Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Excerpt from ‘The Stolen Child’ by W.B Yeats

Written about by renowned poets such as Yeats and William Allingham and used as a defence for murder in the 1800s, mothers for generations in Ireland have been protecting their small ones from abduction, not from humans but from the fairies who replaced them with Changelings, known as Beácán bay-cawn. According to legend, abductions took place to increase the strength of fairy stock as their own often died during birth and red blood was required in order for the fairies to get into heaven.

read more: Changelings, The Darker Side of Irish Fairy Lore | The Spooky Isles.