 From 2008 to 2014, the show True Blood aired weekly on our TVs. Of course, this TV series was based on a book series called The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlene Harris. Now, I personally was a huge fan of True Blood. And as any fan can tell you, what started off as just a story about vampires became stories about all sorts of folkloric creatures in society. And one of these creatures was the fairies or the fey. It seems the main character, Sookie Stackhouse, was herself a hybrid of human and fairy. But you see this idea of fairies, very human hybrid or of humans being taken by fairies is not just selective to the stories of True Blood. In fact, this folklore has been around for a very, very long time. And I told you in a previous video that we were going to start to look at the different legends of little people. Again, I don't believe the fairies are the same as the little people that have been found with the giants. If you have not seen those videos, I will link them down below. But before we get started, make sure to hit that subscribe button and give us a like. If you want to help support the channel, we do have a link to our Patreon down below. Welcome to Esoteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce. And today we're going to be talking about the changelings. Move into our story. When I tell you these stories, I'm giving them to you in the form of storytelling. Your opinions over any religious interpretations of these beings are your opinions. And as I always say in every video, I love to hear your opinions. If you think the fairies are demonic, then that's fine. Let us know in the comment section below. However, if you use Jesus or your religious faith as a weapon to bully or abuse anybody else in the comments, you will be blocked from this channel. On this channel, God is love and Jesus is love. I am open to hearing everybody's perspective and having really constructive dialogue with other people's beliefs. I believe that's how we grow as humanity when everybody has a seat at the table and can say their own opinions. But again, any bullying in the name of God or Jesus will not be tolerated on this channel. And if you feel the need to use Jesus as a weapon, I would highly suggest you sit with that and you pray on that. All right, so let's get started. So the fairies have been around Western Europe for a very long time. Now, some of the fairies are seen to be in full human stature like we saw in True Blood. However, other fairies are seen to be like little people, which might be why some people believe that the fairies are part of the legends of the little people with the giants. In popular culture, this idea of a little fairy or a little person with wings would be almost like Tinker Bell from the classic story of Peter Pan. Now, fairies can also be called the fey. So if you hear people refer to the fey, they're talking about the fairies. The fairies are magical beings, and they do perhaps live in a parallel universe to our own. Whether the fey or the fairies are good or bad is up to interpretation. Again, there are a lot of Christian sex that do believe that fairies are perhaps demons. And I can kind of see where they're coming from, especially with the story we're going to get into today. However, some people believe that the fairies can be good. Maybe again, it's another time when we can look at free will. Are fairies all notoriously evil, or are they all notoriously good, or is there some gray there, a bit like human beings, where every living being has a choice to make? And seeing that I've never personally had an experience with a fairy, nor am I certain they actually exist, I'm going to hold back on my opinion on whether they're good or evil. Even though it appears that the fairies live in an alternative world, a multiverse or a parallel universe, there are times in our history where people have claimed to have experience with fairies. We do know that there are kings and queens in fairy folklore, and we are aware that fairies are able to produce their own offspring. However, for some weird reason, they often need to take human beings to assist in this. It is often said that they also take human beings to be their servants. Not necessarily of a fantastical world that maybe you would want to go to. I think that it's probably very different from what we saw on True Blood. So how do fairies go about this? If you remember back from the last episode where I introduced the idea of little people, I said that there were some forms of little people that were responsible for kidnapping children. And this would be the changelings, which are part of the fairy or fe folklore. A very rough definition of a changeling would be if a baby was an infant, it was a new child. Sometimes the fairies would come in and take the child and leave another fairy in its place. This fairy was called the changeling. Now, oftentimes the fairy they left in its place was very old and would eventually die off or would just be considered part of the human family and be unknowingly raised by these human parents. Fairies do have the ability to glamour people, which is often found in vampire folklore, where they're able to put almost like a spell on someone to see what they want that person to see. However, it is said that oftentimes parents in historical times would notice that the changeling was there instead of their child because the changeling would all of a sudden get very sick. They also said that sometimes the changeling would start to grow a beard as a baby or would have really long teeth. Now, this was a legitimate concern to our ancestors from Europe. A lot of historians to this day blame the story of changelings on infant side. That sometimes back before birth control was practice that maybe sometimes poorer families would end up having too many children and they would have to get rid of a child and so they would blame it on the phenomenon of changelings. We spoke about this with cry baby bridge here in the United States. There's lots of bridges that tend to have the ghost of a crying baby where a lot of people believe that these were babies that were murdered by women who couldn't afford to raise the child. There is also the belief that a lot of people who gave birth to medically fragile children, maybe children with autism back in those days didn't understand what autism was and so therefore they blamed their child's disabilities on the phenomenon of changeling. However, there is a really good YouTube channel that I stumbled upon while I was doing research for this video. I'm going to link the YouTube channel down below. This lady seems to specialize in this idea of fairies and in changeling. She has some really good episodes on the changelings. Now she said that we're not giving our ancestors enough credit. Yes, this