Wow. As you said the reasons why people were accused of being changlings, all I heard was diabetes, autism, teenage hormones, and so many other medical conditions. What a heartbreaking history.
Before she even got into the medical side of it, all I could think of was autism, down syndrome, and other physical or mental afflictions that people passed off as changelings. Some wouldn't be noticeable until the child had grown a bit more, like at age 1 to 2 years, whereas some, like a clubbed foot or cleft palate, would be noticeable instantly at birth. I wonder how those were handled, the ones whose physical afflictions were noticeable right away. The mother was probably accused of witchcraft, thought to have been cursed, accused of adultery/infidelity, or maybe r***ed by the Devil himself.
diabetes doesn't make huge sense to me here (because it doesn't change the personality of the affected person), but autism (I am autistic myself) and mental illnesses like psychosis/schizophrenia fit the picture pretty well in my perception. Ah, the good old times!
A few reminders: Cruelty against the disabled is not a thing of the past, and kindness towards the disabled is not a recent invention either. Many profoundly disabled people have led beautiful productive lives throughout history as long as humans have been human. My personal favorite will always be Shanidar 1, a Neanderthal man who was likely deaf and blind on one side and had mobility limiting injuries and birth defects and still lived to old age in a time where that would only have been possible with community care.
"[L]ed beautiful productive lives.." but we, the disabled, don't need to lead "productive" lives to be respected or valued (or be considered human and not a changeling [!]).
Jane Goodall was once asked what she considered the first sign of civilization. She cited a neandertal skeleton with a healed femur fracture. They *would not* have lived long enough to heal without community support.
yeah, this whole changeling mythology mostly seems like a way to rationalize and justify abuse of someone you are supposed to care for to oneself as well as the wider society.
@@sizanogreen9900- These people honestly believed their children were replaced by monsters. In some areas, the children were mistreated to make the fairies (or whoever) take them back. The poor kid who was brain-damaged or paralyzed by a now-treatable/preventable disease became an object of fear. Or whose autism, OCD, ADHD became obvious with age.
@@melanimatejak6821Did she not mention older adults too, though? Not ruling out the possibility of it being a mental health disorder like the ones you mentioned. Early onset could explain some instances.
@@melanimatejak6821- If nobody noticed, or rationalized, changes until they couldn't be ignored, early-onset Alzheimer's and other conditions could seem sudden.
There was a very interesting short story i read once on tumblr that used changelings as a metaphor for neurodivergent children. It was about a medieval irish woman struggling with infertility who really wanted to have a baby, so she made a deal with her local fae, which stated that after a certain period of time the fae would swap out the woman's baby with a changling and test the woman to see if she could correctly identify which of the two was her actual child. If she guessed correctly, she would get her baby back. If she guessed incorrectly, she would lose her child forever. The deal is sealed, and the woman is blessed with a daughter, and for about a year, the mother and child live happily in their secluded little hut in the woods. When the time came, the fae snuck into the woman's home when she was sleeping did as it said it would and swapped the little girl out for a girl who was identical in every way, save for the fact that she exhibited behaviors that we would now undersrand as very early signs of autism spectrum disorder. And for a little while, the mother and the changeling lived as if nothing changed. The fae returned as it said it would and took the changeling away too and so began its test. The woman met the fae at the same place where the deal was struck, and with it, she found the two little girls completely identical in every visible way. When instructed to identify which of the girls was really hers, she looked closely, thought carefully, and after a moment of consideration she said they both were hers, because she loved them both the same and would do anything for them. The fae, a creature of its word, was surprised and impressed at the woman's answer, as not many would have answered the same, and even fewer would have been telling the truth. And so the fae returned both girls back to their mother and left them in peace, and they lived happily ever after. I wish I could remember who had originally posted that story because I think about it a lot, and it gets me teary-eyed every single time.
I mentally clung to this (edit: that tale, I mean) while the horrific neglect, abuse, and murders were being described - besides being awful by definition, I absolutely would've been labeled as such (ASD and a boatload of other things) and am also a twin. Scary and truly heartbreaking - it takes harboring deep cruelty to do any of those things, regardless of what you think your kid is or isn't.
Got to love the switch in tone from "You're too smart to be our child. You must be a changeling." to "You're too dumb to be our child. You must be a changeling." Like a lot of hateful things, the story is never consistent.
It's the sudden change. If Johnny's been a seeming dullard most of his life, then finds that hyperspecific interest that characterizes some on the autism spectrum, he'll seem to be a changeling. If his brother Bob's been clever and capable, then turned dull and clumsy after a high fever, he'll also seem to be a changeling.
It was probably both. People will use any excuse to be cruel. A “changling” would be anyone different or defiant against social norms. It’s theorized that the victims of the Salem Witch Trials were social outcasts or targeted by someone who wanted them gone.
A little random thought, but when she mentioned how changelings are an inherent fear of imposter's, im suddenly reminded of postpartum cases of women having psychosis and hurting or ignoring their newborn, saying it's not theirs. It makes me wonder how many cases of changelings are also related to this disorder.
oof, yeah. isnt the name of the delusion capgras? thinking your loved ones have been replaced with an impostor look-alike. interestingly, its only a visual delusion. people with this delusion can hear their loved ones on the phone or through a door and know its them, but as soon as the door is opened and they see their face, the delusion takes over and they think its an impostor.
3:20 "if the changeling was beaten, the original human might reappear." i had to pause the video for a minute just to process the horror of that statement. good lord.
Same. Plus the word *might*. It's the ultimate excuse. The faerie didn't let your real child go, thus not appearing and so kept beating the child-despite said child being yours all along.
I laughed at the fact that the demons would allegedly feel compelled to save their fellow demon from human abuse. The demons were more compassionate than the human parents…which quite frankly, tracks.
"The Moorchild" is my favourite changeling-themed book, written from the perspective of a fey child. I read it as a kid, and, being a neurodivergent child who didn't belong anywhere, it stuck a nerve. It's also surprisingly good at depicting fairies as slightly unnerving creatures you really don't want to meet, and not pretty humans with wings.
This has been one of my favorite books since I was eight! It’s also my comfort book, and I love that it subverted most fae tropes way back when it was written. Would love to see a faithful adaption.
This was one of my favorite books as a kid, for precisely the same reason! Would highly recommend, it's a bit of a bittersweet ending, but it was very close to my heart for being written from the perspective of the outcast (and I loved the unlikely bond that she formed with Old Bess)
I grew up deep in the hollows of Appalachia. My mom did not have a good education and was easily influenced. She legitimately thought I was a changeling and when that didn’t quite fit her narrative I was then possessed by demons 😐. I have autism… that is all , just autism. But in the late 70’s early 80’s it was not really known. Education is EVERYTHING 👏🏻
As someone on the autism spectrum, as well as someone with other disabilities, I've read and heard quite a bit about how changelings have been used to explain disability. And honestly, I believe it. We come up with crazy ideas to explain why we don't have the "perfect" child we've always dreamed of, and then sometimes do horrible things in the hope of getting that fantasy to come back. Also, I have really got to read Victor LaValle's The Changeling one of these days. It's been on my Audible wishlist for a while now.
Ngl Changelings always disturbed me. Not from their myths, but how people treated those so called Changelings. Most of those cases feels like a child was born autistic or with any other disorders and sense people back then didnt know about this kind of stuff they just assumed their child was abducted and was replaced with well, a thing. And turns out they did horrifc things to those so called Changelings and this makes the whole thing even more messed up.
I have to wonder if the myth evolved to make it pychologically easier for people to allow children with issues to die. When families were barely surviving, trying to care for a child with health issues could have meant that other members of that family might not survive.
I made a story inspired by this. It's called Changling Brothers which is mostly a reverse version of the changling idea. Instead of the human being built different, it's the faerie. Basically the faerie child was born different, so his parents swapped him with a human child. The human grew up knowing he was not a faerie while the faerie grew up thinking he was a neurodivergent human. Until the human escaped the faerie world and tried to reclaim his life. The pilot ends with the two boys calling each other brothers(because they technically have "same parents") and going on adventures with each other. The human learning to work with other humans and the faerie learning his magic.
@@aureyd2515- No: they didn't have the knowledge and tools to understand these things. If Joe gets bashed in the head hard enough that he can no longer function, people know that was the cause. But little Sarah getting a fever and losing the ability to walk? That's a mystery and in a world where nobody knows about viruses and bacteria, people think of malicious magic spells or of changelings.
It's really sad to me. And even if it was somehow real its not the changeling babies fault it's family swapped it out. Also knowing I was diegnosed with autism at 3 and mom started noticing my very strange behavior early on it makes me shiver to know if I was born back then I probably wouldn't be alive today.
This one was gruesome. Justifying cruelty to abuse the autistic, diabetics, and so much more. And doing something truly bizzare to 'expose' the changeling because somehow normal people wouldn't question it.
I have to say this is one of the most disturbing episodes of Monstum I've watched, and it's not disturbing because of the monsters, it's disturbing because of the humans.
On the more light-hearted side, I went from a skinny kid with a poor appetite to a skinny teenager with a voracious appetite. People were amused that I could eat so much and stay so thin, but the idea that my appetite could have a death sentence in an earlier era is truly scary.
I just adore that if you were slow in your reasoning you were considered to be a changeling. But if you were very fast and intelligent in your reasoning then you were a changeling....
This one hit very hard, kind of out of nowhere. My little brother has Downs Syndrome and is severely autistic, and I saw his face in every description of torture and abuse.
@jonharper5919 This one hit me hard as well. Especially the story of the 4 year old boy that was drowned because he couldn’t walk, speak, or stand… My autistic brother couldn’t walk until he was 5, and he is still nonverbal.
Children with Prader-Willi syndrome could be one explanation for the child keep on eating. And because the baby starts with problems with eating, and suddenly changes its eating pattern when it’s a toddler. This children can’t stop eating.
