The changeling of Celtic folklore isn’t a being who changes forms. The word means something exchanged, usually a fairy baby left in place of a stolen human one. Loud, sickly, ugly, ravenous, and developmentally challenged, this changeling is a world of hurt for its adopted parents. There are usually two ways to be rid of it and get the mortal child back: either to make the changeling think you’re crazier than it is by doing something silly—like making tea out of brewed eggshells—or scaring it by threatening to abuse it. (“I’ll boil the water for the baby’s bath,” the mother calls cheerfully to the father. “You get the steel wool and bleach to rub him.”) It bolts out the window like it could fly, and the mortal child is heard cooing in its crib.
In one description, these Iroquois changelings, from the front, look like people, normally dressed for the rez. But the back half is animallike, with tail or fur. The surreality of this description makes us wonder if the whole thing is an illusion.
The Iroquois aren’t the only ones who see these altered critters. I met a white trucker who once cut through the Tonawanda Reservation every morning on his way to work. One misty dawn, he rounded a bend and caught a look at something strange: a human figure in a long coat and hat, with a big, bushy animal tail billowing out behind. It froze just long enough for him to see it, then darted back into the woods. He never took that shortcut again.
In another description, a changeling is an altered animal but with frightening powers. In the early 1990s, one of these popped out on winding Sandhill Road and chased a man on a chopper, one of the biggest men on the Tonawanda Reservation. People referred to him as “that big mean biker dude.” It was his turn to be intimidated.
He could see it in his rearview mirrors, a forty-pound animal with fox ears and a tail. It chased him upright, though, like an enraged fireplug. He ran stop signs and sped around bends. It gained on him at fifty. He didn’t see the last of it till he was off the reservation. Maybe it was a changeling, out to get him, losing its power on white man’s land. Maybe the medicine people sent it to him as a message: cool it.
There are parallels all over North America. Around the upper Great Lakes are legends about bearwalkers. Obviously witches in their theriomorph forms, they pace as shaggy humanoids that huff and puff smoke and sparks. Author Tony Hillerman (1925–2008) recounts the southwestern mythology of the skinwalkers, who can move pretty fast. Late one night a white trucker saw one of these pull alongside him on a highway. A lean, grinning Native American man under a coyote-head hood kept up with him on foot and motioned him to pull over. He didn’t outrun the figure till he reached a terrifying speed down a hill.
SHAPE-SHIFTERS
For the old Iroquois, shape-shifting witches usually took the forms of forest critters like wolves, bears, and owls. These days, it’s often livestock or pets: dogs, horses, cats, and pigs. In these forms, they stalk and curse their human enemies. They also get hit, whipped, or shot. Somewhere a human usually turns up with a matching wound.
Duce Bowen talked of shape-shifters like they were real. “Have you, or anyone you know, ever seen one of these things in the process?” I asked him once.
“No shape-shifter will ever let you see them,” he said firmly. He seemed to feel that as recently as his own childhood there were people known to use this power. It’s probably a fading art. As of 2004, he knew no one he suspected, at least none he would talk about. Maybe we only hear about these folks near the end of a life, after many occult feats.
But the old-timers can recognize them in their final shape. Any time you see an animal behaving unnaturally like a person—walking on its hind legs or talking—it’s a sign of supernaturalism and usually trouble. Even an animal that looks normal but displays a humanlike sense of purpose—perching outside a home and staring fixedly day after day—is probably either a wizard in disguise or something sent by one. Even a natural animal out of place might be such a critter. Horses grazing in a neighborhood that lacks them. Sheep wandering without an owner.
In the 1930s white writer Carl Carmer (1893–1976) got a couple of Tonawanda Senecas talking about shape-shifting. They gave him an earful.
“There are a good many witch stories about humans changing themselves into animals,” Jesse Cornplanter admitted. “I could tell you the names of two or three who actually do it if reports around here can be believed.”
Cephas Hill, a college-educated plant foreman, recalled that once, in his boyhood, strange pigs were heard rooting in the shed of Willy Abrams, a Seneca man who had just died. An old woman told young Hill that he’d better watch out for them, that they might be witches. She said this as if they might have had something to do with the death and had come back gloating on the funeral day. Young Hill gave them both barrels of his shotgun, and they ran off squealing. Later some younger children who had been with him at the time told Hill that they’d seen a man by an abandoned cabin in the woods picking buckshot out of his backside. “Witch!” they yelled, and off he ran.
Cornplanter remembered an old man who went to the Lockport Fair on a hay wagon with some Tonawanda folk. He wasn’t ready to leave with the rest, so they left him. Later a pig came trotting along behind the wagon. As it passed, the driver gave it a crack of the whip. The pig stopped and looked at him with an eye so evil that
