Bogle

Also Known As: older Scots bogill, boggill, boggle, bogell; northern English boggle; kin to the English boggart and boggard
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Scottish Mythology, English Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A bogle frightens, and in the Border telling it frightens selectively, going after the perjurer and the cheat rather than the household that fears it.
Role in Mythos: It is the Scots and northern English name for the thing in the dark that has no other name, sitting one rung below the Devil in the local order of terrors.
Relation to Humans: People warned children with it, glowered round for it on bad roads at night, and in one recorded case set an open Bible and a lit candle on a table to get rid of one. Where it turns up in a story with a plot, it is usually collecting on a debt somebody thought nobody had witnessed.

A man on a grey mare, drunk, riding home through a thunderstorm, keeping his eyes moving. Burns gives him two lines in Tam o’ Shanter, and they remain the most useful description of a bogle anybody has managed: whiles glowring round wi’ prudent cares, lest bogles catch him unawares. No face. No shape. Only the reason a rider keeps looking over his shoulder on a bad road.

The word is older than that road. Scots writers had it in hand by about 1500, and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue gathers its appearances from then until 1686 under a definition that has never needed much improving: a supernatural being of an ugly or terrifying aspect, a bugbear. Gavin Douglas reached for it in 1513, in his Scots translation of the Aeneid, and the line he set at the head of his sixth book was still good enough for Burns to lift whole, nearly three centuries later, as the epigraph of Tam o’ Shanter. Of Brownyis and of Bogillis full is this buke.

Its origins are unclear even to the people who chase words for a living. The Oxford English Dictionary sets it beside Welsh bwg and German boggel-mann, both meaning ghost or goblin, though whether that is borrowing or a much older shared inheritance is not settled. What is certain is the company it kept. William Stewart, versifying the chronicles of Scotland in 1535, wanted an image for a walking corpse and produced a loathly lean tramort, like ane bogill all of ratland banis. Sir David Lyndsay put a bairdit bogill on the stage in 1540 and, a thousand lines later, a beggar bogle being shooed off. The flyting of Montgomerie and Polwart, before 1585, lists boggles, brownies, gyrcarlings and gaists in one breath, the way you would list vermin.

Then the ministers got hold of it. William Birnie, writing about kirk burial in 1606, used the word to gloss the Latin: being not Lares, but Laruae or Lemures, that is, bogils or gaistes. Elsewhere in the same book he calls graveyards the alrishe innes of bogles and gaistes, eldritch inns for the dead. A Scots diarist of the early 1600s complained that for certain people Hell is but a boggill to fley barnes, a bogle to frighten children. A tract of 1646 records the flat opinion that the Devils are nothing but only boggles in the night, to terrify men. In three generations the bogle went from a thing that stood in a field to a rhetorical device for arguing about whether anything stood in the field at all.

The Borders kept a stronger version. James Hogg gave a shepherd named Barnaby a speech about it in his tale of the Woolgatherer, and William Henderson quoted the whole passage in 1866 as the plainest statement of what the country people actually held. The Devil troubles the godly, Barnaby says. The Brownie does the work. And the bogles are a better kind o’ spirits; they meddle wi’ nane but the guilty; the murderer, an’ the mansworn, an’ the cheaters o’ the widow an’ fatherless. Mansworn means perjured. It is a strange, tidy theology, and it makes the bogle less a monster than a bailiff.

Henderson, who collected on both sides of the Cheviots, would not sign off on it. He says outright that he does not find the Yorkshire bogle bearing that character of a minister of retribution, and then prints two stories that spend the rest of the chapter arguing with each other.

In a village in Arkingarthdale a house had been haunted for years, and nothing would shift the thing. At last the owner opened his Bible, set it on a table with a lighted candle beside it, and said aloud into the room: Noo, thoo can read or dance, or dea as ta likes. Then he turned his back and walked upstairs. Something in the shape of a grey cat flew past him on the steps and went out into the air. It was gone for years. One morning, on his way to work, he met it again on the same staircase. He went back and told his mother what he had seen. He was killed that day in the mines.

