strange story. I might see if I can contact the old recluse who owned the manuscript, if he’s still alive—which I doubt. Still, it couldn’t hurt to track it down and acquire it.
It would be worth the effort and expense, I think.
I seem to recall that there was a very brief biographical notice appended to the manuscript, composed in a different hand (was it a relative or descendant?); I was very busy with the cataloguing of the collection, and don’t remember much else, save that this notice mentioned that the author had perished with the Lusitania in 1915. I’m not willing to stake my reputation on that, however…I may have confused this with some other manuscript I was indexing at the time.
At this point in the narrative, the author inserted a lengthy folkloric digression on this ruin, which explored the many fascinating tales and superstitions of fairies, Bruni, witches, glaistigs, and assorted mnathan sìthe that had accreted about the ruin for centuries if not longer. It was really a very thoroughly researched piece of scientific ethnography; unfortunately, I don’t remember the details of these accounts with any accuracy. They were sufficient, however, to establish that the ruin was universally shunned by local folk, and that it was implicated in the misfortunes that had befallen the family previously occupying the nearby castle or manor. I recall that this family had a long and distinguished history, before succumbing to a progressive degeneration and finally becoming extinct sometime in the early or middle part of the nineteenth century.
This was an execrable practice in the Victorian period, in which unwanted children were “farmed” out to be cared for and raised by other women—in theory, at least. In practice, however, it was often more profitable for baby-farmers to simply accept the proffered payment and murder the child. The author insinuates, in so many words, that this is what happened to the governess’ illicit offspring; but in light of what is revealed at the end of the manuscript, it is difficult to credit this theory. It seems far more likely that the governess, the “White Lady,” gave the child over to her new “family”—though I anticipate myself, and this will all become clearer (?) toward the end of the narrative.
Cf., especially, the “Dittay Against Andro Man,” which recounts at length the accused’s crimes of witchcraft, and especially his illicit congress with the “Quene of Elphene” (The Miscellany of the Spalding Club [Aberdeen: The Spalding Club, 1841] Vol. I, pp. 119-122).