1:34 this just sounds like a child on the Autism spectrum who self-soothed with food and was easily emotionally disregulated (laughing when others are upset due to anxiety, crying during happy events where people are too loud). It’s distressing to think that until fifty years ago parents wouldn’t know why their children were “different”.
there are also developmental disabilities that impact cognitive/emotional development and regulation and specifically cause an inability to feel full. so the people with this disability will eat and eat and eat unless the family locks all cabinets. i believe the main one is called prader-willi syndrome
Even today, most girls with autism will not be diagnosed by their 18th birthday. The increase in diagnosis is finally happening, but it's slow. I just got diagnosed this year at 24 y/o, whereas my older brother was diagnosed decades ago when he was under 10. The stats are even worse if you're not white. And that's in communities that are even equipped to diagnose autism in the first place (I'd be remiss to not acknowledge large parts of the world don't have access to specialists, including parts of the U.S., at least if you don't have $ to travel).
Changeling lore breaks my heart - especially as the parent of a child who would probably have been considered as one. It's heartbreaking to think of how many children suffered through changeling trials, and the wild mix of emotions their parents must have experienced as their child appeared to change with no other ready explanation.
Me too. My son is on the Asperger's spectrum and my youngest daughter has ADD. I was particularly precocious as a youngster - I learned to read & write by the time I was 3, and that wasn't the most "intelligent" thing I did. (Unfortunately I didn't remain so smart!) I can't imagine what I would have gone through, let alone my kids 😢.
And even if you loved and wanted to protect your child, can you imagine how relatives, in-laws, and neighbors would go on and on about how the child was a changeling and what you must do to bring your own child back? You'd be afraid to leave the child alone with anyone for fear that they might try to experiment as soon as your back was turned!
@@y_fam_goeglyd might i suggest you get an autism/adhd assessment as well? being so precocious is also a sign of neurodivergency as we are finding out, and then "regressing"- aka, staying the same while everyone else catches up. and autism/adhd are genetic, meaning children have it because their family members do. i was the same- very advanced and miles ahead intellectually (behind physically), but then around middle school/early high school my peers caught up. was very hard on me. diagnosed as an adult with autism and adhd. turns out my grandpa is definitely autistic but born in 1936 so simply didnt have much awareness of low support needs autism back then, and we figure my two cousins are too. grandma may be adhd? skipped my mom somehow. not sure about her brother, he could have adhd. btw- aspbergers and add are no longer diagnoses. aspbergers is autism level 1, add is adhd, inattentive type (or mixed type). its really bad to use aspbergers, as aspberger was a n4zi who sent autistic children deemed incapable of working to the extermination camps, and the children deemed to be "aspbergers" were sent to work camps because they could be "useful." now its just asd level 1, or "low support needs."
The message was obvious: Don't be different. It's harrowing how those assumed 'changelings' were treated. Unfortunately, the message is still around, and people are still being beaten or even killed for being 'different'.
Humans - and some other species - have always had a problem with "the different." In many cases, we will invent differences where there are none, or where the difference is slight. It's no surprise that infants and children (our most vulnerable) have historically been treated so poorly.
As a child, I could relate to Zeena Henderson's sci fi stories about "The People".. which were groups of surviving Aliens who looked human & the crash of their ship centuries ago had scattered them across the globe...their abilities caused them to be burned as witches, so they learned the hard way that "different is dead"....
I have Autism and ADHD, and when I first heard of Changelings the first thing I thought of was how similar the symptoms seemed to the developmental disorder symptoms.
This☝️ I firmly believe that I am descended from a long line of changelings. There are too many stories of changeling behaviors that the family just rolled with. Uncle Nathan (my paternal grandmother's oldest brother) in hindsight was obviously autistic. Even the dishes in the cupboard speak of autistic food issues (a divided bowl because one child would only eat peas and another would only eat carrots) My grandmother herself was a shining example of precocious knowledge and rotating special interests (any fiber art she could carry with her in the car, baking canning, gardening, and soooo many books)
I'm autistic but mask extremely well, and I only let it slip amongst close friends and loved ones. I almost always hit a point in my relationships where the other person reacts, "When did you change so much?" It happens right when I become comfortable enough to let them see me behaving normally and I start to actually say what's on my mind. The abuse aspect works here; if someone reacts negatively to you appearing to "change," you can simply put your mask back on, and you seem to go back to "normal." Likewise, if a parent abuses or neglects an autistic child who can mask well, the child just stops showing their true nature when their parent is around, because they know they'll be punished if they do. I was fortunate to realize I was broken in some way and was able to hide it by the time I was an early teenager. I never received my diagnosis until I was an adult, because I stopped interacting with my parents due to the abuse. Their reaction to my late diagnosis and their physical abuse was, "You were always strange and disruptive, but you did very well in school. You stopped being a problem at some point, so we knew we did something right. You turned out just fine. You don't act like you're autistic at all. Maybe you just needed to be punished when you acted like that."
1:36 Martin Luther had no chill. He woke up and chose to recommend demon slaying. Also, parents would rather scare their child than try to understand them.
I'm unable to find any sources for this story about Martin Luther and the changeling except this video and the English wikipedia (German version does not have it). If you want to cancel Martin Luther, just use his anti-semitism, do not make stuff up.
@@twell1984"Eight years since," said Luther, " at Dessaw, I did see and touch such a changed child, which was twelve years of age, he had his eyes and all members like another child. He did nothing but feed, and would eat as much as two clowns or threshers were able to eat. When one touched it, then it cried out; when any evil happened in the house then it laughed and was joyful; but when all went well, then it cried and was very sad. I told the Prince of Anhalt, if I were Prince of that country, so would I venture homicidium thereon, and would throw it into the river Moldaw. I admonished the people dwelling in that place devoutly to pray to God to take away the devil; the same was done accordingly, and the second year after the changeling died."
Interestingly, there’s a belief in the Philippines that during a loved one’s wake, there should always be one family member present because there’s a fear that an aswang (a Filipino shape-shifting ghoul that eats corpses) would replace the corpse in the coffin with a look-alike. As soon as a witch doctor throws salt at the corpse in the coffin, it was believed that the true form of the imposter in the coffin would be revealed - a banana tree trunk.
@@melanimatejak6821 some say that if the body is taken and replaced with a banana leaf, it would mean the loved one really didn't die and they were taken away to the "fairies" place - never to be seen again.
It's truly amazing the lengths people will go to to force their reality on others hurting innocents in such horrible ways. Even sadder that it continues to this day. That said, this was an interesting video and I appreciate all the research you put into your series.
This all sounds like a convenient explanation for people's children becoming anything other than a sweet, well-behaved, healthy ideal child. It's hard for most parents to accept that their child isn't just a perfected clone of the parents themselves, and I can imagine a lot of parents using their denial and superstition to do away with, or just take their frustrations out on, their unlucky child.
As someone on the spectrum, this hits hard. Imagine your kid developing normally then all of sudden stopping? I imagine that's how my mom felt. It took looking at my family tree to realize she did nothing wrong. This story could have been used to explain SIDS or Capgras delusion as well.
Capgras Syndrome is one of the theories on how the Bridget Cleary case mentioned in the video happened. Wikipedia doesn't mention mental illness on her part like this video did (and gives a slightly different age) but says she had bronchitis and was ill enough she had been given last rights. Her husband may have snapped due to the stress and become convinced she wasn't his wife.
@@LandCfan I've heard of that case, it's more like the husband not knowing women are people too and she was going through some stuff and his behavior wasn't helping!
Tale Foundry narrated an original short story about a changeling, in which his horns were cut off by his well-meaning adoptive parents in the hopes that he would fit in better. When he meets another fae, the fae says that he never saw anything so cruel in all his years of existence
I highly recommend Fin Dwyer's Irish History Podcast if you want to learn more on the tragic case of Brigit Cleary. He has an episode on the events and it is heartbreaking. Some of her last words were something like "daddy do you not know me, I'm your little girl, why are you hurting me?"
@maxredjasper55 yep. And from what I remember the idea that she was a changeling was based more on the idea that she may have had an affair as opposed to her having mental health problems
As an Autistic person, I want to include the fact that sometimes, how much of an outsider we can feel like can lead US to think we're changelings, or at the very least, swapped from other mortal parents. When you find very few people you have enough in common with, and when they treat you like a freak, you start to wonder.
@maxredjasper55 Yes! The whole concept of otherkin- imcluding therians- is basically identifying as nonHuman, and a LOT of us feel that way. Sometimes even that can lead into prejudice and self-supremacy, with the whole "Humans are evil" concept.
Indeed, autistics like us could easily be, and no doubt often, the victims of this kind of violence for centuries. I have no doubt that in an earlier time, I would have been taken for a witch, a changeling, a werewolf, or something similar, and suffered horribly as a result.
My son is autistic, and this idea made him very depressed for a long time. Fortunately, he talked about it with me and his dad, so we could reassure him and get him the right help.
The Irish also believed in doppelgangers (which are sort of a changeling) that would replace degenerate people and be a much better person. One of my ancestors was accused of being replaced with a doppelganger.
That's exactly what I thought. I have ADD and I have an extremely hard time controlling my appetite. I have mood swings too. A few hundred years ago, I'd probably be in danger.
At the part where you said " irritable and unpredictable" after having seen my boyfriend custom make accessible communication devices for his brother and a few other people, I realize how much my handicapped relatives and other handicapped people have no way to verbalize their needs or desires. And people don't take the time to learn the particular ways of communicating that every individual disabled person has, and try to do a blanket approach and they're also not using informed care by telling them what they're about to do before they do it and so you have a child who's getting yanked around without being told what's coming up next so that they can prepare their nervous system. They might not be able to tell you how they're feeling but at least you can tell them what's going to be happening. My niece is mentally 4 years old and wasn't tested for hearing loss until she was 20. Her father, both her grandfathers , and her grandfather's brother all had hearing loss. I remember when she was in second grade she stopped an aid i. School because she was so upset she had to go to the bathroom but couldn't talk at the moment because she had a lot of big feels and suddenly realized she had to pee and just short circuited.
Wow I never realized how much disabilities and mental disabilities were associated with changelings in Europe. That is so interesting!!! It just shows how scary differences can be to the uneducated and how important it is to accept everyone’s differences. Now I am curious to find out if there are any other creatures that has a connection with people with disabilities. Also I didn’t expect autism to be relevant to changeling lore.