At Hurst, near Reeth, a widow was cheated out of some candles by a neighbour. The neighbour saw a figure standing in his garden one night, fetched his gun, and fired at it, and the figure went out like a blown match. The following night he was in an outbuilding when it filled the doorway and spoke. I’m neither bone, nor flesh, nor blood, thou canst not harm me. Give back the candles, but I must take something from thee. It pulled a single eyelash from his eyelid and vanished. The candles were on the widow’s doorstep by morning, and the man twinkled for the rest of his life.

Nobody wrote down where a bogle comes from. There is no birth, no maker, no first bogle, and the silence is not an accident of preservation. The word arrived in the language as a description of an effect, the way a draught or a chill arrives, and the stories were fitted to it afterwards. The two Yorkshire accounts show what that costs. One bogle is an omen that kills a man by being seen twice. The other is a debt collector with a sense of proportion, taking an eyelash where it could have taken an eye.

What it can do follows from that vagueness. It cannot be shot, because there is nothing in it for shot to enter. It appears where it chooses, in whatever form suits, and its arrival carries information: seen once, a nuisance; seen twice, a death sentence. Its aim, when it has one, is moral rather than appetitive, which is what separates it from the drowning-spirits of the same country. And it takes a token. Not a life, in the Hurst telling, but a piece of a man small enough that he will carry the reminder in his face forever.

Against that, its limits are almost comic. An open Bible and one tallow candle emptied a house that resisted every other remedy. An old northern proverb collected in the Denham Tracts ranks the frights of the country in order and puts it at the bottom: he caps Bogie, Bogie capt Redcap, and Redcap capt Old Nick. The Devil outranks the castle goblin, and the castle goblin outranks the bogle. By 1808 John Jamieson was recording bogill about the stacks as a children’s chasing game played round the corn stacks in a barnyard, and Walter Scott had a character in Waverley boasting that he played at bogle about the bush wi’ them. Burns himself used the word for a metaphor, calling Wealth and State silly bogles that could never make a man eerie. And in a potato field the tattie-bogle stands all season in borrowed clothes, arms out, terrifying nothing but birds, which is where a great many of Scotland’s monsters have ended up.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a bogle?

A bogle is the Scots and northern English name for a frightening supernatural being, defined in the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue as a supernatural being of an ugly or terrifying aspect, a bugbear. It is a general class term rather than one named individual, so a bogle is whatever is in the dark rather than a specific creature with a fixed appearance. The word is recorded in Scots writing from about 1500 onward.

Are bogles evil?

Not in the Border understanding of them. The shepherd’s speech that William Henderson quoted in 1866 says bogles meddle with nobody but the guilty, naming the murderer, the perjurer and those who cheat widows and orphans. Henderson noted that the Yorkshire bogle he collected did not reliably behave that way, so the tradition is not consistent across the region.

What does a bogle look like?

There is no settled answer, and the sources disagree sharply. A 1535 Scots chronicle compares a corpse to a bogle of rattling bones, a 1540 play refers to a bearded bogle, and in a Yorkshire account collected by Henderson one takes the form of a grey cat. In another of Henderson’s stories the bogle simply announces that it is neither bone, nor flesh, nor blood.

How do you get rid of a bogle?

In the one recorded method, a householder in Arkingarthdale opened his Bible, placed it on a table with a lighted candle, invited the bogle to read or dance as it pleased, and walked away. The bogle left the house in the form of a grey cat and stayed away for years. When the man saw it a second time, on the same staircase, he was killed at work that day.

What is a tattie-bogle?

A tattie-bogle is a scarecrow, specifically one set up in a potato field, from the Scots word tattie for potato. It is the same word as the supernatural bogle, applied to a figure whose only job is to frighten. The term is also used of a ragged or badly dressed person.