_Pixies or Piskies._--At Chudleigh Rocks I was told, a few weeks ago, by the old man who acts as guide to the caves, of a recent instance of a man's being pixy-led. In going home, full of strong drink, across the hill above the cavern called the "Pixies' Hole," on a moonlit night, he heard sweet { 511} music, and was led into the whirling dance by the "good folk," who kept on spinning him without mercy, till he fell down "in a swoon."
On "coming to himself," he got up and found his way home, where he "took to his bed, and never left it again, but died a little while after," the victim (I suppose) of _delirium tremens_, or some such disorder, the incipient symptoms of which his haunted fancy turned into the sweet music in the night wind and the fairy revel on the heath. In the tale I have above given he persisted (said the old man), when the medical attendant who was called in inquired of him the symptoms of his illness. This occurrence happened, I understood, very recently, and was told to me in perfect good faith.
I have just been told of a man who several years ago lost his way on Whitchurch Down, near Tavistock. The farther he went the farther he had to go; but happily calling to mind the antidote "in such case made and provided," he turned his coat inside out, after which he had no difficulty in finding his way. "He was supposed," adds my informant, "to be pisky-led."
About ten miles from Launceston, on the Bodmin road (or at least in that direction) is a large piece of water called Dosmere (pronounced Dosmery) Pool. A tradition of the neighbourhood says that on the shores of this lonely mere the ghosts of bad men are ever employed in binding the sand "in bundles with _beams_ of the same" (a local word meaning _bands_, in Devonshire called _beans;_ as _hay-beans_, and in this neighbourhood hay-_beams_, for hay-bands). These ghosts, or some of them, were driven out (they say "_horsewhipped_ out," at any rate exorcised in some sort) "by the parson" from Launceston.
_Straw Necklaces_ (Vol. i., p. 104).--Perhaps these straw necklaces were anciently worn to preserve their possessors against _witchcraft_; for, till the thirteenth century, straw was spread on the floors to defend a house from the same evil agencies. Cf. _Le Grand d'Aussi Vie des Anciens Francs_, tom. iii. pp. 132. 134; "NOTES AND QUERIES," Vol. i., pp. 245. 294.