in Germany, these devil children were fictions and rationalizations for a baby's failure to thrive, or for
some other physical or mental birth defect. If one had a changeling in the home, one would not be
expected to keep and raise it as one's own. Parents would have the right to be rid of the deformed
creature, and they could take the child and leave it outside in the forest overnight. If the goblins refused
to retrieve it, then the poor unfortunate would die from exposure or might be carried off by a wild thing.
The article recounted several versions of the legend, including the twelfth-century French cult of the
Holy Greyhound. One day, a man comes home and finds blood on the muzzle of the hound trusted to
guard his child, enraged, the man beats the dog to death, only later to find his baby unharmed, with a
viper dead on the floor by the crib. Realizing his error, the man erects a shrine to the "holy greyhound"
that protected his son from the poisonous snake. Around this story grew the legend that mothers could
take those babies with "child sickness" to such shrines in the forest and leave them with a note to the
patron saint and protector of children: "A Saint Guinefort, pour la vie ou pour la mort."
"This form of infanticide, the deliberate killing of a child based on its slim probability of survival,"
wrote McInnes,
became part of the myth and folklore that endured well into the nine-teenth century in Germany, the
British Isles, and other European coun-tries, and the superstition traveled with emigrants to the
New World. In the 1850s, a small mining community in western Pennsylvania reported the
disappearance of one dozen children from different families into the surrounding hills. And in
pockets of Appalachia, from New York to Ten-nessee, local legend fostered a folk belief that
these children still roam the forests.
A contemporary case that illustrates the psychological roots of the legend concerns a young man,
"Andrew," who claimed under hypnosis to have been abducted by "hobgoblins." The recent
unexplained discov-ery of an unidentified child, found drowned in a nearby river, was cred-ited as
the work of these ghouls. He reported that many of the missing children from the area were stolen
by the goblins and lived unharmed in the woods nearby, while a changeling took each child's place
and lived out that child's life in the community. Such delusions, like the rise of the changeling myth,
are obvious social protections for the sad problem of missing or stolen children.
Not only had he gotten the story wrong, but he had used my own words against me. A superscript
notation by "Andrew" directed the readers to the fine print of the footnote:
Andrew (not his real name) reeled off an elaborate story of a hobgoblin subculture that, he claimed,
lived in a nearby wooded area, preying on the children of the town for over a century. He asserted
also that he had once been a human child named Gustav Ungerland, who had arrived in the area as
the son of German immigrants in the mid-nineteenth cen-tury. More incredibly, Andrew claims to
have been a musical prodigy in his other life, a skill restored to him when he changed back in the
late 1940s. His elaborate tale, sadly, indicates deep pathological developmen-tal problems,
possibly covering some early childhood abuse, trauma, or neglect.
I had to read the last sentence several times before it became clear. I wanted to howl, to track him
down and cram his words into his mouth. I ripped the pages from the journal and threw the ruined
magazine into the trash. "Liar, faker, thief," I muttered over and over as I paced back and forth among
the stacks. Thankfully I encountered no one, for who knows how I might have vented my rage. Failure
to thrive. Pathological problems. Aban-doned children. He gave us changelings no credit at all and had
the whole story backward. We went and snatched them from their beds. We were as real as nightmares.
The ping of the elevator chimes sounded like a gunshot, and through the open door appeared the
librarian, a slight woman in cats-eye glasses, hair drawn back in a bun. She froze when she saw me,
rather savagely disheveled, hut she tamed me when she spoke. "We're closing," she called out. "You'll
have to go."
I ducked behind a row of books and folded McInnes's pages into eighths, stuffing the packet in my
denim jacket. She began walking toward me, heels clicking on the linoleum, and I attempted to alter my
appearance, but the old magic was gone. The best I could do was run my fingers through my hair, stand
up, and brush the wrinkles from my clothes.
"Didn't you hear me?" She stood directly in front of me, an unbending reed. "You have to go." She
watched me depart. I turned at the elevator to wave good-bye, and she was leaning against a column,