We worked for weeks on her project, meeting in the library or carrying on about the subject when we went out dancing or to the movies or dinner. More than once, we drew a startled stare from nearby strangers when we argued about killing children. Tess took care of the historical framework of the problem and delved into the available statistics. I tried to help by digging up a plausible theory. In certain societies, boys were favored over girls, to work on the farm or to pass on wealth, and as a matter of course, many females were murdered because they were unwanted. But in less patriarchal cultures, infanticide stemmed from a family’s inability to care for another child in an age of large families and few resources—a brutal method of population control. For weeks, Tess and I puzzled over how parents decided which child to spare and which to abandon. Dr. Laurel, who taught the seminar, suggested that myth and folklore might provide interesting answers, and that’s how I stumbled across the article.
Prowling the stacks late one evening, I found our library’s sole copy of the Journal of Myth and Society, a fairly recent publication which had lasted a grand total of three issues. I flipped through the pages of this journal, rather casually standing there by my lonesome, when the name sprang from the page and grabbed me by the throat. Thomas McInnes. And then the title of his article was like a knife to the heart: “The Stolen Child.”
Son of a bitch.
McInnes’s theory was that in medieval Europe, parents who gave birth to a sickly child made a conscious decision to “reclassify” their infant as something other than human. They could claim that demons or “goblins” had come in the middle of the night and stolen their true baby and left behind one of their own sickly, misshapen, or crippled offspring, leaving the parents to abandon or raise the devil. Called “fairy children” or changelings in England, “enfants changés” in France, and “Wechselbalgen” 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: “à 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 nineteenth century in Germany, the British Isles, and other European countries, 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 Tennessee, 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 discovery of an unidentified child, found drowned in a nearby river, was credited 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: