by Aaron Mahnke
In many ways, a daemon is an ancient version of an excuse. If your horse was spooked while you were out for a ride, you’d probably blame it on a daemon. The ancient Minoans believed in them, and in the day of the Greek poet Homer, people would blame their illnesses on them.
The daemon, in many ways, was fate. If it happened to you, there was a reason, it was probably one of these little things that caused it. Across history and cultures, the daemon took on a variety of names. Arab folklore has the jinn. Romans spoke of a personal companion known as the genius. In Japan they tell tales of the kami, and Germanic cultures mention the fylgja. The stories and names might be unique to each culture, but the core of them all is the same: there’s something interfering with humanity, and we don’t like it.
For the majority of the English-speaking world, the most common creature of this type in folklore, hands down, is the goblin. It’s not an ancient word, most likely originating in the Middle Ages, but it’s the one that’s front and center in most of our minds. And from the start, it’s been a creature associated with bad behavior.
A legend from the tenth century tells of how the first Catholic bishop of Évreux in France faced a daemon known to the locals there as Gobelinus. Why that name, though, is harder to trace. The best theory goes something like this: There’s a Greek myth about a creature called the kobalos who loved to trick and frighten people. That story influenced other cultures prior to Christianity’s spread across Europe, creating the notion of the kobold in ancient Germany. That word was most likely the root of the word “goblin.” Kobold, gobold, gobelin—you can practically hear it evolve.
In German, the root of kobold is kobe, which literally means “beneath the earth” or “cavity in a rock.” We get the English word “cove” from the same root. And so, naturally, kobolds and their English counterparts, the goblins, are said to live in caves underground. If that reminds you of dwarves from fantasy literature, you’re closer than you think.
The physical appearance of goblins in folklore varies greatly, but the common description is that they are dwarf-like creatures. They cause trouble, are known to steal, have a tendency to break things, and generally make life difficult for humans. Because of this, people in Europe would put carvings of goblins in their homes to ward off the real thing.
In fact, here’s something really crazy: medieval door knockers were often carved to resemble the faces of daemons or goblins. And it’s most likely purely coincidental, but in Welsh folklore, goblins are called “coblyn” or, more commonly, “knockers.”
My point is this: for thousands of years, people have suspected that their misfortune could be blamed on small, meddlesome creatures. They feared them, told stories about them, and tried their best to protect their homes from them. But for all that time, they seemed like nothing more than stories.
In the early twentieth century, though, people started to report actual sightings. And not just anyone. These sightings were documented by trained, respected military pilots.
OVER AND UNDER
When the Wright brothers made their first controlled flight in December 1903, it seemed like a revelation. It’s hard to imagine it today, but there was a time when flight wasn’t assumed as a method of travel. So when Wilbur spent three full seconds in the air that day, he and his brother Orville did something else: they changed the way we think about our world.
And however long it took humans to create and perfect the art of controllable, mechanical flight, once the cat was out of the bag, it bolted into the future without looking back. Within just nine years, someone had managed to mount a machine gun onto one of these primitive airplanes. Because of that, when the first World War broke out just two years later, military combat had a new element.
Of course, guns weren’t the only weapons a plane could utilize. The very first airplane brought down in combat was an Austrian plane that was literally rammed by a Russian pilot. Both pilots died after the wreckage plummeted to the ground below. It wasn’t the most efficient method of air combat, but it was a start. Clearly, we’ve spent the many decades since getting very, very good at it.
Unfortunately, though, the reasons for combat disasters go beyond machine gun bullets and suicidal pilots. One of the most unique and mysterious of those causes first appeared in a British newspaper. In an article from the early 1900s, it was said that in 1918
the newly constituted Royal Air Force…appear[ed] to have detected the existence of a horde of mysterious and malicious sprites whose whole purpose in life was…to bring about as many as possible of the inexplicable mishaps which, in those days as now, trouble an airman’s life.
The description didn’t feature a name, but that was soon to follow. Some experts think that we can find roots of our word “gremlin” in the Old English germ, which meant “to vex” or “to annoy.” It fits the behavior of these creatures to the letter.
Before we move forward, though, it might be helpful to take care of your memories of the 1984 classic film by the same name. I grew up in the 1980s, and Gremlins was a fantastic bit of eye-candy for my young, horror-loving mind. But the truth of the legend has little resemblance to the version that you and I witnessed on the big screen.
The gremlins of folklore—at least the stories that came out of the early twentieth century, that is—described the ancient, stereotypical daemon, but with a twist. Yes, they were said to be small, ranging anywhere from six inches to three feet in height. And yes, they could appear and disappear at will, causing mischief and trouble wherever they went. But in addition, these modern versions of the legendary goblin seemed to possess a supernatural grasp of modern human technology.
In 1923, a British pilot was flying over open water when his engine stalled. He miraculously survived the crash into the sea, and was rescued shortly after that. When he was safely onboard the rescue vessel, the pilot was quick to explain what had happened. Tiny creatures, he claimed, had appeared on the plane. Whether they appeared out of nowhere or smuggled themselves aboard prior to takeoff, the pilot wasn’t sure. However they got there, he said that they proceeded to tamper with the plane’s engine and flight controls. Without power or control, he was left to drop helplessly into the sea.
