Who’s Afraid of the Lonely Ghost?“Comparative study shows that non-Celtic changeling bel
Who’s Afraid of the Lonely Ghost?“Comparative study shows that non-Celtic changeling beliefs parallel to those of the Celts exist almost everywhere…the idea that the human soul can be abstracted from the body by disembodied spirits and by magicians…According to the Lepers’ Islanders, ghosts steal men–as fairies do–’to add them to their company; and if a man has left children when he died, one of whom sickens afterwards, it is said that the dead father takes it. On Banks Island, Polynesia, the ghost of a woman who has died in childbirth is greatly dreaded: as long as her child is on earth she cannot proceed to Panoi, the otherworld; and the relatives take her child to another house, ‘because they know that the mother will come back to take its soul.”-W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911) This belief in the dead stealing living relatives also fueled the New England vampire panic in the 18th and 19th century. Folklorist Michael E. Bell wrote an informative and highly readable book about it called Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires. -- source link
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