The Boggart

Simon Young examines the boggart as a northern English supernatural being, tracing its meanings across folklore, dialect, place-names and local history. The book questions the familiar image of the boggart as a single kind of goblin, presenting instead a broad category that could include black dogs, headless phantoms, shape-changing ghouls and other solitary beings.

Drawing on digitised 19th-century newspapers and ephemera, alongside around 1,100 memories gathered through surveys and interviews, Young reconstructs how boggart beliefs were experienced and transmitted. He considers the landscapes associated with reported encounters, the decline of the term in dialect, and the later transformation of the boggart through folklore studies, literature and modern fantasy.