My husband and I both have some Irish heritage. He also has English blood. My heritage is also a mixed bag of Scottish and Swiss-German Mennonite. My Mennonite ancestors sought refuge from religious persecution in Pennsylvania, and later left for what is now the Kitchener-Waterloo area in Ontario. Recently, I was playing around with my mother’s birth name (Hume) and my husband’s surname (Holmden) on the Internet to see what I would find. I’m not sure why I did this, but I found out that both names have their roots in Scotland and northern England. Chris and I had a good laugh over that, making jokes about potential inbreeding and such. Rather macabre I suppose, but given how cold it is here and how much cabin fever we’re experiencing, it’s kind of fun.

It turns out that brownies and hobs have their origins in Scotland and northern England as well, a fitting bit of irony given that I’m beginning to wonder if I have a brownie of my own. (Our ancestors left their homelands but did their homelands really ever leave them?)

I will state outright that I don’t believe in ghosts. I do believe that places can be left with certain tones of feeling by those who’ve lived in them, or by the very land on which they’re built. I don’t know how this works, but I have experienced it myself.

When Chris and I first moved to Saskatoon we had to find a home quickly as our worldly goods were on their way from California and our two young children needed a roof over their heads. The real estate agent found three houses in our price range. Given the real estate boom that happened shortly after, it’s surprising there were only three, but that was the state of things then. The first house we viewed was a tiny bungalow built in the 1910s across the street from a beautiful park. Chris was impressed right away with the location and the solid construction. As soon as we stepped inside, I got a very bad feeling about the house. The perceptive real estate agent noticed it right away. We walked to the back of the house and I felt even worse. I told Chris that I could never live in the house. He was, understandably, disappointed. We went to the basement anyhow. It was an unfinished basement with a steep staircase. There were three or four tiny rooms off the main basement area, all painted black. I took my children and headed back up the stairs as quickly as I could. Chris later told me that he didn’t feel very good about the house either. The house we ended up buying was even smaller and extremely plain but we felt at ease as soon as we stepped inside for the first time. When our family grew we moved to another house. This one, too, had a good feeling. It cost a bit more than we had planned on spending, but it is a solid house and we love it.

I had an experience when we moved into our current home that defies rational explanation. As we packed up the old house, I was doing some mending and lost the needle. I was very upset because our youngest child was crawling then and putting everything she found into her mouth. I looked and looked but couldn’t find the needle anywhere. The day we moved into our new house, as I unpacked a box of dishes, I lamented that we had perhaps made a mistake in our purchase after all. As soon as I expressed my doubt aloud I looked down into the box and immediately saw the needle I had lost a few days earlier. I knew it was the same needle by the length and color of the thread still attached. I got goosebumps and took it as a sign that we had made the right choice.

About four years later, one of my children had a musical mentor whose best friend, it turned out, had lived and died in our house. This man had been musical (like my children) and kept his piano exactly where we keep ours. It was an interesting coincidence that made us feel even better about our choice.

Recently, Chris and I have been talking about moving to a warmer climate if the right opportunity arises. I’ve noticed that whenever I get excited about the possibility of doing so, the house seems a little less friendly. It’s the sense that something good and warm is replaced by something less friendly and perhaps even threatening. When I stop thinking about moving, the bad feeling in the house goes away.

Perhaps I inherited a brownie from the home of my great aunt. As a child my happiest memories are of time spent with her. Her house was a treasure trove of antiques and handcrafted items made by long dead relatives. The room I slept in with my sister was the same room in which our great grandfather had died (the same bed, too). I always felt perfectly safe and relaxed in that house. My sister and I would giggle until we fell asleep. I recall having the sense at times, usually first thing in the morning, that a small man about two or three feet tall was watching us. I was often startled by this sensation but never frightened by it.

Here is Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You, accurately restored and described by Tony Diterlizzi and Holly Black, on brownies:

These kindly and dependable creatures (also called lobs, hobs, or, if female, silkies) attach themselves to human households, where they help with chores and protect the well-being of people living on “their” land.

Fiercely loyal, brownies will defend a home and its surrounding estate from burglars and goblins. They live somewhere on the land they protect, perhaps in an abandoned barn, an unused closet, or within the walls. Despite their love of cleanliness, brownies are rather shabby in appearance, often going shoeless or wholly unclothed. Even so, they expect no payment other than scraps of food and a bowl of milk left out at night; in fact, further gifts are likely to induce adverse effects.

I didn’t have house hobs or brownies on my mind at all until I read Katherine Langrish’s Troll Trilogy. The hob in those books is a helpful yet mischievous being, the Nis, who is particularly attached to one member of the household, the main protagonist, Peer Ulfsson. The Nis is only one of many reasons to read these books (Troll Fell, Troll Mill and Troll Blood) if you haven’t done so already.

For a fascinating glimpse into brownies in 19th and 20th century popular culture, there are two sites worth visiting: The Photographic Historical Society of Canada: Palmer Cox, The Brownie Craze, and the Brownie Camera, March 21, 2007 AND Palmer Cox: The Brownies.