Jock Brocas On Spiritual Life

Tuesday, 23 December 2025

Meet the UK’s Christmas Demons: Mari Lwyd, Dorset Ooser & crooked Crom Dubh na Nollaig

Mari Lwyd, Dorset Ooser - Wikimedia Commons/Crom Dubh - Wilson's Point Historic Site

Over recent years the Festive Season has seen an uptick in interest in Austria’s Krampus - the mythic ‘Anti-Santa’ who punishes wicked children and generally acts as a primal, early Yuletide supernatural entity:

Throughout Europe there are indeed many other nasty Christmas demons, including the Kallikantzari, Frau Perchta, Hans Trapp, Gryla and her Yule Cat, Knecht Ruprecht, La Befana, the Yule Lads, Père Fouettard and Zwarte Piet, all of whom can be explored in Further Reading below.

But the focus of this investigation is the UK, where there is a relative scarcity of similar Yuletide fiends - with two exceptions; the menacing horse-skulled Mari Lywd of South Wales and the demonic Dorset Ooser.

Mari Lywd

The Mari Lwyd is a wassailing (a pagan Winter fertility festival) folk custom in South Wales, led by a hobby horse with a nag’s skull mounted on a pole, carried under a white sheet. The custom was first recorded in 1800, carrying on into the early twentieth century, before retreating to remote villages before its revival in recent decades.

The Mari Lwyd was performed at Christmas time by groups of men who would carry the unnerving symbol to local houses, requesting entry through song. The householders would be expected to deny them entry, again through song, with this back and forth ‘Sing Off’ carrying on interminably in typical Welsh fashion. When inhabitants eventually gave in, the team would be let in and given food and drink.

Folklorists believed that the tradition had once possibly been a pre-Christian religious rite, in keeping with British hooded animal lore —such as the Hoodening of Kent, the Broad of the Cotswolds, and the Old Ball, Old Tup, and Old Horse of northern England. Or perhaps, a link to the sixteenth and seventeenth-century craze for hobby horses among the social elite, which the lower orders mocked with their antics? As Mary Lwyd most often targeted wealthier homes, this is one theory.

An account from Gower stated the horse’s skull was buried throughout the year, only being dug up for use during the Christmas season, when the fun began at dusk and lasted late into the night.

Welsh writer and folklorist Marie Trevelyan (1853-1922) posited the name Mari Lwyd derived from "Grey Death", a symbol of "the dying or dead year". Fellow folklorist Iorwerth Peate (1901-1982) claimed it the horse was, “a survival of a pre-Christian tradition" once spread across Britain and Europe, and surviving the Christianization of Britain, renamed Mari Lwyd as homage to the Virgin Mary. He theorized the original custom had been "horrific in origin and intention". Scholar Ellen Ettlinger (1902–1994) believed the Mari Lwyd was a "death horse", symbolized by the white cloth worn by its carrier, and began as pre-Christian ritual to mark the festival of Samhain.

My personal theory is that Mari Lywd may owe something to those who inhabited the region at various times throughout the ages, as the Celts, Romans and Vikings all sacrificed horses as part of their religious practices. A syncretic folk memory survival perhaps?

From December 2024: Alister Bailey travels to a remote Welsh town to help inspire his latest book, however what he finds is more than simply inspiring. (IMDB)

The Dorset Ooser

The Dorset Ooser is a demonic wooden head which was part of the folk culture of the Dorset village of Melbury Osmond, in southwestern England, the fabled ‘Wessex’ of Thomas Hardy*. The head was hollow, possibly used as a mask, with a hinged jaw which creepily enabled the mouth to open and close. Sometimes used to scare people for practical jokes, the Ooser was part of local charivari custom "skimity riding" aka "rough music", where immoral behaviour was punished.

*Thomas Hardy's mother lived in Melbury Osmond as a child; the village appears as "Little Hintock" in his novel The Woodlanders. The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge contain brief references to the Dorset Ooser.

First brought to public attention in 1891, the head was owned by the Cave family of Melbury but Ooser went missing in 1897 when taken on a tour of Somerset. Folklorists and historians have debated the origins of the head; some believed that it was a representation of Satan designed to terrify people into obeying the local community's moral codes. Others suggested that it represented a pre-Christian god of fertility whose worship survived in Dorset into the Victorian era - or even later.

In 1975 a replica of the original Ooser was made, which has since been on display at the Dorset Museum in Dorchester. This mask is used in local Morris dancing processions and inspired copies used as representations of the Horned God in the modern Pagan religion of Wicca, both in the UK and United States.

