Newtown Boggle

BOGGLE is the Cumbrian dialect term for a ghost - well, anything odd or unexplained. And the Newtown Boggle is one of the more famous supernatural visitors that is said to wander the streets of Whitehaven. Over the centuries the boggle has changed shape and form - probably due to two ghost stories being confused. In one form the boggle is a huge black dog that stands and howls outside a house the night before a death (or on the harbour when a ship has been lost at sea). In its other form, the boggle is described as an extremely tall lady with no head.

My partner, Lesley, has now stumbled across what is perhaps the oldest reference to the boggle - a report in The Cumberland Pacquet of October 1, 1793:

WHITEHAVEN: Whether on "the sensible and true avouch of their own eyes," we know not, but it is reported, that a very ancient and awful personage, commonly known by the title of The New-Town Boggle, has lately 'revisited the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous.' -- Nothing so much checks the general admission of the report, as the shape in which this well-known phantom now appears: - it is that of a huge swine: and some sceptics are of opinion, that so extraordinary a visitant should assume a form less common to our streets.

I am happy to be corrected, but what I think The Pacquet is saying towards the end is that the sceptics are suspicious that the creature should appear in such a common form as that of a pig - common, because at that time most households would have kept a pig in the backyard. 

If the boggle was a portent of disaster then its appearance in October 1793 was very timely. A couple of weeks later The Pacquet would report on the execution of Marie Antoinette.

The 'making night hideous' quote is from Hamlet.