These reports were infrequent in the 1920s, but as World War II began and the number of planes in the sky began to grow exponentially, more and more stories seemed to follow of small, troublesome creatures who had an almost supernatural ability to hold on to a moving aircraft, and while they were there, to do damage and cause accidents. In some cases, they were even sighted inside planes, among the crew or cargo.
Stories, as we’ve seen so many times before, have a tendency to spread like disease. Sometimes it’s because there’s some truth to them, but oftentimes it’s just because of fear. The trouble is in figuring out where to draw that line. And that line kept moving as the sightings were reported outside the British ranks. Pilots on the German side also reported seeing creatures during flights, as did some in India, Malta, and the Middle East.
Some might chalk these stories up to hallucinations, or maybe a bit of pre-flight drinking. There are certainly a lot of stories of World War II pilots climbing into the cockpit after a night of “romancing the bottle.” And who could blame them? In many cases, these pilots had a 20 percent chance of never coming back alive.
But there are far too many reports to blame them all on drunkenness or delirium. Something unusual was happening to planes all throughout the war. And with folklore as a lens, some of the reports are downright eerie.
INVADERS
In 2014, a ninety-two-year-old World War II veteran from Jonesboro, Arkansas, came forward to tell a story he had kept to himself for seven decades. During the war he’d piloted a B-17, one of the legendary “Flying Fortresses” that helped Allied air forces carry out successful missions over Nazi territory. And it was on one of those missions that this man experienced something that he couldn’t explain.
The pilot, who chose to identify himself with the initials L
.W., spoke of how he was a twenty-two-year-old flight commander on the B-17 when something very strange happened on a combat mission in 1944. He described how, as he brought the aircraft to a higher altitude, the plane began to make strange noises. That wasn’t completely unexpected, as the B-17 was an absolutely enormous plane and sometimes turbulence could rattle the airframe. But he checked the instrument panel out of habit.
According to his story, the instruments seemed broken and confused. Looking for an answer to the mystery, he glanced out the right-side window and then froze. There, outside the glass of the cockpit window, was the face of a small creature. The pilot described it as about three feet tall, with red eyes and sharp teeth. The ears, he said, were almost owl-like, and its skin was gray and hairless.
He looked back toward the front and noticed a second creature, this one moving along the nose of the aircraft. He said it was dancing and hammering away at the metal body of the plane. He immediately assumed he was hallucinating. I can picture him rubbing his eyes and blinking repeatedly, like in some old Looney Tunes cartoon. But according to him, he was as sharp and alert as ever.
Whatever it was that he witnessed outside on the body of the plane, he said that he managed to shake them off with a bit of “fancy flying”—his term, not mine. But while the creatures themselves might have vanished, the memory of them would haunt him for the rest of his life. He told only one person afterward, a gunner on another B-17, but rather than laugh at him, this friend acknowledged that he, too, had seen similar creatures on a flight just the day before.
Years prior, in the summer of 1939, an earlier encounter had been reported, this time in the Pacific. According to the account, a transport plane took off from the air base in San Diego in the middle of the afternoon and headed toward Hawaii. On board were thirteen marines, a mixture of crewmembers and passengers.
About halfway through the flight, while still over the vast expanse of the blue Pacific, the transport issued a distress signal. After that, the signal stopped, as did all other forms of communication. It was as if the plane had simply gone silent and then vanished. Which made it all the more surprising when it reappeared later outside the San Diego airfield and prepared for landing.
But the landing didn’t seem right. The plane came in too fast. It bounced on the runway in a rough, haphazard manner and then finally came to a dramatic emergency stop. Crew on the runway immediately understood why, too. The exterior of the aircraft was extensively damaged. Some said it looked like bombs had ripped apart the metal skin of the transport. It was a miracle, they said, that the thing even landed.
When no one exited the plane to greet them, the land crew opened it up and stepped inside, only to be met with a scene of horror and chaos. Inside, they discovered bodies everywhere. Each seemed to have died from the same types of wounds: large, vicious cuts and injuries that almost seemed to have originated from a wild animal.
Added to that, the interior of the transport smelled horribly of sulfur and the acrid odor of blood. To complicate matters, empty shell casings were found scattered about the interior of the cockpit. The pistols responsible, belonging to the pilot and co-pilot, were lying at their feet, their magazines emptied.
Twelve men were found dead, but there was a thirteenth. The co-pilot had managed to stay conscious, despite his extensive injuries, long enough to land the transport at the base. He was alive but unresponsive when they found him, and he was quickly removed for emergency medical care. Alas, the man died a short while later. He never had the chance to report what had happened.
BEYOND BELIEF
Stories of gremlins have stuck around in the decades since, but today they are mentioned more like a personified Murphy’s Law, muttered as a humorous superstition by modern pilots. I get the feeling that the persistence of the folklore is due more to its place as a cultural habit than anything else.
