The Manx Heritage Foundation's schools resource card records that fishermen "in early times" prayed to Saint Patrick before putting to sea: Dy bannee Noo Parick shinyn as nyn maatey — "St Patrick bless us and our boat." This was the formal prayer, spoken at the harbour, addressed to the saint. But a song called Mannanan Beg Mac y Leir also circulated among the fishing communities, collected in Kiaull yn Theay — the Music of the People, published by Culture Vannin. The formal prayer went to the saint. The song remembered the god. Both lived in the same community, often in the same boat, and nobody saw a problem with that. The two existed side by side because the accommodation ran deeper than theology. Moore records that Teare's daughter was still practising the charming of fishing nets in the late nineteenth century: "she is resorted to by the fishermen for the sake of having their nets charmed, and so cause them to be lucky in their fishing." The power passed man to woman to man, alternating through generations. The Church knew. The fishermen knew. The fish, presumably, did not mind. Bishop Wilson composed a formal prayer for the use of fishermen, printed in Manx by Bishop Hildesley. Train records it. A formal ecclesiastical composition, separate from folk tradition, issued by a bishop who understood that the sea demanded its own forms of address. Between the bishop's prayer, the saint's blessing, and the god's song, the Manx fisherman had every authority covered.

A hairy goblin or sprite of similar character to the Phynnodderee but more unpredictable. Cregeen defined the Glashtyn as a goblin or sprite. He frequented lonely spots and was useful to people or otherwise as the caprice of the moment led him. The name also applied to the water-horse, the Cabbyl-Ushtey, a shape-shifting creature who could appear as a handsome young man to lure victims, then transform and drag them into the water. The people around Glen Meay believed the glen below the waterfall was haunted by the spirit of a man who mistook the Glashtyn for an ordinary horse, mounted it, and was carried into the sea and drowned.

The communities remembered what happened to anyone who interfered with the keeills. A windmill built from keeill stones went with tremendous fury and had to be taken down. A farmhouse roofed with stone from a keeill produced such unearthly noises that the stone was returned to the site. Bishop Wilson knew the formula for the worst curse a Manx person could utter: Clogh ny killagh ayns corneil dty hie mooar, may a stone of the church be found in the corner of thy dwelling-house. The stories protected what the buildings could not. The holiness was understood to be permanent, deposited in the ground, infused into the stones. A ruined keeill was not a dead church. It was a sleeping one.

The spirits that haunted churchyard stiles in Manx tradition. The boundary between consecrated and unconsecrated ground was a charged threshold in Manx belief. The keimagh inhabited that boundary, occupying the liminal space where the sacred met the everyday. Part of Moore's comprehensive taxonomy of the Manx supernatural world.

The spirit friend, a guardian spirit identical with the Irish Liannan-Shee. A familiar or household spirit who was implacable in resentment but unchanging in friendship. One of the two familiar spirits known in the Isle of Man, the other being the Dooinney-Oie. The Lhiannan-Shee attached itself to a particular person and could bring either great fortune or great ruin depending on how the relationship was maintained.

The earliest account is George Waldron's, in his Description of the Isle of Man printed in 1744 from his residence on the Island in the 1720s. They said, he wrote, that an apparition called in their language the Mauthe Doog, in the shape of a large black spaniel with curled shaggy hair, used to haunt Peel Castle, and had been frequently seen in every room, but particularly in the guard chamber, where as soon as candles were lighted it came and lay down before the fire in the presence of all the soldiers. By long custom they lost great part of their terror, but they still believed it an evil spirit which only waited permission to do them hurt, and for that reason forbore swearing and all profane discourse in its company. None cared to be left alone with it. Since one soldier had to lock the castle gates at a certain hour and carry the keys to the Captain, whose apartment was reached by a passage through a church, they agreed that whoever was to take the keys should be accompanied by the man who went the night before, for the dog was always seen to come out of that passage at the close of day and go back to it at dawn, which made them look on the place as its peculiar residence. One night, Waldron went on, a soldier who was drunk laughed at the simplicity of his companions and, though it was not his turn, snatched up the keys and went out of the guard room, swearing that he desired nothing more than that the Mauthe Doog should follow him, for he would try whether it were dog or devil. Some time after his departure a great noise was heard, but nobody had the boldness to see what occasioned it. When he returned he was sober and silent enough, for he was never heard to speak again, and though for the three days he lived he was entreated to speak or make some sign of what had happened to him, nothing intelligible could be got from him, and by the distortion of his limbs and features it was guessed that he died in agonies greater than is common in a natural death. The Mauthe Doog was never seen in the castle again, nor would anyone go through that passage, which was closed up and another way made. Waldron dated the accident about threescore years before his own time, which places it in the 1660s, and said he had it attested by several, especially by an old soldier who assured him he had seen the dog oftener than he had hairs on his head. Everything since has followed Waldron. George Woods copied the story into his account of Peel Castle in 1811 and noted that Walter Scott had drawn on it in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, where a knight lies speechless like him of whom the story ran that spoke the spectre-hound in Man. Jenkinson's guidebook pointed visitors to the guard room where the Moddey Dhoo used to come and sit silently among the soldiers, and Moore printed Waldron's text in 1891 under the heading Legend of the Black Dog, Moddey Doo, describing the Moddey Dhoo in his introduction as one of the Island's spirits or fiends of evil and malicious nature, beside the Buggane. Sophia Morrison retold it for children in 1911 with the date fixed in the days of Charles II and Charles, Earl of Derby. By then the name had become a common noun. W. Walter Gill, in 1929, used moddey dhoo for any haunting black dog: one at Balladoole in company with a White Lady, one on the road near Ballamodda, a headless one in the lane at Ballagilbert like that at Hango, and a black dog reported in 1852 that howled and screamed and chased people round Castletown as far as the gallows post at Hango but dared not go beyond, and he noted that the word buggane in Manx use covered almost all apparitions of the gloomier sort, black dogs in particular.