Complex topic that i cant come to the same conclusion about. I wonder if confusion or misunderstanding is the actual reason. Or whether a lack of empathy and compassion was not the actual reason. I think there had to be people who were alive back then who knew that they were doing the wrong thing by killing a baby. @lilbasenji1
Autism is actually not particularly linked to changeling lore. Stories typically describe physical change of a child, and it is often severe. Cases of normal looking children who just display strange behaviour are rare.
My current D&D character is an Oath of Vengeance Paladin who's a Changeling that believes she's a highborn Elf cursed to be a changeling. Her whole reason for becoming an adventurer is so "she can find the person or persons who cursed her, have them break the curse and restore her to her natural form, and then deal retribution so they cannot curse anyone else." Other than basic backstory questions (Her "family" are nobility and have roles tied to their group's church. The family knows because the spell holding her shape broke at a family function, but the family has been successful in keeping this secret from the rest of their people. And anyone who does know believes she to be a changeling and not an elf.), I left the details decided blank for the DM to fill in. She also has a very little patience for anyone who dabbles in curses and will take up the cause or offer protection to someone who's cursed. To be honest, this was supposed to be a throw away character for a one-shot adventure. That day, most of our table bailed, but my brother still wanted to play D&D. While he was creating a character for his son, I rolled randomly for what character I was playing, landed on "Changeling" and "Paladin - Oath of Vengeance". Then I asked myself, "Why is she so angry?" and decided to use the swapped baby/changeling story, but with a twist. She doesn't know she's a changeling. Now I had her critical wounds, I needed a Want and a Need. Her want is for the curse to be broken and the form she thinks she should have be restored. The need is to realize she wasn't an elf and come to terms with it. Only then can she find a way to become an elf. I think we're about two and a half years playing this story, and I have an idea of the who did what and why, but my character is no closer to any of the answers.
Another possible explanation for Changelings is a phenomenon known as Capgras Syndrome, in which a person believes that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter.
Warning for anyone who has trouble with audio of screaming/crying: sounds of a kid screaming around 4:45 until 5:00 ish while she’s speaking about a child’s death by abuse
@@6400loser I almost stopped watching because of it. I enjoy Monstrum because they normally have Dr Zarka narrating without distracting sound effects and I can just listen or also look at the art. Randomly having screaming in the middle was jarring
We had a litter of kittens* once. They were tabbies & greys, and one single white kitten who developed points like a himalayan cat after several weeks. I called him a changeling, because if we hadn't watched it happen, we wouldn't have believed it! He was so different from his mother & littermates. *Mom was still saving up money to get our girl kitten spayed when she went into heat & escaped for just long enough. Poor thing had a massive litter, too. She did get spayed later
Probably had a different father. Queens will often mate several times when in heat, and it's actually possible for EVERY kitten in a single litter to have a different father.
@@quiestinliteris No doubt, though those specific genes may've been from a grandparent or two. I never saw a himalayan or a siamese out & about, not even in windows.
@@eliscanfield3913 o3o I know that basic color is very genetically simple for cats, but now I feel the need to go on a potentially really involved info quest into color point genes and other less common variations. I don't know why I'm so invested in understanding your cat's lineage. 😂
It has been said, the Uncanny Valley implies there was a point in human development when they should be afraid of things that looked human but weren't.
These are the stories that make me wonder why the fey - if they'd ever been real - would not have simply shunned humans completely OR decided to truly make war on them. Shoving a red hot poker down someone's throat?? You would not do that to any of your livestock no matter WHAT you thought was wrong with them, what in hell makes it OK to do it to a CHILD? And it's not as if people didn't beat their children anyway - "spare the rod" was a thing back then too, and the whole "well it's their kid, it's not our business." They didn't even need the excuse of changelings to hurt the helpless, did they?
As a neurodivergent adult who was once a neurodivergent little girl bullied for being "too smart", this hits hard. I always identified with strange or alien characters in fiction, and more than a few adults suggested there was something profoundly wrong or inhuman about me just because I read Hamlet when I was nine. And now we're experiencing a huge wave of conservative social backlash against anyone perceived as "different". This should go well...
builled for being too dumb for me. you should have seen the look on my third grade teacher when he realized that i should have been in the highest book group! turns out i have dyscalculia and it's a learning disability but oh well i'm autistic anyway
Adding to the horror is dehumanising racism. It was not just mythical creatures supposed to switch babies but also real people. Travellers and Romani have often been accused of these exact crimes. For a high profile example look no further than Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris. In it Esmeralda was not born to a Romani mother but stolen at birth from a French woman. It is truly deeply disturbing that this folklore has been used as grounds for abuse and perpetuating racial discrimination and violence
The sound effects between the emaciated food smacking and then later of the child drowning made me literally choose to read the transcript rather then keep watching the video!
So I watched this video when it came out but didn't leave a comment. I rarely do in general. I love everything that you do, but this one really hit home. I've been reflecting for a long while on my disability, what it means to me, how it has influenced my life and why, the image I want other people to have of me in that regard (especially because I'm a teacher)...and this feels like another piece of the puzzle. A week after I saw this I'm still thinking about it so I think it's only fair that I come back here and thank you for this one
White Wolf, the table top RPG publishers that make the Vampire RPG, also make a game called Changeling. I played it for many years with a group of friends. It does a really interesting job of putting you in the place of a person who has their fae side "awaken" at a young age. You play different types of half-fae, and your story ends when you either go completely to bedlam or banality. It didn't occur to me at the time, but as an autistic person with a late diagnosis, it was very familiar to how you experience the world differently from the people around you, and find others who also experience the world differently. It kind of flips the script from feeling like everyone else has these rules of society that they have been taught and you were never allowed to learn, to a paradigm where you are the one who sees the world as it truly is and the normal people are the ones in the dark.
As someone who was not diagnosed with autism until in my 40's, I am quite certain that my parents would have attempted one of these cruelties so that they could rid me of my 'changeling' (Strong Will), if we had lived in the Victorian era. Childhood trauma is almost guaranteed for the neurodivergent in this society. Doubly so, if the divergence was passed off as 'bad behavior' until an adult diagnosis reveals the true cause.
I wish you'd put a warning at the begining of this - when the vast majority of the content amounts to these are excuses/reasons used to torture / murder a group of people who are still around - its basic consideration to warn them before they get to hear that information.
Children, and adults, who have disabilities can still to this day be accused of being a changeling, or whatever creature the people in their surroundings believe in, and suffer horrible abuse because of it.
After hearing about pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections, I wonder if maybe that had a role in "changelings". Parents of children who get it say it's like the child changed overnight. It's a strep infection that goes to the brain. Very poorly understood even today but imagine back then before modern medicine.
Not that long ago there was a case of two children being mistakenly swapped at birth in a small county hospital in Eire. Both sets of families reported any uneasy feeling that their infants did not belong. It took years for the hospital to notice their mistake. Finally, once reunited with their now teenage child, Mr & Mrs O'Reilly said that it was as if a tremendous weight had been lifted from their shoulders. Mr & Mrs Khan were unavailable for comment.
I was hoping to hear something about Mamuna from Slavic folklore. Mamuna could replace the child with her changling. To protect the child, parents can put something red to the craddle - red color can keep away the Mamuna.
Interesting. In the Balkans, there used to be a custom among Slavic rural population to tie the umbilical cord of the newborn baby with red thread. Perhaps some connection?
@Wiking-Inwestuje By the way, I never heard of this 'Mamuna', but in Slavic folklore, various fairies could exchange the human baby with a changeling. In one story, it was a water spirit who lived in the nearby river or pond. In the end, the father took the changeling and threw him in the water. Just as the changeling sinked, little further down the bank, the father saw his own son getting thrown out of water to the land.
In South India, there is a tradition of taking some of the dried cord and putting it inside of a small metal amulet. These are tied onto the baby with special string dipped in turmeric to protect them from the evil eye. Boys wear them around their waist and girls wear them around their neck. They don't take them off even when they grow up.
I always believed that the fairies kidnapped Peter Pan as a baby and replaced him with a changing which was the “baby” his mother was cradling when he returned in the ending of “The Little White Bird”.
As someone with autism I can't help but feel my mother essentially did a modernised version of this with me as a child. She labeled me as a psychopath that was incapable of emotion and used that as justification for witholding love and continuous abuse. She acted like she was virtuous for taking care of me out of her motherly duty despite being punished with an innately evil child... I am now in therapy 😂
I’m so sorry to hear that as a fellow person with autism, my mother did the best she could to support me but it was still hard to fit in and not get left out. I can’t imagine how much worse it must feel when it is coming from your own family. I’m wishing you all the best for the future and much happiness. ❤
Changeling stories seem to have similarities in many non European places too. Like in my country people believe a malignant fairy folk will kidnap children and replace them with ghouls as a form of revenge, or just out malignance
i’m glad that i was able to learn about a real historical topic because that’s something that shouldn’t be forgotten, but man this was gruesome and low key i had to tune out for a bit. i appreciate the lesson but i feel like the tone was a bit off. although it is related to a legendary creature from folklore, it’s also about real-world violence against children and disabled people, and that’s just horrifying in a way that i feel should be given a little more acknowledgment
I've met one person like this. Quite definitely. We shook hands in twilight outside a pub on a works do. As he pulled his hand away I saw it turn into Lizard claws for a fraction of a second. When he spoke he kept sticking his tongue out between words in a pointy way like a lizard. Maybe I imagined it or maybe not but it seemed pretty real.
Here in the Philippines we have a sort of similar monster. It's called the Tiyanak, and it has plenty of versions, some are babies abandoned by parents in the forest because they could not care for the child causing the child to grow up and feed on people who would seek its cries in the mountains/forests, the others are babies possessed or unbaptized, while another is a baby swapped at birth by another monster like entity (That I forgot completely as I've only learned this when I was a child and wasted my time with sort of cryptozoology/ghosts/monsters/unknown). It's eerie how similar these things are but I'm certain that during those times, the Changeling never made it Surigao Del Sur yet, because I've only learned about Changelings because of the movie Hellboy and I've never heard a single friend classmate of mine ever mention changelings.
