The Fairies and Pixies of Marblehead, Mass.

When I say that the town of Marblehead on Massachusetts’ North Shore is unlike other coastal Massachusetts towns, I’m not simply referring to the fact that it’s teeming with fairies and pixies (which it is). Isolated from the state’s highway system on a remote peninsula, the town has always boasted a most unorthodox history.

Think of it as the black sheep of Colonial New England. Whereas Puritans founded the surrounding settlements of Salem, Peabody, and Danvers to be pure and godly communities, Marblehead’s beginnings were more down to earth. According to historians Priscilla Sawyer Lord and Virginia Clegg Gamage, “irreligious settlers” and “adventurous fishermen” founded the town to escape the harsh dictates of Puritanism while making a living catching fish. In about 1629, these humble but industrious early settlers headed south east to a peninsula where the Naumkeag Tribe lived. They coexisted peacefully with the tribe while establishing the sleepy fishing village we know today.

Over the next few hundred years, Marblehead saw an influx of fairy-acquainted immigrants from Scotland and the fishing regions of South West England: Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset. According to the historian Samuel Roads, immigration from England’s South West accounted for what he called Marblehead’s “idiomatic peculiarities,” a fact we’ll discuss in more detail later in the context of the distinctly Marblehead word pixilated and its interesting connection to the fae.

Besides their linguistic idiosyncrasies, the townspeople also had an approach to life that was noticeably cheerier than that of their Puritan neighbors. The first reference to the name Marblehead in the Colonial records (at that time, the village was under Salem’s jurisdiction) came in 1633 when a man called John Bennett was fined for being drunk on the “Sabbath day.”

Such raucous beginnings characterized the spirit of Marblehead for many years, for the Cornish and South West English who lived there rarely belonged to a church and didn’t establish one in the town until 1684, although they did build a meeting-house to host religious services on a hill overlooking the harbor. Unlike their Puritan neighbors, they imported from England unorthodox ideas about fairies and pixies, too.

If it’s true to say that where the Puritans went, the fairies didn’t follow, it might also be true to say that where the Cornish and South West English went, the fae usually flourished. Based on English fairy lore, early Marblehead’s lack of a church might even have encouraged the fairies to come, for there’s nothing the Good Folk hate more, apparently, than the tolling of a church bell.

The first record of Marblehead’s thriving belief in fairy legends came in 1851 when the son of Supreme Court justice and Marblehead native Joseph Story described the town as home to a “compendium of all varieties of legends” that “credulous” immigrants from“all over the globe” had brought to Massachusetts. Some of these immigrants, from Devon, brought with them a belief in pixies. Others, from Scotland, brought a belief in bogles (a type of goblin or bogeyman). While others, from the north of England, brought a belief in Jack O’ Lanterns (light-bearing fairies similar to will-o’-the-wisps).

Justice Story recalled the town’s superstitious fishermen warning him to run home at twilight so the bogles wouldn’t catch him. In fact, belief in “hobgoblins,” among other supernatural beings, was almost “universal” in the town, claimed Story.

A few decades later, in 1894, the outside world got wind of the sheer extent of fairy lore in modern Marblehead when a woman called Sarah Bridge Farmer put to writing what she’d heard as a child from the town’s elderly residents. She described what has since been recognized as Marblehead’s most notable contribution to fairy lore: a clear

distinction between good fairies and bad pixies.

According to Farmer, the fairies of Marblehead looked kindly upon the town’s residents and never did anything to harm them. The elders told her that children needn’t fear the fairies because they were “universally sweet-natured.” They were known to live in “underground palaces built of gold and silver, ornamented with pearls and precious stones.”

These elaborate underground homes clearly derive from English fairy lore, in which they’re a common motif. However, in England, this aspect of fairyland was more complicated than it at first appeared. Often, when humans visited a fairy abode, the grandeur of the place would impress them, but the appearance was nothing but enchantment and “glamor.” The enchantment would inevitably wear off, and the visitor would find himself in a cave with only dirt and leaves for decoration.

Following Marblehead’s winding streets to the tip of the peninsula, one can see why the town’s residents might have located the fairies in underground palaces. The town boasts many hills, both steep and gentle, covered in moss and clover. Fairies have long been associated with mounds—sometimes called hollow hills—and one Marblehead hill, in particular, has a very fairylike atmosphere: the location of the old burying ground, where the Colonial Era dead are buried above the town (it seems to me there’s something a bit eerie about a town where members of the living go about their activities

somewhere below the dead).

Other Marblehead beliefs about the good-natured fairies included the fact that they only visited the human world to revel on moonlit nights, that they left “fairy rings” of moss or fungi where they danced, and that they drank from red lichens shaped like wine glasses. When the dawn came, they’d hurry back underground or fall asleep among the flowers, where children would look for them, believing that if they caught one, it would bring them luck.

Marblehead’s pixies, on the other hand, were “malicious” creatures who, like the fairies, were “tiny” but brown colored. They loved to lead people astray at night, causing them to wander for hours not recognizing familiar sights. As in parts of Rhode Island, one way to protect oneself against pixie enchantment was to “turn one’s clothes.” This meant turning out the pockets of one’s coat or turning an entire garment inside out. The practice confounded the pixies and prevented them from exercising their malicious enchantment.

One Marblehead resident, an elderly, well-educated woman, claimed the pixies caused her to wander for “an hour or more unable to find her home.” Eventually, she realized the “little brown people” had cast their enchantment over her, and she “turned her cloak,” breaking the spell. The word used for this pixie-induced bewilderment was pixilated.

Marblehead’s residents were famous for their unique way of speaking. This included broad pronunciation of vowels and strange idioms unknown to other New Englanders. They always dropped the letter h at the beginning of words, clipped their words short, and used a dialect reminiscent, according to historian Samuel Roads, of a “cockney Englishman’s.” Few Marblehead expressions have received as much attention, however, as the word pixilated, which appears, in America at least, to be unique to the town.

First attested in the mid-nineteenth century but probably used much earlier, the word may have originated in the term pixie led or (in the academic Simon Young’s opinion) in a Somerset term pixie laden. Like Marblehead’s pixie enchantment, pixie led referred to a state of being lost or confused at night. It could also refer to madness more generally or a state of being “beside oneself.” The meaning of the word pixilated in Marblehead is therefore consistent with its South West English origins, where pixies also led people astray, especially when someone was returning home drunk from an inn or local booze-

up. Records of the word being used in the town lend credibility to Sarah Bridge Farmer’s descriptions of Marbleheaders’ thriving fairy beliefs.

This story is an excerpt from Andrew Warburton’s new book, New England Fairies: A History of the LIttle People of the Hills and Forests.  It has been modified slightly for the New England Historical Society’s format.