The little people, the fairies proper in Manx tradition. They lived under the hills and sometimes helped and sometimes harmed. They were not the gossamer creatures of Victorian illustration. They were neighbours of a kind, powerful, unpredictable, and best treated with respect. Waldron observed that the Manx people would be even refractory to their clergy if the clergy tried to preach against the existence of fairies. The Church knew better than to try. The accommodation between Christianity and the older world meant the fairy faith and the Sunday service coexisted without contradiction.

The native tradition of how the Island received its arms. Before the Christian era, the Island was inhabited by fairies and all business was carried on in a supernatural manner. A blue mist hung continually over the land, preventing mariners from suspecting an island was near. When fishermen, stranded by a storm, struck the first spark of fire on the beach, the fog began to move up the mountainside, closely followed by a revolving object resembling three legs of men joined together at the upper thigh, spinning like the spokes of a wheel. Hence the Arms of the Island. The blue mist was Manannan's cloak of protection in another form.

Around 950 AD, a woman was buried in a stone-lined grave on St Patrick’s Isle at Peel. Beside her lay a necklace of glass, amber and jet beads — some already three hundred years old — with an amber ring pendant at its centre. A leather pouch held bronze needles. Three iron knives, a pair of shears, a bone comb, a miniature stone pestle and mortar, and an ammonite fossil were placed around her. Down the length of her body lay a long iron rod, wrapped in textile and feathers from a goose wing. Seeds lay near the rod. Excavations at Peel Castle between 1982 and 1987, directed by David Freke for Liverpool University, uncovered an extensive early Christian cemetery on St Patrick’s Isle. Within it, seven pagan Norse burials were found — interments that followed Norse custom, placed inside the grounds of a Christian burial site. Among them, this woman’s grave was by far the richest. It is now considered the wealthiest Viking-age female burial in the British and Irish Isles outside Scandinavia. The iron rod was initially interpreted as a cooking spit, and the burial as that of a high-status head of household. That reading changed when the archaeologist Neil Price examined the object and identified its resemblance to iron staffs found in Norse female graves at Veka in Norway and at Birka in Sweden — graves associated with women who practised seiðr, the Norse tradition of prophecy and magic. The Old Norse word for such a woman was völva, meaning staff-bearer. The staff was the instrument of her craft. If Price is right, the Pagan Lady of Peel was not simply a wealthy woman. She was a seer, a practitioner of the old religion, buried with the tools of her art in the one place on the Island where the worlds of the living and the dead had met for centuries. Bone chemistry analysis confirmed that she was not born on the Island. She was a traveller who came to Mann and was buried there, carrying with her a necklace assembled from across Europe — beads from Britain, Scandinavia, and the Continent, some of them likely heirlooms, passed down through generations before they reached her. The burial tells more than one story. A pagan woman, laid to rest with the full apparatus of Norse ritual, inside a Christian cemetery. The community that buried her saw no contradiction, or if they did, they accommodated it. At Kirk Andreas, Thorwald’s Cross carries Odin devoured by Fenrir on one face and Christ triumphant on the other — two religions on the same slab of stone. The Pagan Lady’s grave is the same statement made in earth: the old world and the new, side by side, in the same consecrated ground. The same pattern runs through everything on the Island: the wells in the churchyards, the rushes going up the hill at Midsummer, the fishermen praying to Saint Patrick at the harbour and singing of Manannán on the water. The necklace is now displayed in the Viking Gallery at the Manx Museum in Douglas.