We can ponder why, I suppose. Why would sightings stop after World War II? Some think it’s because of advances in airplane technology—stronger structures, faster flight speeds, and higher altitudes. The assumption is that maybe gremlins could have held on to earlier planes, but the newer ones are so fast that it’s become impossible for them to cling.
The other answer could just be that the world has left those childhood tales of little creatures behind. We’ve moved beyond belief now. We’ve outgrown it. We know a lot more than we used to, after all, and to our thoroughly modern minds these stories of gremlins just sound like so much fantasy.
Whatever reason you subscribe to, it’s important to remember that many people—people we would respect—have believed with all their being that gremlins are real, factual creatures. In 1927, a pilot was over the Atlantic in a plane that, by today’s standards, would be considered primitive. He was alone and had been in the air for a very long time, but was startled to discover that there were creatures in the cockpit with him.
He described them as small, vaporous beings with a strange, otherworldly appearance. The pilot claimed that these creatures spoke to him and kept him alert in a moment when he was overly tired and past the edge of exhaustion. They helped with the navigation on his journey, and even adjusted some of his equipment.
It was a rare account of gremlins who were benevolent, rather than meddlesome and hostile. Even still, this pilot was so worried about what the public might think of his experience that he kept the details to himself for more than twenty-five years.
In 1953, this pilot included the experience in a memoir of his flight. It was a historic journey, after all, and recording it properly required honesty and transparency. The book, you see, was called The Spirit of St. Louis. And the man was more than just a pilot. He was a military officer, an explorer, an inventor, and, on top of all that, a national hero because of his successful flight from New York to Paris. The first man to do so, in fact.
This man was Charles Lindbergh.
ON THE NORTHERN slope of a hill in southern England, near the village of Woolstone, is an artifact from another era. It’s a drawing of an enormous horse, made at least three thousand years ago. Thanks to the white chalk that fills in the artwork, which is more than 350 feet long, it’s been known for centuries as the White Horse of Uffington.
In April 2017, the National Trust in southern England announced that it had made a new, exciting discovery on the hill—a second chalk figure, nearly as large, that depicted another regional animal: the duck.
Now, I love Uffington. I’ve been there twice in the last decade, and it’s one of my favorite places in all of England. So I felt compelled to read the full article, but when I did, I was surprised by what I found. While the article and accompanying video were published on March 31, they were promoted on social media the following day: April 1.
The duck, you see, was an April Fools’ Day joke. Now, I’ll admit I was more than a bit relieved. The White Horse is special, after all. But every year on the first of April, countless jokes are played out on the local and national level all around the world, taking our expectations and assumptions for a ride. Google might just be the biggest perpetrator of the last few years, spending what some think is millions of dollars to create fake product videos, elaborate prototypes, and full websites.
It’s not a new thing, though. Humans have always been easily fooled by—and prone to create—trickery. Ancient mythology is full of characters known as tricksters, and modern media has added a plethora of new names to that list: the Joker from Batman, Q from Star Trek, even Bugs Bunny and Bart Simpson. And we love them all for it.
But it’s not always fun and games. Many trickster legends are far darker than modern cartoons and movies. In fact, some of them are a lot more frightening than you’d think.
SHIFTING SHAPES
If you’ve come anywhere within ten feet of a comic-book-inspired movie in the past decade, you’ve probably been exposed to a number of modern spins on a very old idea. In fact, nearly all of the Marvel movies include one character lifted straight out of ancient mythology and
brought to life by Tom Hiddleston: the Norse god Loki.
Loki does a great job of living up to the true definition of a trickster. Across the globe and the pages of history, nearly all ancient tricksters have stuck to the same small list of characteristics. They’re morally ambiguous, bouncing between acts of good and evil with surprising flexibility. They have the power to create and destroy. They’re often a messenger, bringing bad news or tragedy to a community. And they excel at taking any situation and flipping it on its head.
Writing about Loki nearly nine hundred years ago, Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson described him as being
handsome and fair of face, but [he] has an evil disposition, and is very changeable of mood. He excelled all men in the art of cunning, and he always cheats. He was continually involving the Aesir in great difficulties, and he often helped them out again by guile.
But Loki isn’t alone in the trickster space. Greek mythology has Hermes, who was—among other things—the god of thieves. West African folklore has the spider Anansi, although some stories tell of trickster rabbits as well. Many scholars think those are the roots of the more modern tales of Br’er Rabbit, a supposition that might very well be true. Folklore, as we’ve discussed so many times before, has a way of growing and adapting over the years.
We can see that evolution in European folklore. Those old ideas of tricksters who break the rules and make life difficult found fresh expression in new tales and legends. These stories are different but also the same, if you know what I mean. Because underneath all the cultural dress and decoration, every trickster is a shape-shifter, whether in practice or just metaphorically. Tricksters adapt and shift and change. Sometimes they’re the ones doing the transformation, but oftentimes it’s the status quo that gets reinvented. If there’s a rule, whether social or moral or legal, the trickster is there to bend or break it.
