These are the beings that dance on heaths and village greens, as Lavater and Trithemius think. Olaus Magnus adds that they leave those green circles we commonly find in open fields. Others attribute the circles to a falling meteor or some chance patch of exceptional fertility in the soil: nature amusing herself in this way. Old women and children sometimes see these beings.

Jeroni Pau, in his description of the Spanish city of Barcelona, relates how they have often been seen near the town, around springs and hills. “Sometimes,” says Trithemius, “they lead simple people into their mountain hiding places, showing the astonished visitors marvellous wonders, ringing bells, spectacles, and the like.” Gerald of Wales gives the example of a Welsh monk who was deceived in this way.

Paracelsus lists many places in Germany where they commonly walk about in little coats some two feet long. There is a larger kind, which we call hobgoblins and Robin Goodfellows. In those superstitious times they would grind grain for a bowl of milk, cut wood, or do any sort of menial work. In former ages they would repair old ironwork in the Aeolian Islands of Lipari, and they have often been seen and heard.

Tholosanus calls them Trulli and Getuli, and says that in his day they were common in many parts of France. Dithmar Blefken, in his description of Iceland, reports as a certainty that almost every household still has some such familiar spirit. Felix Malleolus, in On the Cruelty of Demons, similarly affirms that these trolls, or Telchines, are very common in Norway and are seen doing menial work: drawing water, says Weyer, book 1, chapter 32, preparing food, and similar tasks.

There is another sort that frequents abandoned houses, which the Italians call foliots. Cardan considers them mostly harmless. They make strange noises at night, sometimes howl pitifully and then laugh, produce great flames and sudden lights, throw stones, rattle chains, shave people, open and shut doors, knock down platters, stools and chests, and sometimes appear as hares, crows, black dogs, and the like.

Read about them in the Jesuit Peter Thyraeus’s treatise On Haunted Places, part 1, chapter 4. He holds that they are devils, the souls of the damned seeking revenge, or souls from purgatory seeking relief. For examples, consult Sigismund Scherertz’s On Apparitions, part 1, chapter 1, which he says he drew chiefly from Luther. There are many instances.

Pliny the Younger recalls such a house at Athens, which the philosopher Athenodorus rented, although no one dared live in it for fear of devils. Augustine, City of God, book 22, chapter 8, tells a similar story of the tribune Hesperius’s house at Zubeda, near their city of Hippo. It was troubled by evil spirits, to his great loss, “with suffering inflicted on his animals and servants.”

Many such instances can be read in Nider’s Ant-Hill, book 5, chapters 12, 3, and elsewhere. I am uncertain whether I may call these the Zim and Ophim of which Isaiah 13:21 speaks. For more, see the same Scherertz, On Apparitions, book 1, chapter 4; he is full of examples.

This kind of devil often appears to people and frightens them out of their wits, sometimes walking at midday and sometimes at night, impersonating the ghosts of the dead. Such was Caligula’s ghost, which Suetonius says was seen walking in Lavinia’s garden. Spirits haunted the place where his body was buried, and in the house where he died “no night passed without terror until it was consumed by fire.” This happened every night: there was no peace until the house burned down.

Ghosts commonly walk around Hekla in Iceland, “impersonating the souls of the dead,” says Johannes Ananias, On the Nature of Demons, book 3; so too Olaus, book 2, chapter 2; Natalis Taillepied, On Apparitions of Spirits; and Kornmann, Wonders of the Dead, part 1, chapter 44. Such sights are frequently seen “around graves and monasteries,” says Lavater, book 1, chapter 19—in monasteries and around churchyards, “marshy places, large isolated buildings, and places marked by murder,” and so on.

Thyraeus adds, “where some grave sin has been committed, where the impious, oppressors of the poor, and people notorious for wickedness live.” These spirits often foretell people’s deaths by various signs—knocking, groaning, and the like—though Richard Argentine, On the Deceptions of Demons, chapter 18, attributes these predictions to good angels, on the authority of Ficino and others.

“Portents occur more frequently at the deaths of princes,” and so on. Thus, in the Lateran church in Rome, popes’ deaths are foretold by Sylvester’s tomb. Near Rupes Nova in Finland, in the kingdom of Sweden, there is a lake where, before the governor of the castle dies, an apparition dressed as Arion with his harp appears and plays exquisite music.

The same is true of those logs in Cheshire which, they say, foretell the death of the head of the family, or that oak in Lanthadran Park in Cornwall which foretells the same. Many European families are reminded of their end by such predictions, and many people are forewarned—if we may believe Paracelsus—by familiar spirits in various forms, such as cocks, crows and owls, which often hover around sick people’s rooms.

It may be “because they smell the foulness of the dying,” as Baracellus conjectures, “and therefore caw above the roofs of the sick”—because they smell a corpse. Or it may be because, as Bernardino de’ Busti thinks, God allows the Devil to appear in the form of crows and similar creatures to frighten those who live wickedly here on earth.

Shortly before Cicero’s death, says Plutarch, crows made a tremendous noise around him, “clamouring tumultuously”; they pulled the pillow from beneath his head. Robert Gaguin’s History of France, book 8, tells another such marvellous story about the death in 1345 of Jean de Montfort, a French lord: “So great a multitude of crows settled on the dying man’s house that no one would have believed there were that many in all France.”

Such portents are very common in the authors. See further instances in the same Lavater; Thyraeus, On Haunted Places, part 3, chapter 58; Pictorius; Delrio; and Cicogna, book 3, chapter 9. Necromancers claim to summon and dismiss these spirits at will.

They claim the same power over those whom Mizaldus calls Ambulones, “wanderers,” that walk about at midnight on vast heaths and in deserted places. These, says Lavater, draw people off the road and lead them along a wrong path all night, or entirely block their way. They have different names in different places; we commonly call them Pucks.