A fallen fairy, cast out of fairyland for falling in love with a mortal woman. Hairy, ungainly, enormously strong, and slightly tragic. He would gather sheep from the mountain in a single night, cut meadow grass, or move stones that no team of men could shift. He asked nothing in return except to be left alone. When a grateful farmer, meaning kindness, laid out clothes for him, the phynnodderee picked them up one by one, lamented in Manx over each piece, and departed forever. The old people mourned his going: there has not been a merry world since he lost his ground. In the book, the phynnodderee becomes a metaphor for the Revestment itself: the helpful spirit driven away by a gift of clothes, classification destroying the wild thing by trying to domesticate it.

Among the many stories of the Phynnodderee bringing sheep home for his farmer friends, there is one of his having brought home a hare among the flock. When questioned, he explained that the loaghtan beg, the little native sheep, had given him more trouble than all the rest, as it made him run three times round Snaefell before he caught it. The confusion of the hare for a small Loaghtan sheep is comic, but the story also shows the Phynnodderee's earnestness and his connection to the mountain landscape.

A farmer expressed displeasure with the Phynnodderee for not cutting his grass close enough to the ground. The following year the hairy one let the farmer cut it himself, but followed behind stubbing up the roots so fast that the farmer barely escaped having his legs cut off. For years afterwards no one could be found to mow the meadow until a fearless soldier from one of the garrisons took on the task. He began in the centre and cut outward in a circle, keeping one eye on the scythe and the other watching for the Phynnodderee. He finished unmolested. The field, in the parish of Marown near St Trinian's, is still called yn cheeanee rhunt, the Round Meadow.

A gentleman building a house at Tholt-e-Will, at the base of Snaefell, quarried stones on the beach. One immense block of white stone could not be moved despite the united strength of all the men in the parish. Overnight the Phynnodderee carried not only this block but the entire quarry of over a hundred cartloads from the shore to the building site. When the grateful gentleman laid out clothing for him, the Phynnodderee picked up each piece and lamented in Manx: cap for the head, alas poor head; coat for the back, alas poor back. Then he departed forever, mourning: if these be all thine, thine cannot be the merry Glen of Rushen.

The earliest printed account is by George Woods, in his Account of the Past and Present State of the Isle of Man, published in London in 1811. Walking the road from Peel towards St John's, Woods was told of an uncultivated hill about two miles from the town, on the far side of the river, still haunted by the spirit of a murdered witch. She did not appear to mortal eyes, but every night she joined her lamentations to the howling of the wind. He could not learn how she had offended the people. She had been put into a barrel with spikes set round the interior and rolled from the top of the hill to the bottom by the weight of herself and the apparatus, a fate Woods likened to that of the Roman general Regulus. The man who told him the story appeared to believe it himself. Woods names no hill, gives one woman, and uses the word murdered. In the same book he recorded Manx fishermen who, returning with an empty boat, blamed a witch and burned bundles of dry heath or furze through every part of the vessel to dispel the charm. Joseph Train, whose Historical and Statistical Account appeared in 1845, took the passage from Woods almost word for word and cited him for it. He added the name. About two miles from Peel, opposite the Tynwald Mount, there was a hill called Slieu Whallan, haunted by the spirit of a murdered witch. He then added a plural, since many other persons had suffered there in a similar manner, and a second victim, a man named Thomas Carran who died protesting his innocence and predicted that a thorn tree would grow on the summit to prove it. Train followed this with a second ordeal at the Curragh Glass near Greeba, where a suspected woman was driven into the water and, if she paddled to the side, was burnt alive or rolled from the top of Slieu Whallan. He set beside all this a case of December 1843, a trespass jury at Marown examining witnesses on whether they had witched a farmer's cattle, which he introduced with the observation that suspected witches were now differently treated in the Island. Henry Jenkinson's Practical Guide of 1874 condensed Train for visitors climbing the hill from St John's station. It kept the word murdered and Woods's phrase about the weight of herself and the apparatus, and it enlarged the plural to many other persons of both sexes. The condemned man became a separate story, unnamed, with a thorn tree at his head and a well or spring at his feet, and a promise to trouble the neighbourhood so long as grass continued to grow or water to flow. A. W. Moore's Folk-lore of the Isle of Man of 1891 printed Train's version under the heading The Witch of Slieu Whallian, and in its chapter on witchcraft described the ducking and the spiked barrel as what it was supposed had happened in old times, before setting out the church and civil records from 1638 onwards to show that the courts had dealt with such people in a milder fashion. John Rhys, collecting at St John's about 1890 and avoiding the printed books, found a tradition that witches had at one time been punished by being set to roll down the steep side of the mountain in spiked barrels, with nothing else attached to it. Sophia Morrison, writing in 1911 from Peel, joined the barrel to the loss of the herring fleet. Her wise woman sold fair winds, looked into a basin of water, foretold the wreck of the fleet on the Calf, and was blamed afterwards for raising the storm. The people took her to the top of Slieu Whallian in a spiked barrel, the barrel sank into the bog at the foot, and a bare track down the mountainside where nothing would grow was called the Witch's Way. The record does not support the custom, and the shape of the tradition shows why. The Spiritual Law that Moore printed required a suspected witch to be presented to the Chapter Quest, held in the Bishop's prison while a jury of the parish inquired, and then delivered to the Lord's gaol and court if a notorious fault was proved. That is the process the court books show, and the cases Moore printed from them end in penance, apology or acquittal. The one capital case that has been read for this site, against Margaret yne Quane and her son John Cubon of Kirk German in 1617, ended in a sentence of burning pronounced at Castle Rushen, not on a hill. A practice carried out repeatedly would have left a charge, a court and an entry somewhere in books that recorded every sixpence, and it has left none, whereas a single killing by neighbours would leave nothing at all, so the silence tells against the custom and says nothing either way about the woman. Every account close to the ground has a single woman. The plural rests on one sentence of Train's, enlarged by a guidebook. The reason for her death moves with each teller. Woods could not discover one, Train supplied a judicial sentence and attached it to the man, and Morrison's tellers said she had raised the storm by her spells. What stays fixed from 1811 to 1911 is a woman, a hill, a barrel, a killing and a lament in the wind, told first by a Peel man to a visitor who wrote it down, and carried since by Train's history, Jenkinson's guidebook, Moore's collection, Rhys's fieldwork at St John's and Morrison's tales from Peel.

