Grouping | Folklore creature |
---|---|
Sub grouping | Household spirit, or ogre attached to a particular location |
Similar entities | See here |
Folklore | English folklore |
Other name(s) | Boggard (in Yorkshire) |
Country | England |
Region | Parts of Northern England, particularly the North West |
Habitat | Both within homes and outside in the countryside. |
A boggart is a supernatural being from English folklore. The dialectologist Elizabeth Wright described it as 'a generic name for an apparition';[1] folklorist Simon Young defines it as 'any ambivalent or evil solitary supernatural spirit'.[2] Halifax folklorist Kai Roberts states that boggart ‘might have been used to refer to anything from a hilltop hobgoblin to a household faerie, from a headless apparition to a proto-typical poltergeist’.[3] As these wide definitions suggest boggarts are to be found both within and out of doors, as a household spirit or a malevolent genius loci (that is, a geographically-defined spirit) inhabiting fields or other topographical features.