The Nicole is a spirit of modern creation who torments the honest fishermen of the Bay of Saint-Brieuc and 101 Saint-Malo. Just as they are about to draw in their nets this mischievous spirit leaps around them, freeing the fish, or he will loosen a boat’s anchor so that it will drift on to a sand-bank. He may divide the cable which holds the anchor to the vessel and cause endless trouble. This spirit received its name from an officer who commanded a battalion of fishermen conscripts, and who from his intense severity and general reputation as a martinet obtained a bad reputation among the seafaring population.
The Mourioche
The Mourioche is a malicious demon of bestial nature, able, it would seem, to transform himself into any animal shape he chooses. In general appearance he is like a year-old foal. He is especially dangerous to children, and Breton babies are often chided when noisy or mischievous with the words: “Be good, now, the Mourioche is coming!” Of one who appears to have received a shock, also, it is said: “He has seen the Mourioche.” Unlucky is the person who gets in his way; but doubly so the unfortunate who attempts to mount him in the belief that he is an ordinary steed, for after a fiery gallop he will be precipitated into an abyss and break his neck.
The Ankou
Perhaps there is no spirit of evil which is so much dreaded by the Breton peasantry as the Ankou, who travels the duchy in a cart, picking up souls. In the dead of night a creaking axle-tree can be heard passing down the silent lanes. It halts at a door; the summons has been given, a soul quits the doomed house, and the 102 wagon of the Ankou passes on. The Ankou herself—for the dread death-spirit of Brittany is probably female—is usually represented as a skeleton. M. Anatole le Braz has elaborated a study of the whole question in his book on the legend of death in Brittany,[38] and it is probable that the Ankou is a survival of the death-goddess of the prehistoric dolmen-builders of Brittany. MacCulloch[39] considers the Ankou to be a reminiscence of the Celtic god of death, who watches over all things beyond the grave and carries off the dead to his kingdom, but greatly influenced by medieval ideas of ‘Death the skeleton.’ In some Breton churches a little model or statuette of the Ankou is to be seen, and this is nothing more nor less than a cleverly fashioned skeleton. The peasant origin of the belief can be found in the substitution of a cart or wagon for the more ambitious coach and four of other lands.
The Youdic
Dark and gloomy are many of the Breton legends, of evil things, gloomy as the depths of the forests in which doubtless many of them were conceived. Most folk-tales are tinged with melancholy, and it is rarely in Breton story that we discover a vein of the joyous.
THE DEMON-DOG