It’s still unknown if the head was actually the Ooser, or whether it instead was designed as a mere depiction of an entity called the Ooser; folklore historian H. S. L. Dewar (1892-1976) connected it to the term Wurse, used for the Devil in Layamon's Brut (The Chronicle of Britain), or the 17th-century Italian term Oser, again meaning Devil.

dorset ooser — Helstone Dolmen entrance - Wikimedia Commons

Local tales say that the ‘real’ Ooser lies sleeping beneath the Hell Stone in Dorset’s Portesham parish, only woken by the clattering of hailstones. He then proceeds to stalk the locality looking for anyone mug enough to be out and about in the hailstorm. Interestingly, bearing in mind Mari Lwyd, the remains of another tomb, The Grey Mare and her Colts, is 1+1⁄4 miles (2 km) to the west of the Hell Stone.

It has also been suggested that Ooser or Osser is possibly derived from Wooset, a term used in the dialect around Wiltshire to refer to a pole upon which a horse's skull with deer's horns was affixed; recorded as having been paraded by unruly youths in the Marlborough district until the 1830s, where it was used to mock neighbors whose partners were suspected of marital infidelity, the horns being a traditional sign of cuckoldry.

The Ooser at Christmas

“In my childhood [the Ooser] was doing service – at Christmas mummings*, surely it was. Our Cerne Abbas nurse was quite up in all relating to the "Wurser", as I should spell it phonetically. I did not know of the horns, indeed in our embryo Latinity we thought the word an attempt at Ursa, if I remember rightly. What crowds of odd bits I could note if, alas, I did but "remember rightly" all nurse's folk-lore and folk-speeches." —H. J. Moule, Dorchester, 1892

*Mummings - traditional form of folk performance, particularly associated with the British Isles, involving groups of amateur actors known as mummers or ‘guisers’

In some Dorset villages such as Shillingstone, the Ooser mask (or a close relative) had become the ‘Christmas Bull’, a terrifying creature that roamed through the streets at the end of each year demanding food and drink from the locals.

In 2005, a Guardian journalist reported a dawn ceremony on May Day atop Giant Hill near Cerne Abbas, involving one member carrying the Dorset Ooser replica atop his head, with other Morris men dancing around him. After the frolics they proceeded, still dancing, to a local hostelry the Red Lion. Next Summer, the Wessex Morris Men took the replica to Melbury Osmond for the first time in over a century where they performed a dance for amused locals.

Daniel Patrick Quinn’s The Dorset Ooser (reproduced on www.wessexmorrismen.co.uk by permission of the author, September 2013):

https://www.wessexmorrismen.co.uk/docs/TheDorsetOoser.pdf

Crom Dubh na Nollaig – the Dark Crooked One of Christmas

The coming of Crom Dubh na Nollaig or The Dark Crooked One of Christmas is heralded by the sound of wind howling in the chimney. This is to terrorize naughty children, in a legend not too dissimilar to Krampus.

On the Inner Hebridean Isle of Islay, Crom Dubh na Nollaig was once a notable element of the holiday season. Back in a 1969 interview, islander Peggy Earl said as a child she was was threatened with a terrifying Yuletide visit from The Dark Crooked One if she ever misbehaved or cheeked her parents.

Nice.

Crom Dubh derives from the Irish pagan god Crom Cruaich, who was associated with fertility and linked to the practice of human sacrifice.

The Dark Crooked One of Christmas is usually depicted as a goat-like entity boasting huge horns, razor-sharp fangs, with glowing demonic eyes; also akin to Krampus, he would whip wicked children frenziedly with birch branches, yowling with laughter as he laid into the weeping youngsters.

Monday, 8 December 2025

Four Christmas Ghosts of London

For around two decades, I lived in London’s central Clerkenwell area, a place with a rich history of ghosts, supernatural phenomena and other strange occurrences. And, as we near the Yuletide season, there are literary associations with Charles Dickens, the ghosts of whose characters sometimes seem to permeate the streets and alleyways. Barely 10 minutes away was Charles Dickens’ actual house in Doughty Street, whilst 2 minutes stroll took me to Clerkenwell Green, where Fagin and the Artful Dodger taught Oliver pickpocketing; nearby Hockley-by-the-Hole was notorious gathering point for petty criminals; a short trot took me to Fagin’s lair at the southern end of Saffron Hill.

A longer perambulation would see me at Scrooge’s counting house in Newman's Court, off Cornhill in the City of London; still further across the Thames I would venture to what used be Jacob’s Island, disease-ridden slum and home to the evil Bill Sikes.

But enough of these fictional specters; here are four ‘real’ ones, all with a special Seasonal relevance.

The Buckingham Palace Monk

Buckingham House (The Palace of Her Majesty Queen Charlotte), St James's Park - Wikimedia Commons

Legend has it there was once a monastery on the site of the present palace and and a monk was confined in a cell as punishment for some unnamed crime where he starved to death; presumably something very naughty on the list of sins. If you’re in the area on Christmas Day you may catch sight of his shade at the the rear of the palace which overlooks the Royal Family’s sprawling private gardens. There is a terrace along this side and it is here that the chained, moaning spirit stumbles his way until he reaches the end of the promenade and fades away, only to return the next Christmas Day.