As a parent of a child with autism, I can not imagine the terrible things that happened to these lovely and wonderful children. Love your kids, guys don't hurt them because they are different. I've heard this legend as a child and always thought it was just a way to abuse your child that wasn't "normal"
Your child is lucky to have you -- a parent who accepts them for who they are. As an Autistic, I *wish* I had had that privilege. However, I'm happy I give the sense of security and belonging to my own son (who inherited Mommy's neurodiversity) which I mostly lacked myself.
When I was in the Air Force I worked with a guy who was blue-eyed and blonde and he told me that he had a secret. I asked him what his secret was. He said his secret was that nobody knew he was black. Both of his parents were black but inexplicably they had given birth to a blue-eyed blonde fair skinned child. He said his parents had done three DNA tests on him just to make sure that he hadn't been swapped at the hospital! He showed me photos of his parents. Sure enough they were black. I told him you must have got all the recessive genes. So I can see how somebody would believe in changelings. Strange things happen.
I studied Lutheran theology, Luther wrote outright evil things about Jews and was completely out of his depths when the farmers revolted and asked for more social justice because of his teachings. This story about him and the changeling sounds very made up, however, and I cannot find any reliable sources for it.
There is also a gripping horror film starring George C. Scott with this title. The Changeling in question is a disabled child who is murdered and then replaced with a presentable orphan. The ghost of the murdered child forever pounds on the sides of the bathtub in which he was drowned, calling from eternity for justice. It still makes me cry. Sehenswert!
As an autistic adult descended from Scottish and English ancestors, I see a lot of autistic traits often reflected in the changeling descriptors. I look back at these children and think that could have been me. Instead (and without ignoring the very real discrimination autistic folks face today), I've led a fulfilling life, a long marriage, raised two children, and had a satisfying career. Hopefully future generations will do even better.
One of my favorite things done with the Changeling myth is from the manga “Delicious in Dungeon” where they are mushrooms that once a person or creature that steps in a ring are changed by the spores, & this was clever by combining it with the myth of Fairy Ring which are fungi grown in a circle which are believed to where fairies dwell or the site of Witches dancing on Walpurgis Night
And stories where the family's actions force the fey to return the real child could easily be seen as the child learning to mask themselves to avoid further beatings.
This attitude is not dead. Anyone who does not conform to the hive mind mentality is still ostracised, gossiped about and bullied. The only difference is you can't blame a missing person on fairies anymore. But in it's essence humanity is still a very superstitutious creature with a desperate fear of difference.
And further proof that it's not caused by vaccines. After all many of the tales go back when vaccines were either a not readily available or b before they were even invented. Seriously people stop using a D-list celebrity with no knowledge in medicine as your reference.
This was particularly heartbreaking to watch as an autistic person. I’ve loved anything having to do with fairies since I was little -- Baby's first special interst 😂 -- and remember very distinctly learning what changlings were in middle school. It changed my brain chemistry forever. I read a book called the Moorchild, a story set from the changeling's perspective and the story resonated with me as few others have.
Changeling lore existed all over Europe and was not limited to Britain or Scandinavia. It is a very old belief system that predates the advent of Christianity. Typically it involved children with severely disfiguring conditions, for example hidrocephalus, which couldn't be cured.
One of my favorite TTRPGs was White Wolf’s Changeling the Dreaming and while the stealing babies was pretty glossed over I feel now it would be a bigger part of my games than the me of the 90s
I mean, they also specifically mention a child in 1845- the year the potato famine started- in basically the next sentence, so I think it's fairly relevant. I imagine there probably was an uptick in incidents like that during the famine, since families would have been under enormous pressure to figure out how to feed their kids and disabled kids would probably have been a particular source of distress
I'm Swedish, and I had completely forgotten about the changeling stories until now. But I grew up in a part of Sweden where story telling was/is quite big. We even have a story museum near me, full of stories like the changeling trolls. Now, this part is out on the country side, where several small villages lies, separated by vast areas of woods/forests, so pretty much all the tales and lore I've grown up with are about different creatures from the depth of the forests. Several of them involving trolls. I've always loved those stories, but I would lie if me and the other kids wasn't at least a little bit scared of being too close to the forest after dark, which was unfortunate for some because they actually lived by a gravel road in the middle of the dense woods, closest neighbors house not even visible from their yard. Sleepovers at those friends houses was always a bit interesting 😅😂 But yeah, the stories of the troll changelings was some of the best, and scariest. They were also used as a "threat" (most often a bit playfully) by some parents if you didn't behave. Like that they would either leave you in the forest to change you out, or that if you didn't behave, the trolls might take you and they wouldn't even notice the difference between you and the troll. Or like, if you were having a meltdown or something as a kid, parents could say something like "is this my child, or has the trolls been visiting?" It's funny how you can go so long not thinking about a thing for even a second, to suddenly get all those memories back, along with vivid memories of the illustrations from the stories. Like toddlers with black eyes, sharp teeth and wild unruly hair, as well as a tail that was hidden away from the parents.
While not as common as in northern european countries, changelings also appear in italian folklore. In the northern half it's often a wild woman, an ogress like the bregostana, or a fairy like the anguana, that changes the child for her own. Other times it's the goblin, il folletto, l'incubo. In Piemont, the changeling goblins are called servans. Even Pirandello, one of the most important writers of the italian 20th century, who revolutionized our literature and theatre, wrote a novella on this legend, "il figlio cambiato" (the changed son) in 1902, which he later reworked into a play between 1930 and 1932. His story is influenced by the sicilian legends he grew up with (the child is supposedly stolen by "le Donne", the Ladies, that fly through the night air), and by the verist writers, like Verga and Capuana (both of whom he knew), who wanted to represent the people of the land with realism. In this novella, the narrator comes across such a changeling accusation, and notes how the witch that is asked for help, uses the superstition of the scared mother to protect the innocent child: she tells her that anything done to the changeling shall be done in turn to the stolen kid. This ensures the child's safety, but the narrator also sees that the mother raises him without love, neglecting him, as do all the other people in the village
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
Wow. As you said the reasons why people were accused of being changlings, all I heard was diabetes, autism, teenage hormones, and so many other medical conditions. What a heartbreaking history.
Before she even got into the medical side of it, all I could think of was autism, down syndrome, and other physical or mental afflictions that people passed off as changelings. Some wouldn't be noticeable until the child had grown a bit more, like at age 1 to 2 years, whereas some, like a clubbed foot or cleft palate, would be noticeable instantly at birth.
I wonder how those were handled, the ones whose physical afflictions were noticeable right away. The mother was probably accused of witchcraft, thought to have been cursed, accused of adultery/infidelity, or maybe r***ed by the Devil himself.
Good thing less superstitious people was allowed to do science (was very restrictive once)
@@PatrickRsGhostyou killed newborns if obviously urm "defective or deformed" so to avoid becoming a burden to the family
I’m thinking Capgras delusion: the idea that your loved one has been “replaced” for a phony.
diabetes doesn't make huge sense to me here (because it doesn't change the personality of the affected person), but autism (I am autistic myself) and mental illnesses like psychosis/schizophrenia fit the picture pretty well in my perception.
Ah, the good old times!
A few reminders: Cruelty against the disabled is not a thing of the past, and kindness towards the disabled is not a recent invention either. Many profoundly disabled people have led beautiful productive lives throughout history as long as humans have been human.
My personal favorite will always be Shanidar 1, a Neanderthal man who was likely deaf and blind on one side and had mobility limiting injuries and birth defects and still lived to old age in a time where that would only have been possible with community care.
Oh, I remember hearing about that from Trey the Explainer
Tfw neanderthals were kinder than than some "more advanced" humans
As a disabled person, I concur. I have zero trust in anyone.
"[L]ed beautiful productive lives.." but we, the disabled, don't need to lead "productive" lives to be respected or valued (or be considered human and not a changeling [!]).
Jane Goodall was once asked what she considered the first sign of civilization. She cited a neandertal skeleton with a healed femur fracture. They *would not* have lived long enough to heal without community support.
The part where the channeling just “disappears” one day gave me the shivers because what a convenient excuse to use after you killed the child.
Or after a child decides to run away because of their treatment, or worse. Which is still causing the death of a child
yeah, this whole changeling mythology mostly seems like a way to rationalize and justify abuse of someone you are supposed to care for to oneself as well as the wider society.
@@sizanogreen9900- These people honestly believed their children were replaced by monsters. In some areas, the children were mistreated to make the fairies (or whoever) take them back. The poor kid who was brain-damaged or paralyzed by a now-treatable/preventable disease became an object of fear. Or whose autism, OCD, ADHD became obvious with age.
@@EALoArt- Or wandered off and nobody bothered looking for them because 'obviously' the fairies had taken them back.
Also an explanation of just plain high child mortality. Your baby gets sicker and sicker and nothing helps... And they just die.
When you mentioned examples that later included older adults, I immediately thought of people diagnosed with dementia who start acting differently.
Or Traumatic Brain Injury
It wasn't dementia. People affected were relatively young, and the change happened abruptly. More likely bipolar disorder, or even schizophrenia.
@@melanimatejak6821Did she not mention older adults too, though? Not ruling out the possibility of it being a mental health disorder like the ones you mentioned. Early onset could explain some instances.
@@melanimatejak6821Early onset dementia is a thing; it isn't just a disease for the elderly
@@melanimatejak6821- If nobody noticed, or rationalized, changes until they couldn't be ignored, early-onset Alzheimer's and other conditions could seem sudden.
