Barghest

I have heard, he adds, when a boy, many stories concerning it.

The no less famous Barguest of Durham and the Pictree Bragg have been already alluded to.

the former beside its many other pranks would sometimes at the dead of night and passing through the different streets set up the most horrid and continuous shrieks to scare the poor girls who might happen to be out of bed the compiler of the present sheets remembers when very young to have heard a respectable old woman then a midwife of stockton relate that when in her youthful days she was a servant at durham being up late one saturday night cleaning the irons in the kitchen she heard these first at a great and then at a less distance till at length the loudest and most horrible that can be conceived just at the kitchen window sent her upstairs she did not know how where she fell into the arms of a fellow-servant who could scarcely prevent her fainting away pioneers or diggers for metal according to lavater do affirm that in many mines there appear strange shapes and spirits who are apparelled like unto other labourers in the pit these wander up and down in caves and under minings and seem to bestire themselves in all kinds of labour as to dig after the vein to carry together ore to put it in baskets and to turn the winding-wheel to draw it up when in very deed they do nothing less they very seldom hurt the labourers as they say except they provoke them by laughing and railing at them for then they threw gravel-stones at them or hurt them by some other means these are especially haunting in pits where metal most abounds of ghosts c london fifteen seventy two for to page seventy three this is our great milton's swart fairy of the mine simple foolish men imagine i know not how that there be certain elves or fairies of the earth and tell many strange and marvellous tales of them which they have heard of their grandmothers and mothers how they have appeared unto those of the house, have done service, have rocked the cradle, and, which is a sign of good luck, do continually tarry in the house, of ghosts, etc.

Page 49 mallet though without citing any authority says after all the notion is not everywhere exploded that there are in the bowels of the earth fairies or a kind of dwarfish and tiny beings of human shape and remarkable for their riches their activity and malevolence in many countries of the north the people are still firmly persuaded of their existence in ireland at this day the good folk show the very rocks and hills in which they maintain that there are swarms of these small subterraneous men of the most tiny size but the most delicate figures there is not a more generally received opinion throughout the principality of wales than that of the existence of fairies amongst the commonalty it is indeed universal and by no means infrequently credited by the second ranks Fairies are said at a distant period to have frequented Buster's Hill and St. Mary's Island, but their nightly pranks, aerial gambols, and cockle-shell abodes are now quite unknown.