Skip to main content

Friday night folklore: The Spectre’s Cap

Once, at a farm rectory there were, among others, a teenage boy and girl. The boy liked to frighten the girl, but she had got so used to it that noting would scare her any more because if she saw something frightening she simply thought it was the boy up to his old tricks. 

One laundry day a large number of white night-caps got washed and the laundry laid out to dry on the wall around the churchyard. That evening the girl was told to go and get the laundry from the wall, so she went out and started gathering the laundry off the wall.

When she was almost finished she noticed where a white spectre was sitting on a grave in the churchyard and immediately thought that this must be the boy, in one of his attempts to frighten her, so she ran to the spectre, and thinking the boy had taken one of the night-caps she grabbed the cap of it’s head, saying: “You shall not frighten me this time around.”

The she took in the laundry, and when she did she noticed that the boy was inside the house. Now they began to separate the laundry, but there was one more cap than there should have been, and that was stained with earth on the inside. The girl now began to get apprehensive.

The next morning the spectre was still sitting on the grave, and no-one knew what to do about it and no-one dared give it back the cap, so they sent someone to seek advice at the other farms nearby.

An old wise man who lived on another farm said that nothing good would come of it if anyone but the girl were to hand the spectre back its cap. He further advised that she should do this without saying a word and that there should be many witnesses. 

The girl was pressed to do this, and she hesitantly walked up to the spectre, put the cap on its ghostly head and said: “Are you happy now?” But the ghost raised its hand and slapped her hard, saying, as it dived back into its grave, “I’m happy. Are you?”

The girl fell over from the blow and when the people got to her, she was dead. The boy was punished for his frightening pranks, because it was believed that all the trouble had been caused by his attempts to frighten the girl. He never tried to frighten anyone ever again, and thus ends this story.

Copyright notice: The wording used to tell this folk-tale is under copyright. The story itself is not copyrighted. If you want to re-tell it, for a collection of folk-tales, incorporate it into fiction, use it in a school essay or any kind of publication, please tell it in your own words or give the proper attribution if you choose to use the wording unchanged.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...