There was a very interesting short story i read once on tumblr that used changelings as a metaphor for neurodivergent children. It was about a medieval irish woman struggling with infertility who really wanted to have a baby, so she made a deal with her local fae, which stated that after a certain period of time the fae would swap out the woman's baby with a changling and test the woman to see if she could correctly identify which of the two was her actual child. If she guessed correctly, she would get her baby back. If she guessed incorrectly, she would lose her child forever. The deal is sealed, and the woman is blessed with a daughter, and for about a year, the mother and child live happily in their secluded little hut in the woods. When the time came, the fae snuck into the woman's home when she was sleeping did as it said it would and swapped the little girl out for a girl who was identical in every way, save for the fact that she exhibited behaviors that we would now undersrand as very early signs of autism spectrum disorder. And for a little while, the mother and the changeling lived as if nothing changed. The fae returned as it said it would and took the changeling away too and so began its test. The woman met the fae at the same place where the deal was struck, and with it, she found the two little girls completely identical in every visible way. When instructed to identify which of the girls was really hers, she looked closely, thought carefully, and after a moment of consideration she said they both were hers, because she loved them both the same and would do anything for them. The fae, a creature of its word, was surprised and impressed at the woman's answer, as not many would have answered the same, and even fewer would have been telling the truth. And so the fae returned both girls back to their mother and left them in peace, and they lived happily ever after. I wish I could remember who had originally posted that story because I think about it a lot, and it gets me teary-eyed every single time.
That’s a beautiful fairytale.
I mentally clung to this (edit: that tale, I mean) while the horrific neglect, abuse, and murders were being described - besides being awful by definition, I absolutely would've been labeled as such (ASD and a boatload of other things) and am also a twin.
Scary and truly heartbreaking - it takes harboring deep cruelty to do any of those things, regardless of what you think your kid is or isn't.
This is one of my absolute favourite "modern folk tales". It was written by Tumblr user dycefic
You've just unlocked one of my memories lol. Loved when I ran into this story in my tumblr days!
It's actually a very old story. I first read it in the Changeling Table Top game.
Got to love the switch in tone from "You're too smart to be our child. You must be a changeling." to "You're too dumb to be our child. You must be a changeling." Like a lot of hateful things, the story is never consistent.
Well, obviously because we are talking about different people with different conception of changeling.
It's the sudden change. If Johnny's been a seeming dullard most of his life, then finds that hyperspecific interest that characterizes some on the autism spectrum, he'll seem to be a changeling. If his brother Bob's been clever and capable, then turned dull and clumsy after a high fever, he'll also seem to be a changeling.
@@julietfischer5056 I never said it was a sudden change. I'm just point out that hateful people aren't consistent in their hate.
@@jackielinde7568 He was saying it was the sudden changes that hints at the changelings not whether they are smart or dumb.
It was probably both. People will use any excuse to be cruel.
A “changling” would be anyone different or defiant against social norms. It’s theorized that the victims of the Salem Witch Trials were social outcasts or targeted by someone who wanted them gone.
A little random thought, but when she mentioned how changelings are an inherent fear of imposter's, im suddenly reminded of postpartum cases of women having psychosis and hurting or ignoring their newborn, saying it's not theirs. It makes me wonder how many cases of changelings are also related to this disorder.
oof, yeah. isnt the name of the delusion capgras? thinking your loved ones have been replaced with an impostor look-alike. interestingly, its only a visual delusion. people with this delusion can hear their loved ones on the phone or through a door and know its them, but as soon as the door is opened and they see their face, the delusion takes over and they think its an impostor.
So far no supernatural phenomenon has been verified.its always human superstition or misunderstanding behind it
prove its a disorder and they not just feel that its not there child
3:20 "if the changeling was beaten, the original human might reappear."
i had to pause the video for a minute just to process the horror of that statement. good lord.
Same. Plus the word *might*. It's the ultimate excuse. The faerie didn't let your real child go, thus not appearing and so kept beating the child-despite said child being yours all along.
I laughed at the fact that the demons would allegedly feel compelled to save their fellow demon from human abuse. The demons were more compassionate than the human parents…which quite frankly, tracks.
Huh, guess my birth mother thought us all changelings.
No excuse to beat your child.
I guess that's why my grandmother was always trying to "beat the devil out of me"
(And no she was not a Bob Ross fan)
"The Moorchild" is my favourite changeling-themed book, written from the perspective of a fey child. I read it as a kid, and, being a neurodivergent child who didn't belong anywhere, it stuck a nerve. It's also surprisingly good at depicting fairies as slightly unnerving creatures you really don't want to meet, and not pretty humans with wings.
Thank you for sharing this. I immediately went to my library website and found the ebook. I look forward to reading it!
This has been one of my favorite books since I was eight! It’s also my comfort book, and I love that it subverted most fae tropes way back when it was written. Would love to see a faithful adaption.
Lol nobody wants to meet fae. My assumption is that they eat kids.
Thanks for the recommendation, I was JUST wondering about if there were any stories written from the perspective of the changeling themselves!
This was one of my favorite books as a kid, for precisely the same reason! Would highly recommend, it's a bit of a bittersweet ending, but it was very close to my heart for being written from the perspective of the outcast (and I loved the unlikely bond that she formed with Old Bess)
I grew up deep in the hollows of Appalachia. My mom did not have a good education and was easily influenced. She legitimately thought I was a changeling and when that didn’t quite fit her narrative I was then possessed by demons 😐. I have autism… that is all , just autism. But in the late 70’s early 80’s it was not really known. Education is EVERYTHING 👏🏻
One of my favorite quotes is "If you think you have a child possessed by a demon, you have a completely normal child." XD
Glad you survived that.
An education doesn't equal common sense.
@ common sense ain’t too common. She was educated on changelings so it had some effect. So the correct education makes a difference.
Welcome to the neurodivergent club.
As someone on the autism spectrum, as well as someone with other disabilities, I've read and heard quite a bit about how changelings have been used to explain disability. And honestly, I believe it. We come up with crazy ideas to explain why we don't have the "perfect" child we've always dreamed of, and then sometimes do horrible things in the hope of getting that fantasy to come back.
Also, I have really got to read Victor LaValle's The Changeling one of these days. It's been on my Audible wishlist for a while now.
Ngl Changelings always disturbed me. Not from their myths, but how people treated those so called Changelings. Most of those cases feels like a child was born autistic or with any other disorders and sense people back then didnt know about this kind of stuff they just assumed their child was abducted and was replaced with well, a thing. And turns out they did horrifc things to those so called Changelings and this makes the whole thing even more messed up.
I have to wonder if the myth evolved to make it pychologically easier for people to allow children with issues to die.
When families were barely surviving, trying to care for a child with health issues could have meant that other members of that family might not survive.
I made a story inspired by this. It's called Changling Brothers which is mostly a reverse version of the changling idea. Instead of the human being built different, it's the faerie. Basically the faerie child was born different, so his parents swapped him with a human child. The human grew up knowing he was not a faerie while the faerie grew up thinking he was a neurodivergent human. Until the human escaped the faerie world and tried to reclaim his life. The pilot ends with the two boys calling each other brothers(because they technically have "same parents") and going on adventures with each other. The human learning to work with other humans and the faerie learning his magic.
Agreed. It hurts my heart to think about how many poor souls may have been mistreated and even killed because of this ignorance.
@@aureyd2515- No: they didn't have the knowledge and tools to understand these things. If Joe gets bashed in the head hard enough that he can no longer function, people know that was the cause. But little Sarah getting a fever and losing the ability to walk? That's a mystery and in a world where nobody knows about viruses and bacteria, people think of malicious magic spells or of changelings.
It's really sad to me. And even if it was somehow real its not the changeling babies fault it's family swapped it out.
Also knowing I was diegnosed with autism at 3 and mom started noticing my very strange behavior early on it makes me shiver to know if I was born back then I probably wouldn't be alive today.
This one was gruesome. Justifying cruelty to abuse the autistic, diabetics, and so much more. And doing something truly bizzare to 'expose' the changeling because somehow normal people wouldn't question it.
They were a product of their time. Grow up
I have to say this is one of the most disturbing episodes of Monstum I've watched, and it's not disturbing because of the monsters, it's disturbing because of the humans.
Humans are usually the real monsters.
Humans are always the real monsters, tbh
Much like today eh?
As a physically disabled person who also has ASD, this video is honestly heartbreaking…
The true horror was us* all along. [Not disabled ppl but humanity (as too much as a rule)]
On the more light-hearted side, I went from a skinny kid with a poor appetite to a skinny teenager with a voracious appetite. People were amused that I could eat so much and stay so thin, but the idea that my appetite could have a death sentence in an earlier era is truly scary.
I just adore that if you were slow in your reasoning you were considered to be a changeling. But if you were very fast and intelligent in your reasoning then you were a changeling....
Damned if ya do, damned if ya don't.
This one hit very hard, kind of out of nowhere. My little brother has Downs Syndrome and is severely autistic, and I saw his face in every description of torture and abuse.
@jonharper5919 This one hit me hard as well. Especially the story of the 4 year old boy that was drowned because he couldn’t walk, speak, or stand… My autistic brother couldn’t walk until he was 5, and he is still nonverbal.
Children with Prader-Willi syndrome could be one explanation for the child keep on eating. And because the baby starts with problems with eating, and suddenly changes its eating pattern when it’s a toddler. This children can’t stop eating.
Still, insatiable appetite is associated with changelings only in British Isles and Ireland. In other parts of Europe no.
It also describes the short stature, quick temper, and "unusual" physical presentation. It makes me so sad
1:34 this just sounds like a child on the Autism spectrum who self-soothed with food and was easily emotionally disregulated (laughing when others are upset due to anxiety, crying during happy events where people are too loud). It’s distressing to think that until fifty years ago parents wouldn’t know why their children were “different”.
there are also developmental disabilities that impact cognitive/emotional development and regulation and specifically cause an inability to feel full. so the people with this disability will eat and eat and eat unless the family locks all cabinets. i believe the main one is called prader-willi syndrome
Even today, most girls with autism will not be diagnosed by their 18th birthday. The increase in diagnosis is finally happening, but it's slow. I just got diagnosed this year at 24 y/o, whereas my older brother was diagnosed decades ago when he was under 10.
The stats are even worse if you're not white. And that's in communities that are even equipped to diagnose autism in the first place (I'd be remiss to not acknowledge large parts of the world don't have access to specialists, including parts of the U.S., at least if you don't have $ to travel).