Not exactly a fun afterlife then.

The “Nameless Thing” of 50 Berkeley Square

Grade II listed 50 Berkeley Square was built in the 1750s and is located in Mayfair, London; a pretty enough building, unassuming and constructed in the same style as it's neighbors. But something truly terrible lurks behind its well-heeled exterior, something worthy of a novel by H.P. Lovecraft.

There are other tales to tell of the building (see Further Reading) but the following has particular resonance for the Holiday Season. To paraphrase Rod Serling's iconic introduction to The Twilight Zone, "Submitted for your approval, the story of the Two Sailors”

Christmas Eve 1887: two drunken sailors on shore leave sought shelter in the then shuttered, uninhabited building, unaware of 50 Berkeley Square's thoroughly evil reputation .

The ground floor rooms being damp, the pair chose a room on the second floor. After an hour or so of fitful, inebriate slumber, they were woken by the sound of thudding, purposeful footsteps coming up the stairs accompanied by a vile stench. The door to the sailor’s room was suddenly flung open to reveal in the doorway, “a shapeless, slithering, horrible mass”. One fellow managed to wrest his way past the thing and ran for help, but the other was trapped. When the sailor returned with a policeman, they soon found the body of his companion, impaled on the railings outside the house, his face a rictus of terror. He had either tried to escape the apparition by climbing outside and had accidentally fallen to his death; or deliberately jumped, and failed to avoid the railings.

Or he had been flung to his death by the monstrous sludgy being, which appears to be a cousin of the disgusting ‘Guardian’ in M.R. James’ The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1904). A damp, heavy, slimy, leathery creature, with a moldy smell, cold ‘face’ and and clinging limbs.

The Red-Scarfed Woman at Ickenham Tube Station

A disturbing tale is the haunting of Ickenham Tube station, where a female spirit visits every festive period.

The apparition first appeared in the 1950s, and has been spotted every Christmas since then. She’s said to be the shade of a woman who slipped onto the track and was electrocuted. Wearing a bright red scarf, she appears at the end of the platform, close to where she fell, waving frantically at people on the platform to attract their attention, then vanishing into the gloom. Is this the tortured soul of the poor woman desperately trying to save herself time and time again, hoping she can get home to celebrate Christmas with her family?

Or maybe the ghost of a suicide, nursing eternal regrets?

From Charles Dickens’ The Signal-Man (1866):

Ghosts on the Underground

All Hallows by the Tower: the phantom crone and her feline companion

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:All_Hallows_by_the_Tower,_Byward_Street,_London_EC3_-_Crypt_-_geograph.org.uk_-_718035.jpg

December 1920: 6pm - a choirmaster and two young choirboys (no, not the beginning of a risqué joke) are in the ancient church, to rehearsing few days before Christmas. They had been singing for around twenty minutes when they saw a little old lady standing close by. One of the lads placed a chair for her to sit on, the woman nodding her thanks and promptly parking her rear end. She was dressed, so the choirmaster later recalled, in old-fashioned clothing, grey-haired grey and with sallow features. What struck him most though, were her eyes, “They seemed to burn with a strange radiance… and were fixed on my face as if eagerly searching for something, or as if fascinated by our music.”

The woman perturbed the choirmaster; he locked the door when they had entered, so how could she have got inside? And how did she she manage to approach their rehearsal room without any sound? No footsteps were heard on the stone floor and, the heavy, creaking wooden doors had been silent since he and the choristers had passed through them.

Suddenly, as the practice came to an end, their mysterious visitor vanished without trace, then a strange scratching noise emanated from the corner of the room, “as if a cat was in the building and was trying to get out.” One of the boys cried out, “There it is sir! I saw a cat rush out of the room and go down towards the south aisle!” They searched the church but no trace was found of either the woman or feline.

When the choirmaster went to leave the building, the door was still locked. Moving forward five years, he was standing in the church on a Sunday morning when an old fellow approached him and said he knew the identity of the old woman. Sixty years previously, he had been a choirboy at the church and that a somewhat eccentric lady organist had led the choir in those days. She was “passionately fond of …cats,” the old boy told the choirmaster, and continued, “…cats used to follow her about, even in the streets…she used to give me pocket money for feeding them regularly. She was “quite gone” on carols, and used to take us boys through the city lanes…singing them as well as in church.” Could the former choir mistress's love of carols and pussycats continued beyond the grave; the description given by the old gentleman of her style of dress corresponded exactly with clothing worn by the apparition in the rehearsal room.

Reports of her appearances continued throughout the 1920’s and early 1930’s, but she seems to have found peace, as many decades have passed without reports of the ghostly old lady at All Hallows Church.

Christmas Chills for One & All

A spooky seasonal treat, set on New Years’ Eve 1767 in the then village of Gospel Oak (now part of the Inner London Suburbs), at the very south of Hampstead Heath.