The Púca (An Púca)

A shapeshifter who might carry you home or might carry you into a bog, and who spoils the blackberries.

The púca is the most unpredictable thing in Irish folklore, which is precisely what defines it. It is neither good nor bad. It helps and it torments, sometimes the same person on the same night, and there is no way to know which you are getting.

It appears as a black horse with eyes like coals, and also as a goat, a bull, a dog, a hare, a cat, an eagle, and occasionally as a man with animal features. The horse is the famous one. It waits for a person walking home late, invites them up, and takes them on a ride across country at an impossible speed before depositing them, usually unharmed and always badly shaken, in a ditch or back at their own door.

On a farm it can be an asset. There are many accounts of a púca threshing corn or doing a night's work unasked, with the household leaving out a share for it. Cross it and the same creature will scatter the harvest and knock the walls.

It belongs particularly to Samhain, the turn of the year. There is a widespread tradition that after Samhain no blackberry should be eaten, because the púca has been over them and fouled them, which is also sound advice about fruit in November.

The origin of the name is unsettled. It is old enough to appear in place-names by the eighth century, and relatives of the word turn up across Britain and northern Europe, but which way the borrowing went is not agreed.