Last Halloween I recounted all of my true ghost stories and had half an idea that I would keep an ear open for more to record here this year, but alas, I heard none. What I did collect was this strange story from my father-in-law:
Back in the old country, in Sicily*, people weren't too concerned about ghosts, but they did believe in and fear changelings. When a full moon came around, my aunts and uncles used to tell me, there were those who could feel that a change was coming – and no one is really sure if we're talking about werewolves here, but the fear was that these people would turn into beasts of some sort. Sometimes these people would volunteer to be locked up and sometimes they were taken by force, but it was always the whole village involved, because everyone was scared. The changelings would be gathered in a barn, locked in, and some of the villagers would watch over them from the outside. My aunts and uncles from the old country told me – and they would have seen this themselves in the early 1900's – that there would be screaming and growling coming from inside, and if anyone would start banging against the inner walls, the villagers would poke these longs knives in through the slats. They told me that they saw with their own eyes the knife blades coming out bloody, but in the morning, when the moon was gone and the sun was up, none of the changelings would have cuts on their bodies, and that's what scared them most of all. All those years later, when they would tell me these stories, you could tell they were still scared.
Doing a quick google search of Sicily + changeling netted no results, but Sicily + werewolf shows that
there's plenty of historical backing for this story:
- In Sicily, it was said that if someone was seen by a werewolf they would lose his/her power of speech.
- In Sicily, a child conceived during a new moon was thought sure to grow up to be a werewolf.
- In Sicily, werewolf stories remind us that these creatures apparently cannot climb more than three steps at once so finding a flight of stairs to run up would be extremely helpful if one ever happened to chase you!
- According to this source, Sicilians believed that you could become a werewolf if you slept outside on a Friday with a full moon, and that to kill a werewolf, you can hit it on his head with a knife, cut away the backs of his paws or touch him with a specially crafted key.
- A Sicilian belief of Arabic origin holds that a werewolf can be cured of its ailment by striking it on the forehead or scalp with a knife. Another belief from the same culture involves the piercing of the werewolf's hands with nails.
- In the book Sicily: A Literary Guide for Travellers, it is recounted:
And in fiction:One of their more surreal exchanges took place on an August night 'when the moons were so preposterous'. Their purveyor of ice started to question the couple on their knowledge of werewolves; the boy even suggested that (Truman) Capote may be afraid of venturing out after dark. It appears that Taormina was in the grip of a werewolf scare owing to the tale of a youth who had claimed he was attacked by a half-human howling beast on all fours. The author, with his American scepticism of peasant superstition, laughed at the boy's naivety, only to be brought up short for his impertinence when the youth told him that the town used to be infested with lycanthropy, finally reassuring him that just a couple remained.
- In the 12th century book Guillaume de Palerne, a young prince of Sicily is kidnapped by a werewolf at the age of four. Woven into the story of the eponymous hero is the parallel story of Alphonse, the Spanish prince who was transformed into a werewolf by his stepmother when he was still a toddler.
That's just the top results of a quick google search, and although this proves the superstition and isn't meant to reflect my own beliefs, it is interesting to me that the Sicilian belief in changelings (or werewolves if we must) survived into at least the early 20th century; survived in the family stories of the people I married into.
Happy Halloween!
*For my own interest, this is as good a place as any to record that my father-in-law's Italian grandfather (Giuseppe Tomasino) was from Calabria and his grandmother from Salerno.
Strange stories from previous years:
Halloween I