The earliest account is George Waldron's, in his Description of the Isle of Man of 1744, who set the water bull among the prodigies of nature he was convinced of the truth of. It was an amphibious creature so like a bull that many people, seeing him in a field, had not distinguished him from the natural kind, and the cows had no instinct to avoid him, though what they conceived by him never had life or any due formation but was a rude lump of flesh and skin without bones, seldom brought forth without the death of the cow. A neighbour of Waldron's who had lost several cows to it set a man to watch, and when word came that a strange bull was among the cows he called a good number of lusty men armed with poles and pitchforks. They ran at the bull together, but he was too nimble, and after tiring them over mountains and rocks and a great space of stony ground he took a river and dived down into it, showing his head above water now and then as if to mock their skill. Waldron heard of another man who had more cunning and shot one with a brace of bullets as it was going into the river. Joseph Train, in 1845, said the belief was not yet extinct. A few years before, the farmer of Slieau Mayll in Onchan, coming home from worship one Sunday evening, had seen at the garee of Slegaby a wild-looking animal with large eyes sparkling like fire cross the road before him and go flapping away, which he knew for a tarroo-ushtey because his father had seen one at nearly the same place, and he broke his walking stick over its back, so lazy was it to get out of his way. The farmer's brother, going to the fold very early one June morning at Lhanjaghyn, saw a water bull outside it, and the bull within broke through the fence and ran at it roaring and tearing up the ground, but the tarroo-ushtey scampered off unconcerned, leapt over a precipice into deep water, swam about a little as if amusing himself, gave a loud bellow and disappeared. A. W. Moore printed both accounts in 1891, with the Manx word, and gave the old Fenodderee song that calls down the spotted water bull and the Glashtin on an enemy to throw him like a bolster against the wall. John Rhys, collecting in 1891, was told by a man from the Ayre that there used to be a tarroo ushtey between Andreas and the sea to the west before the ground was drained, and an octogenarian captain at Peel had heard one as a boy, the bellowings of the brute making the ground tremble. Rhys noted that the Manx bull was not of the same breed as the Welsh lake bull, whose visits brought great fertility and an overflow of milk, for in the Isle of Man the tarroo ushtey only begot monsters and strangely formed beasts. W. Walter Gill, in 1929, added the tale of Pharick y Kellya of the Lower Kellya in Dalby, cutting turf on the slope of Cronk yn Irree Lhaa about a hundred years before, who saw a little tarroo-ushtey rise out by the well and grow bigger as it came towards him, and laid on to it with his turf spade until it was nothing but a soft jelly like frog spawn, for these watery creatures dissolve at the touch of iron. Gill also recorded that the water bull had something queer about his ears which came out again in the calves that followed his visits to the farm's cows, the mark by which fairy beasts are known.

Waldron, writing around the 1720s, recorded the native belief that the first inhabitants of the Island were fairies, and that these little people still had their residence among the Manx. They called them the good people and said they lived in wilds and forests and on mountains, shunning great cities because of the wickedness acted therein. All the houses were blessed where they visited, for they fly vice. Waldron noted that a person would be thought impudently profane who should suffer his family to go to bed without having first set a tub of clean water for these guests to bathe themselves in. If anything happened to be mislaid and found again in an unexpected place, they presently told you a fairy took it and returned it.