Changeling lore breaks my heart - especially as the parent of a child who would probably have been considered as one. It's heartbreaking to think of how many children suffered through changeling trials, and the wild mix of emotions their parents must have experienced as their child appeared to change with no other ready explanation.
Me too. My son is on the Asperger's spectrum and my youngest daughter has ADD. I was particularly precocious as a youngster - I learned to read & write by the time I was 3, and that wasn't the most "intelligent" thing I did. (Unfortunately I didn't remain so smart!) I can't imagine what I would have gone through, let alone my kids 😢.
And even if you loved and wanted to protect your child, can you imagine how relatives, in-laws, and neighbors would go on and on about how the child was a changeling and what you must do to bring your own child back? You'd be afraid to leave the child alone with anyone for fear that they might try to experiment as soon as your back was turned!
@@y_fam_goeglyd might i suggest you get an autism/adhd assessment as well? being so precocious is also a sign of neurodivergency as we are finding out, and then "regressing"- aka, staying the same while everyone else catches up. and autism/adhd are genetic, meaning children have it because their family members do. i was the same- very advanced and miles ahead intellectually (behind physically), but then around middle school/early high school my peers caught up. was very hard on me. diagnosed as an adult with autism and adhd. turns out my grandpa is definitely autistic but born in 1936 so simply didnt have much awareness of low support needs autism back then, and we figure my two cousins are too. grandma may be adhd? skipped my mom somehow. not sure about her brother, he could have adhd.
btw- aspbergers and add are no longer diagnoses. aspbergers is autism level 1, add is adhd, inattentive type (or mixed type). its really bad to use aspbergers, as aspberger was a n4zi who sent autistic children deemed incapable of working to the extermination camps, and the children deemed to be "aspbergers" were sent to work camps because they could be "useful." now its just asd level 1, or "low support needs."
The message was obvious: Don't be different. It's harrowing how those assumed 'changelings' were treated. Unfortunately, the message is still around, and people are still being beaten or even killed for being 'different'.
Humans - and some other species - have always had a problem with "the different." In many cases, we will invent differences where there are none, or where the difference is slight. It's no surprise that infants and children (our most vulnerable) have historically been treated so poorly.
As a child, I could relate to Zeena Henderson's sci fi stories about "The People".. which were groups of surviving Aliens who looked human & the crash of their ship centuries ago had scattered them across the globe...their abilities caused them to be burned as witches, so they learned the hard way that "different is dead"....
I have Autism and ADHD, and when I first heard of Changelings the first thing I thought of was how similar the symptoms seemed to the developmental disorder symptoms.
This☝️
I firmly believe that I am descended from a long line of changelings. There are too many stories of changeling behaviors that the family just rolled with.
Uncle Nathan (my paternal grandmother's oldest brother) in hindsight was obviously autistic.
Even the dishes in the cupboard speak of autistic food issues (a divided bowl because one child would only eat peas and another would only eat carrots)
My grandmother herself was a shining example of precocious knowledge and rotating special interests (any fiber art she could carry with her in the car, baking canning, gardening, and soooo many books)
The number of children abused to death because of nerodivergent changes, nutritionally caused cognitive disorders and other illnesses is chilling.
Proving once again that humans are the world's true monsters
*cringe
I'm autistic but mask extremely well, and I only let it slip amongst close friends and loved ones. I almost always hit a point in my relationships where the other person reacts, "When did you change so much?"
It happens right when I become comfortable enough to let them see me behaving normally and I start to actually say what's on my mind.
The abuse aspect works here; if someone reacts negatively to you appearing to "change," you can simply put your mask back on, and you seem to go back to "normal." Likewise, if a parent abuses or neglects an autistic child who can mask well, the child just stops showing their true nature when their parent is around, because they know they'll be punished if they do.
I was fortunate to realize I was broken in some way and was able to hide it by the time I was an early teenager. I never received my diagnosis until I was an adult, because I stopped interacting with my parents due to the abuse.
Their reaction to my late diagnosis and their physical abuse was, "You were always strange and disruptive, but you did very well in school. You stopped being a problem at some point, so we knew we did something right. You turned out just fine. You don't act like you're autistic at all. Maybe you just needed to be punished when you acted like that."
some people really shouldn’t procreate
You aren’t broken. ❤😊
The people around you were/are.
1:36 Martin Luther had no chill. He woke up and chose to recommend demon slaying.
Also, parents would rather scare their child than try to understand them.
I'm unable to find any sources for this story about Martin Luther and the changeling except this video and the English wikipedia (German version does not have it).
If you want to cancel Martin Luther, just use his anti-semitism, do not make stuff up.
I'm pretty sure that the newborn in The Omen was murdered by the bad guys and they were instead given a baby born of jackal.
@@twell1984"Eight years since," said Luther, " at Dessaw, I did see and touch such a changed child, which was twelve years of age, he had his eyes and all members like another child. He did nothing but feed, and would eat as much as two clowns or threshers were able to eat. When one touched it, then it cried out; when any evil happened in the house then it laughed and was joyful; but when all went well, then it cried and was very sad. I told the Prince of Anhalt, if I were Prince of that country, so would I venture homicidium thereon, and would throw it into the river Moldaw. I admonished the people dwelling in that place devoutly to pray to God to take away the devil; the same was done accordingly, and the second year after the changeling died."
Interestingly, there’s a belief in the Philippines that during a loved one’s wake, there should always be one family member present because there’s a fear that an aswang (a Filipino shape-shifting ghoul that eats corpses) would replace the corpse in the coffin with a look-alike. As soon as a witch doctor throws salt at the corpse in the coffin, it was believed that the true form of the imposter in the coffin would be revealed - a banana tree trunk.
Ugly stuff 😬 But is the soul of the deceased affected if the ghoul eats the corpse, or just physical body is destroyed?
@@melanimatejak6821 some say that if the body is taken and replaced with a banana leaf, it would mean the loved one really didn't die and they were taken away to the "fairies" place - never to be seen again.
It's truly amazing the lengths people will go to to force their reality on others hurting innocents in such horrible ways. Even sadder that it continues to this day. That said, this was an interesting video and I appreciate all the research you put into your series.
This all sounds like a convenient explanation for people's children becoming anything other than a sweet, well-behaved, healthy ideal child. It's hard for most parents to accept that their child isn't just a perfected clone of the parents themselves, and I can imagine a lot of parents using their denial and superstition to do away with, or just take their frustrations out on, their unlucky child.
As someone on the spectrum, this hits hard. Imagine your kid developing normally then all of sudden stopping? I imagine that's how my mom felt. It took looking at my family tree to realize she did nothing wrong.
This story could have been used to explain SIDS or Capgras delusion as well.
Absolutely. It’s a really heartbreaking and scary “monster.”-*Dr.Z*
Changeling : 🇮🇪 Ireland traditional night forest house
Capgras Syndrome is one of the theories on how the Bridget Cleary case mentioned in the video happened. Wikipedia doesn't mention mental illness on her part like this video did (and gives a slightly different age) but says she had bronchitis and was ill enough she had been given last rights. Her husband may have snapped due to the stress and become convinced she wasn't his wife.
@@LandCfan I've heard of that case, it's more like the husband not knowing women are people too and she was going through some stuff and his behavior wasn't helping!
Tale Foundry narrated an original short story about a changeling, in which his horns were cut off by his well-meaning adoptive parents in the hopes that he would fit in better. When he meets another fae, the fae says that he never saw anything so cruel in all his years of existence
I remember listening to that story and crying.
I highly recommend Fin Dwyer's Irish History Podcast if you want to learn more on the tragic case of Brigit Cleary. He has an episode on the events and it is heartbreaking. Some of her last words were something like "daddy do you not know me, I'm your little girl, why are you hurting me?"
JFC! And they still killed her!
@maxredjasper55 yep. And from what I remember the idea that she was a changeling was based more on the idea that she may have had an affair as opposed to her having mental health problems
As an Autistic person, I want to include the fact that sometimes, how much of an outsider we can feel like can lead US to think we're changelings, or at the very least, swapped from other mortal parents. When you find very few people you have enough in common with, and when they treat you like a freak, you start to wonder.
Real! I'm autistic and legit believed I was adopted for years.
@maxredjasper55 Yes! The whole concept of otherkin- imcluding therians- is basically identifying as nonHuman, and a LOT of us feel that way. Sometimes even that can lead into prejudice and self-supremacy, with the whole "Humans are evil" concept.
Indeed, autistics like us could easily be, and no doubt often, the victims of this kind of violence for centuries. I have no doubt that in an earlier time, I would have been taken for a witch, a changeling, a werewolf, or something similar, and suffered horribly as a result.
My son is autistic, and this idea made him very depressed for a long time. Fortunately, he talked about it with me and his dad, so we could reassure him and get him the right help.
The Irish also believed in doppelgangers (which are sort of a changeling) that would replace degenerate people and be a much better person. One of my ancestors was accused of being replaced with a doppelganger.
that’s so funny, they’re like yeah people get replaced but it’s for the best dw
Damn. Hits different when you work around neurodivergents.
I have to work around myself I feel you for real
That's exactly what I thought. I have ADD and I have an extremely hard time controlling my appetite. I have mood swings too. A few hundred years ago, I'd probably be in danger.
At the part where you said " irritable and unpredictable" after having seen my boyfriend custom make accessible communication devices for his brother and a few other people, I realize how much my handicapped relatives and other handicapped people have no way to verbalize their needs or desires. And people don't take the time to learn the particular ways of communicating that every individual disabled person has, and try to do a blanket approach and they're also not using informed care by telling them what they're about to do before they do it and so you have a child who's getting yanked around without being told what's coming up next so that they can prepare their nervous system. They might not be able to tell you how they're feeling but at least you can tell them what's going to be happening.
My niece is mentally 4 years old and wasn't tested for hearing loss until she was 20. Her father, both her grandfathers , and her grandfather's brother all had hearing loss. I remember when she was in second grade she stopped an aid i. School because she was so upset she had to go to the bathroom but couldn't talk at the moment because she had a lot of big feels and suddenly realized she had to pee and just short circuited.
