Upon which the imp cried "Ho! ho! ho! my daddy is come!" flew through the keyhole, and was never heard of after. Unbaptised children were, in this county at the beginning of the century, said to turn, when they died, into piskies; they gradually went through many transformations at each change, getting smaller until at last they became "Meryons"[1] (ants) and finally disappeared. Another tradition is that they were Druids, who, because they would not believe in Christ, were for their sins condemned to change first into piskies, gradually getting smaller, they too, as ants, at last are lost. It is on account of these legends considered unlucky to destroy an ant's nest, and a piece of tin put into one could, in bygone days, through pisky power be transmuted into silver, provided that it was inserted at some varying lucky moment about the time of the new moon.
Moths were formerly believed in Cornwall to be departed souls, and are still, in some districts, called piskies.
There is also a green bug which infests bramble-bushes in the late autumn that bears the same name, and one of the reasons assigned for blackberries not being good after Michaelmas is that pisky spoils them then. Pisky is in some places invoked for luck at the swarming of bees.
It was once a common custom in East Cornwall, when houses were built, to leave holes in the walls by which these little beings could enter; to stop them up would drive away all luck. And in West Cornwall knobs of lead, known as pisky's pows or pisky feet, were placed at intervals on the roofs of farm-houses to prevent the piskies from dancing on them and turning the milk sour in the dairies.
Country people in East Cornwall sometimes put a prayer book under a child's pillow as a charm to keep away piskies. I am told that a poor woman, near Launceston, was fully persuaded that one of her children was taken away and a piskey substituted, the disaster being caused by the absence of a prayer book on one particular night. —H. G. T. Notes and Queries, December, 1850.
If piskies are kind and helpful little beings, spriggans or sprites are spiteful creatures, never doing a good turn for any one. It is they
- ↑ The word Meryons is also used in Cornwall as a term of endearment, "She's faather's little Meryon."
