Between Reagill and Reagill Grange is a stone called "The Boggle Steayne;" it is haunted by a black swine, which crosses before the seer past the stone, and then vanishes in a deep pool of water. The stone is of immense size, but is half buried in the earth. Upon its upper surface is a natural mark resembling a footprint. This is said to have been left by the boggle. Another was formerly seen on the school, and another on the house between it and the stone; evident traces of some spirit of evil or perhaps of good, and who, like the Brownie of Bledwock
.... though lang sen geayne The mark o' his foot's left on mony a steayne.
In following up the history of a people we find that each age had its characteristic superstitions, and supernatural appearances. The remote inhabitants believed in the transmigration of souls, and the return of the spirit to haunt its earthly tomb; these and the later Scandinavian races, imaginative to a high degree, and whose religion gave to every object and event a presiding spirit, have peopled our hills and bye-places with boggles, which for ages have kept in awe the minds of many successive generations. To such means, and the native wild and superstitious feelings descended from our forefathers, may we ascribe the belief in apparitions such as the reappearance of those dead, the lady in white, black swine, wraiths, &c. From the older religions we have the Barghast, the ghost of the tomb, whose unearthly lamentations warn mortals of fell mishaps, the Taisteral, a mischievous spirit of evil; the dobbies, brownies and fairies. In these mysterious spirits of the night do we trace the imaginings of a people long gone, whose works are almost lost; yet tradition has never failed to hand them down and down from father to son, yet each time ebbing weaker and weaker, till now the advance of the nineteenth century has marked the bounds "Thus far shall they go and no further"; now no longer the ingle newk resounds with the dread tales of a grandfather, and by the next generation all this will be forgot.