Wow I never realized how much disabilities and mental disabilities were associated with changelings in Europe. That is so interesting!!! It just shows how scary differences can be to the uneducated and how important it is to accept everyone’s differences. Now I am curious to find out if there are any other creatures that has a connection with people with disabilities. Also I didn’t expect autism to be relevant to changeling lore.
Difference isn't scary. Humanity's inability to accept difference is scary. Bruh
@@Horrorbabe4Very true. I meant difference is scary to people who don’t know better.
Complex topic that i cant come to the same conclusion about. I wonder if confusion or misunderstanding is the actual reason. Or whether a lack of empathy and compassion was not the actual reason. I think there had to be people who were alive back then who knew that they were doing the wrong thing by killing a baby. @lilbasenji1
Autism is actually not particularly linked to changeling lore. Stories typically describe physical change of a child, and it is often severe. Cases of normal looking children who just display strange behaviour are rare.
My current D&D character is an Oath of Vengeance Paladin who's a Changeling that believes she's a highborn Elf cursed to be a changeling. Her whole reason for becoming an adventurer is so "she can find the person or persons who cursed her, have them break the curse and restore her to her natural form, and then deal retribution so they cannot curse anyone else." Other than basic backstory questions (Her "family" are nobility and have roles tied to their group's church. The family knows because the spell holding her shape broke at a family function, but the family has been successful in keeping this secret from the rest of their people. And anyone who does know believes she to be a changeling and not an elf.), I left the details decided blank for the DM to fill in. She also has a very little patience for anyone who dabbles in curses and will take up the cause or offer protection to someone who's cursed.
To be honest, this was supposed to be a throw away character for a one-shot adventure. That day, most of our table bailed, but my brother still wanted to play D&D. While he was creating a character for his son, I rolled randomly for what character I was playing, landed on "Changeling" and "Paladin - Oath of Vengeance". Then I asked myself, "Why is she so angry?" and decided to use the swapped baby/changeling story, but with a twist. She doesn't know she's a changeling. Now I had her critical wounds, I needed a Want and a Need. Her want is for the curse to be broken and the form she thinks she should have be restored. The need is to realize she wasn't an elf and come to terms with it. Only then can she find a way to become an elf. I think we're about two and a half years playing this story, and I have an idea of the who did what and why, but my character is no closer to any of the answers.
Another possible explanation for Changelings is a phenomenon known as Capgras Syndrome, in which a person believes that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter.
Warning for anyone who has trouble with audio of screaming/crying: sounds of a kid screaming around 4:45 until 5:00 ish while she’s speaking about a child’s death by abuse
I actually started to feel very uncomfortable at that point in the video. I feel a little better knowing other people might have been disturbed too :(
@@6400loser I almost stopped watching because of it. I enjoy Monstrum because they normally have Dr Zarka narrating without distracting sound effects and I can just listen or also look at the art. Randomly having screaming in the middle was jarring
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We had a litter of kittens* once. They were tabbies & greys, and one single white kitten who developed points like a himalayan cat after several weeks. I called him a changeling, because if we hadn't watched it happen, we wouldn't have believed it! He was so different from his mother & littermates.
*Mom was still saving up money to get our girl kitten spayed when she went into heat & escaped for just long enough. Poor thing had a massive litter, too. She did get spayed later
Probably had a different father. Queens will often mate several times when in heat, and it's actually possible for EVERY kitten in a single litter to have a different father.
@@quiestinliteris No doubt, though those specific genes may've been from a grandparent or two. I never saw a himalayan or a siamese out & about, not even in windows.
@@eliscanfield3913 o3o I know that basic color is very genetically simple for cats, but now I feel the need to go on a potentially really involved info quest into color point genes and other less common variations. I don't know why I'm so invested in understanding your cat's lineage. 😂
It has been said, the Uncanny Valley implies there was a point in human development when they should be afraid of things that looked human but weren't.
That point is now and those things are corpses
These are the stories that make me wonder why the fey - if they'd ever been real - would not have simply shunned humans completely OR decided to truly make war on them. Shoving a red hot poker down someone's throat?? You would not do that to any of your livestock no matter WHAT you thought was wrong with them, what in hell makes it OK to do it to a CHILD? And it's not as if people didn't beat their children anyway - "spare the rod" was a thing back then too, and the whole "well it's their kid, it's not our business." They didn't even need the excuse of changelings to hurt the helpless, did they?
For real! If I was a faerie, I'd want absolutely nothing to do with humans.
3:35 So the fae community care about their changelings more than humans care about their children...😢
They abandoned the child in the first place
As a neurodivergent adult who was once a neurodivergent little girl bullied for being "too smart", this hits hard. I always identified with strange or alien characters in fiction, and more than a few adults suggested there was something profoundly wrong or inhuman about me just because I read Hamlet when I was nine. And now we're experiencing a huge wave of conservative social backlash against anyone perceived as "different". This should go well...
Me too! I also discovered Shakespeare around age 9! I now have a theatre troupe of likewise people called "The Changelings Company ".
Conservative? It is usually far left being extremely hostile against anybody they perceive 'different'.
builled for being too dumb for me. you should have seen the look on my third grade teacher when he realized that i should have been in the highest book group! turns out i have dyscalculia and it's a learning disability but oh well i'm autistic anyway
Star Trek also has a whole species called Changelings. Odo from DS9 is one of them.
I clicked on this thinking it was some deep cut Star Trek lore 😅
Very well researched video again!! Mad respect to Dr. Zarka and Team ❤
Is there a list of sources, please? I cannot find anything about the anecdote about Martin Luther except on Wikipedia.
Adding to the horror is dehumanising racism. It was not just mythical creatures supposed to switch babies but also real people. Travellers and Romani have often been accused of these exact crimes. For a high profile example look no further than Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris. In it Esmeralda was not born to a Romani mother but stolen at birth from a French woman. It is truly deeply disturbing that this folklore has been used as grounds for abuse and perpetuating racial discrimination and violence
The sound effects between the emaciated food smacking and then later of the child drowning made me literally choose to read the transcript rather then keep watching the video!
Ever since I heard a little about this history, I've been waiting for a Monstrum episode about changelings, and you did not disappoint!
Aww Dr. Z has a baby! I bet that kid is going to get some awesome bedtime stories.
So I watched this video when it came out but didn't leave a comment. I rarely do in general. I love everything that you do, but this one really hit home. I've been reflecting for a long while on my disability, what it means to me, how it has influenced my life and why, the image I want other people to have of me in that regard (especially because I'm a teacher)...and this feels like another piece of the puzzle. A week after I saw this I'm still thinking about it so I think it's only fair that I come back here and thank you for this one
Thank you. My work is all about showing how monsters can help us understand other people and ourselves. I’m honored it resonated. 🖤-*Dr.Z*
White Wolf, the table top RPG publishers that make the Vampire RPG, also make a game called Changeling. I played it for many years with a group of friends. It does a really interesting job of putting you in the place of a person who has their fae side "awaken" at a young age. You play different types of half-fae, and your story ends when you either go completely to bedlam or banality. It didn't occur to me at the time, but as an autistic person with a late diagnosis, it was very familiar to how you experience the world differently from the people around you, and find others who also experience the world differently. It kind of flips the script from feeling like everyone else has these rules of society that they have been taught and you were never allowed to learn, to a paradigm where you are the one who sees the world as it truly is and the normal people are the ones in the dark.
As someone who was not diagnosed with autism until in my 40's, I am quite certain that my parents would have attempted one of these cruelties so that they could rid me of my 'changeling' (Strong Will), if we had lived in the Victorian era. Childhood trauma is almost guaranteed for the neurodivergent in this society. Doubly so, if the divergence was passed off as 'bad behavior' until an adult diagnosis reveals the true cause.
I wish you'd put a warning at the begining of this - when the vast majority of the content amounts to these are excuses/reasons used to torture / murder a group of people who are still around - its basic consideration to warn them before they get to hear that information.
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This has got to be the most horrific episode you've ever made.
Children, and adults, who have disabilities can still to this day be accused of being a changeling, or whatever creature the people in their surroundings believe in, and suffer horrible abuse because of it.
After hearing about pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections, I wonder if maybe that had a role in "changelings". Parents of children who get it say it's like the child changed overnight. It's a strep infection that goes to the brain. Very poorly understood even today but imagine back then before modern medicine.
Japan and parts of Asia have a history with changelings going as far back as Europe if not longer.
I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that certain nomadic Amazonian tribes do, as well
All of these stories only highlight one thing consistently- human cruelty knows no bounds. We are truly a sickening species of creature.
Not that long ago there was a case of two children being mistakenly swapped at birth in a small county hospital in Eire. Both sets of families reported any uneasy feeling that their infants did not belong. It took years for the hospital to notice their mistake. Finally, once reunited with their now teenage child, Mr & Mrs O'Reilly said that it was as if a tremendous weight had been lifted from their shoulders. Mr & Mrs Khan were unavailable for comment.
it breaks my heart to think of how many disabled children were killed because their families believed they were changelings
They weren't killed because they thought they were changelings. They were killed for being malformed. The changeling story was incidental.
I was hoping to hear something about Mamuna from Slavic folklore. Mamuna could replace the child with her changling. To protect the child, parents can put something red to the craddle - red color can keep away the Mamuna.
Interesting. In the Balkans, there used to be a custom among Slavic rural population to tie the umbilical cord of the newborn baby with red thread. Perhaps some connection?
@@melanimatejak6821 I believe, there is, these are only a different face of the same believe among Slavic people :)
@Wiking-Inwestuje By the way, I never heard of this 'Mamuna', but in Slavic folklore, various fairies could exchange the human baby with a changeling. In one story, it was a water spirit who lived in the nearby river or pond. In the end, the father took the changeling and threw him in the water. Just as the changeling sinked, little further down the bank, the father saw his own son getting thrown out of water to the land.
@@melanimatejak6821 It may be a very similar story :)
In South India, there is a tradition of taking some of the dried cord and putting it inside of a small metal amulet. These are tied onto the baby with special string dipped in turmeric to protect them from the evil eye. Boys wear them around their waist and girls wear them around their neck. They don't take them off even when they grow up.