could be true for some cases, but even back a couple hundred years ago, our ancestors were aware of certain medical conditions. They might not have understood autism as we understand it today, but they were aware that there was something medically not wrong but different about the child. So in a lot of cases that just simply doesn't pan out. So we do we're looking at people who do have some understanding of what happens to people medically, but also believe in the phenomenon of changelings. There were parents who would put iron around their babies and salt around their babies. There was also an idea that a baptized baby could not be taken by the fairies. Growing up a Presbyterian, I was baptized pretty quickly after I was born. That's pretty common in the Presbyterian church. Of course, a lot of denominations have different ideas and beliefs around baptism. Now that seems pretty simple in today's world. You can just bring your kid to a church, get it baptized, no big deal. Back then, though, you didn't always have access to a priest. So you would have to wait for the priest to perhaps come to your town to get your baby baptized. So what happens if you turn your back on your infant for a few minutes and a fairy comes in and switches your baby out for another older fairy, a changeling? And you start to notice that your baby isn't your baby and so you want to try to get your baby back. Well, this is where a lot of the infant side came in to question. Some of the practices of getting the changeling to leave and bring your baby back involved abusing the baby. There are lots of stories that you can read about regarding this situation. I'm not going to go into too much detail on this channel. Some of the situations, though, were leaving the child outside to cry until finally the fairies would bring your own baby back and take their changeling back to their world. There is a really kind of funny story I read from Ireland where a baby had been changed by the fairies. The changeling was there and before the mother even noticed that her baby was not her baby, the mother of the fairy that got changed knocked on the woman's door and gave her her baby back and asked for her fairy child back in return. It seems the other fairies had brought her baby to change out with the human lady's baby and the mama fairy was not very happy about that so she just marched right up and said they tricked us, let's switch our babies back. And that does cover another point. Of course, yes, a lot of the changelings are older fairies that will eventually die but then sometimes the changelings are younger fairies that some parents do want to grow up in a human world. Now the babies they bring back to their fairy universe are often raised there and used as breeding stock. Now for the babies, it does seem that the fairies prefer male babies. So for a long time women in Europe would dress their infants up like little girl babies. This was interesting to me because even I have pictures of my grandparents and great-grandparents when they were babies and they were in dresses with their hair like curled a little bit and I don't know if my ancestors of my great-grandparents parents if that they were doing that intentionally for the legend of the changeling or if it just got so into the western European culture that women just did that not even knowing where it stems from. I mean think about baptismal dresses for both little boys and little girls, they're dresses. Little boys are put in baptismal dresses. So that's kind of interesting and I do wonder if that's where it got its origins. Now there are cases where fairies will switch out adults, human adults and this mostly is women. This is either a new mother who is able to nurse because for some reason the fairies need human milk to feed their babies. This is also for new brides who are young enough and potentially fertile enough to be used again as breeding stock in the fairy world. Now when the changeling is presented it's a lot like with the baby. The fairy coming in as the original person will look a lot like the person and they'll be glamored and their partner will hopefully recognize eventually it's not their wife or spouse but in the beginning they would resemble the wife or the spouse. Now since adults have more of a formed personality than an infant, usually the spouse would notice changes in their wife by the way she behaved. For example if someone was usually pretty easygoing or kind you might see more sassy attitude or anger coming from the changeling. There's also the idea that eventually the changeling will get sick because it's in human form and this was the case of Bridget Cleary. Bridget Cleary lived in Ireland in 1895. She was a young bride. Now Bridget was out one day and she came home and developed pneumonia. Her husband and her friends, family friends thought that this sick woman was the sign of a changeling. So in order to try to get the real Bridget back the family, the husband especially, started to abuse Bridget. Of course Bridget just got sicker and sicker and sicker and nothing happened. No fairy came to bring the real Bridget back. Unfortunately Bridget ended up dying. Her husband was tried for her murder and was found guilty. Now the question still remains did he really believe that his wife had been abducted by a fairy and that was a changeling or was this just an excuse to get rid of her. Luckily now in 2020 we don't see a lot of this anymore in America or European countries. However I do know that a lot of people still are cautious of the idea of changelings and if you want to be super cautious especially around babies it is said that if you want to protect the baby don't give it a compliment. Folklore still says that the fairies are listening and when they hear that a baby is beautiful or cute multiple times then that baby becomes very very very prime real estate for the fairies to abduct. So if you want to be on the safe side don't go complimenting any babies. All right guys let me know what you think. Again I don't think the fairies have anything to do with the little people that are associated with the giants. You could probably understand why I wouldn't think that. Now if you think they are associated with the giants I would love to hear why. I'd love to hear your opinion so please place it down below. Again make sure all of your opinions are very respectful to each other. This channel is supposed to be informative and entertaining and a place where we can all talk about weird and fringe topics. All right thank you to Josh McKay for doing our music and to Todd Roderick for helping me produce this video. We should have a link available very soon for the opening song. I know a lot of you have asked and that will be available real soon. So anyway I hope you guys have a wonderful day. Be good. Bye.