The Demon Lover

There were strange things moving in the dark, last night. One of the first clear, cold nights of the winter, and one of the few nights you could see nearly to the treeline.

I say things, because there seemed to be too much of it to be any one thing, Tall, thin, dark, and the only way you could see any movement was the strange flicker, with flashes of pallor in the moonlight.

I told no one of this. I'm not sure if I was hallucinating, or if there was something in the woods.

But aside for my personal mental deterioration, I'm determined to keep researching the interconnected figures to this millpond man, and the man in the woods.

I remember seeing mentioned in the manuscript, and some of the files on the project archive website, was this concept of a "Demon Lover". In fact, Sir Water Scott has a version of this ballad in his writings of folk ballads of England and Scotland.

At first glance, I deemed it fatuous. But as I kept skimming over the literature, and the compilations of the original stories, there were unnerving parallels that persist through the narratives.

The original tale of the Demon Lover is told through the narrative lens of the Lover himself. He seems to be a strange, obssessive figure who comes by sea to return to a long-lost lover, who has since been wed off to a carpenter.

Now, she had originally pledged her love to this Demon Lover, a sailor figure, but when he had departed for distant shores for some undetermined amount of time (the amount varies between stories, it seems), she instead opted to take a new lover, who became her husband and the father of her child.

Now, it appears that she was quite enthused by the idea of her original lover, the demon, to promise her riches from foreign lands, and adventure, excitement, etc. But after he left, she instead sought security and stability in the human carpenter. These themes are pretty recognizable-- a human who has pledged fealty or love to a water demon, who promises prosperity in return for their loyalty.

At first, I was pretty prepared to skim these over as superficially similar folkish stories, But then several versions of the ballad struck a very uncanny note. They reference the Demon Lover suddenly becoming monstrous with her rejection, and his retaliation is to take the both of them back to Hell, where he came from.

But even stranger is his physical transformation.

And as she turned herself roundabout,
So tall and tall he seemed to be,
Until the tops of that gallant ship
No taller were than he.

And he struck the topmast with his hand,
The main mast with his knee,
And he broke that shining ship in two
And he dashed it into the bottom of the sea.

The Demon Lover becomes as tall as the masts of a ship, and he wrecks the ship single-handedly,  This strength and height is very reminiscent of the stories of the Millpond Man, and The Man in the Woods, who seemed to be as tall as the trees.

This Demon Lover has also been catalogued in a number of alternately titled folk ballads, also called The Carpenter's Wife, The Housecarpenter, as well as James Harris, which is what some of the ballads call the Demon Lover.

Another very uncanny, very strange and chilling note in these versions. Bob Dylan borrowed this folk ballad, and turned it into The Man in the Long Black Coat, transposing the story to Appalachain America, and the story is told through the eyes of the jilted husband, who learns his wife has been spirited away by this Demon Lover.

The man in the long black coat.

One description is so vivid and so arresting that it never leaves my head.

Somebody seen him hanging around
At the old dance hall on the outskirts of town,
He looked into her eyes when she stopped to ask
If he wanted to dance, he had a face like a mask.
Somebody said from the Bible he'd quote
There was dust on the man
In the long black coat.

A face like a mask. Every time I  think on this, the picture I found on my phone sears through my head, The manlike shape by the tree.

Here's a version of Dylan's song:

And a version of Demon Lover, sung by contemporary artists, but through the traditional ballad format.

People, especially people who are vulnerable in society, who make a pact with unsavory power figures. And when they can't make good on their promises with these inherently unbalanced demands, the demon figure kills them, or takes their soul, and in general robs them of being in the realm of regular society.