A book I read not too long ago hat involved changelings was Eloise McGraw's The Moorchild. I enjoyed it and recommend it.
I always believed that the fairies kidnapped Peter Pan as a baby and replaced him with a changing which was the “baby” his mother was cradling when he returned in the ending of “The Little White Bird”.
Changelings are also seen in MLP.
First appearing in Season Two finale: A Canterlot Wedding part 2
and troll hunters
Yes that too @Dcfan38-q6v
This to me is the scariest episode so far :(
So it's like witch-hunting but for children
No, because witch-hunting is justification of rejection of a too-independent person.
This is the opposite. Rejection of a low-functioning person.
No because children weren't exclusively accused of being changelings.
As someone with autism I can't help but feel my mother essentially did a modernised version of this with me as a child. She labeled me as a psychopath that was incapable of emotion and used that as justification for witholding love and continuous abuse. She acted like she was virtuous for taking care of me out of her motherly duty despite being punished with an innately evil child... I am now in therapy 😂
I’m so sorry to hear that as a fellow person with autism, my mother did the best she could to support me but it was still hard to fit in and not get left out. I can’t imagine how much worse it must feel when it is coming from your own family. I’m wishing you all the best for the future and much happiness. ❤
the 2001 film 'Frailty' is more or less a modern retelling of a 'changeling' and it may be one of the most underrated horrors I know about.
0:16 In a few Indian media pieces, there are shapeshifting snakes. Maybe that’s our changeling.
The man who turns into monkey and cat while fleeing
Changeling stories seem to have similarities in many non European places too. Like in my country people believe a malignant fairy folk will kidnap children and replace them with ghouls as a form of revenge, or just out malignance
i’m glad that i was able to learn about a real historical topic because that’s something that shouldn’t be forgotten, but man this was gruesome and low key i had to tune out for a bit. i appreciate the lesson but i feel like the tone was a bit off. although it is related to a legendary creature from folklore, it’s also about real-world violence against children and disabled people, and that’s just horrifying in a way that i feel should be given a little more acknowledgment
rockin the purple XD
I've met one person like this. Quite definitely. We shook hands in twilight outside a pub on a works do. As he pulled his hand away I saw it turn into Lizard claws for a fraction of a second. When he spoke he kept sticking his tongue out between words in a pointy way like a lizard. Maybe I imagined it or maybe not but it seemed pretty real.
Tony Robinson's Gods and Monsters series talked about changelings, among other things.
Here in the Philippines we have a sort of similar monster. It's called the Tiyanak, and it has plenty of versions, some are babies abandoned by parents in the forest because they could not care for the child causing the child to grow up and feed on people who would seek its cries in the mountains/forests, the others are babies possessed or unbaptized, while another is a baby swapped at birth by another monster like entity (That I forgot completely as I've only learned this when I was a child and wasted my time with sort of cryptozoology/ghosts/monsters/unknown). It's eerie how similar these things are but I'm certain that during those times, the Changeling never made it Surigao Del Sur yet, because I've only learned about Changelings because of the movie Hellboy and I've never heard a single friend classmate of mine ever mention changelings.
Thank you, Dr. Z.
As a parent of a child with autism, I can not imagine the terrible things that happened to these lovely and wonderful children. Love your kids, guys don't hurt them because they are different. I've heard this legend as a child and always thought it was just a way to abuse your child that wasn't "normal"
Your child is lucky to have you -- a parent who accepts them for who they are. As an Autistic, I *wish* I had had that privilege. However, I'm happy I give the sense of security and belonging to my own son (who inherited Mommy's neurodiversity) which I mostly lacked myself.
Surprised there wasn't a single mention of the World of Darkness game Changeling.
When I was in the Air Force I worked with a guy who was blue-eyed and blonde and he told me that he had a secret. I asked him what his secret was. He said his secret was that nobody knew he was black. Both of his parents were black but inexplicably they had given birth to a blue-eyed blonde fair skinned child. He said his parents had done three DNA tests on him just to make sure that he hadn't been swapped at the hospital! He showed me photos of his parents. Sure enough they were black. I told him you must have got all the recessive genes. So I can see how somebody would believe in changelings. Strange things happen.
I'm so used to hearing Martin Luther be the cool guy who called out Catholic Church's corruption, never knew this side to him!
I studied Lutheran theology, Luther wrote outright evil things about Jews and was completely out of his depths when the farmers revolted and asked for more social justice because of his teachings.
This story about him and the changeling sounds very made up, however, and I cannot find any reliable sources for it.
There is also a gripping horror film starring George C. Scott with this title. The Changeling in question is a disabled child who is murdered and then replaced with a presentable orphan. The ghost of the murdered child forever pounds on the sides of the bathtub in which he was drowned, calling from eternity for justice. It still makes me cry. Sehenswert!
8:00 those are literally illustrations from a book of brothers Grimm fairytales! I have the same book at my house!
I love this video I have watched it numerous times and I can't get enough of it
Please don't use AI imagery in this show! I very much enjoy it and it was a bummer to see (such as at 3:05)
I found this image elsewhere, titled "Livre du roi Modus et de la reine Ratio, 14th century." Not sure if that's AI or not.
3:03 - 3:12 I like that a way to ferret out a changeling is to outweird it so much it has to point out how weird you're being.
As an autistic adult descended from Scottish and English ancestors, I see a lot of autistic traits often reflected in the changeling descriptors. I look back at these children and think that could have been me. Instead (and without ignoring the very real discrimination autistic folks face today), I've led a fulfilling life, a long marriage, raised two children, and had a satisfying career. Hopefully future generations will do even better.
One of my favorite things done with the Changeling myth is from the manga “Delicious in Dungeon” where they are mushrooms that once a person or creature that steps in a ring are changed by the spores, & this was clever by combining it with the myth of Fairy Ring which are fungi grown in a circle which are believed to where fairies dwell or the site of Witches dancing on Walpurgis Night
And stories where the family's actions force the fey to return the real child could easily be seen as the child learning to mask themselves to avoid further beatings.
This attitude is not dead. Anyone who does not conform to the hive mind mentality is still ostracised, gossiped about and bullied. The only difference is you can't blame a missing person on fairies anymore. But in it's essence humanity is still a very superstitutious creature with a desperate fear of difference.
As an autistic person, I find changeling lore as an explanation of our existence.
And further proof that it's not caused by vaccines. After all many of the tales go back when vaccines were either a not readily available or b before they were even invented. Seriously people stop using a D-list celebrity with no knowledge in medicine as your reference.
This was particularly heartbreaking to watch as an autistic person. I’ve loved anything having to do with fairies since I was little -- Baby's first special interst 😂 -- and remember very distinctly learning what changlings were in middle school. It changed my brain chemistry forever. I read a book called the Moorchild, a story set from the changeling's perspective and the story resonated with me as few others have.
Changeling lore existed all over Europe and was not limited to Britain or Scandinavia. It is a very old belief system that predates the advent of Christianity. Typically it involved children with severely disfiguring conditions, for example hidrocephalus, which couldn't be cured.
I love your videos, Dr Zarka
Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak as well
One of my favorite TTRPGs was White Wolf’s Changeling the Dreaming and while the stealing babies was pretty glossed over I feel now it would be a bigger part of my games than the me of the 90s
6:28 - I might be mistaken, but I think that's actually a victim of the Irish Great Famine, so not really an appropriate use of the image.
I mean, they also specifically mention a child in 1845- the year the potato famine started- in basically the next sentence, so I think it's fairly relevant. I imagine there probably was an uptick in incidents like that during the famine, since families would have been under enormous pressure to figure out how to feed their kids and disabled kids would probably have been a particular source of distress
I'm Swedish, and I had completely forgotten about the changeling stories until now. But I grew up in a part of Sweden where story telling was/is quite big. We even have a story museum near me, full of stories like the changeling trolls.
Now, this part is out on the country side, where several small villages lies, separated by vast areas of woods/forests, so pretty much all the tales and lore I've grown up with are about different creatures from the depth of the forests. Several of them involving trolls.
I've always loved those stories, but I would lie if me and the other kids wasn't at least a little bit scared of being too close to the forest after dark, which was unfortunate for some because they actually lived by a gravel road in the middle of the dense woods, closest neighbors house not even visible from their yard.
Sleepovers at those friends houses was always a bit interesting 😅😂
But yeah, the stories of the troll changelings was some of the best, and scariest. They were also used as a "threat" (most often a bit playfully) by some parents if you didn't behave. Like that they would either leave you in the forest to change you out, or that if you didn't behave, the trolls might take you and they wouldn't even notice the difference between you and the troll. Or like, if you were having a meltdown or something as a kid, parents could say something like "is this my child, or has the trolls been visiting?"
It's funny how you can go so long not thinking about a thing for even a second, to suddenly get all those memories back, along with vivid memories of the illustrations from the stories. Like toddlers with black eyes, sharp teeth and wild unruly hair, as well as a tail that was hidden away from the parents.
I'd be concerned if the people in my family started acting normal.
While not as common as in northern european countries, changelings also appear in italian folklore. In the northern half it's often a wild woman, an ogress like the bregostana, or a fairy like the anguana, that changes the child for her own. Other times it's the goblin, il folletto, l'incubo. In Piemont, the changeling goblins are called servans.
Even Pirandello, one of the most important writers of the italian 20th century, who revolutionized our literature and theatre, wrote a novella on this legend, "il figlio cambiato" (the changed son) in 1902, which he later reworked into a play between 1930 and 1932. His story is influenced by the sicilian legends he grew up with (the child is supposedly stolen by "le Donne", the Ladies, that fly through the night air), and by the verist writers, like Verga and Capuana (both of whom he knew), who wanted to represent the people of the land with realism. In this novella, the narrator comes across such a changeling accusation, and notes how the witch that is asked for help, uses the superstition of the scared mother to protect the innocent child: she tells her that anything done to the changeling shall be done in turn to the stolen kid. This ensures the child's safety, but the narrator also sees that the mother raises him without love, neglecting him, as do all the other people in the village