Black Annis

Black Annis was the terror of the Dane Hills, west of Leicester — a hag with a blue face, iron talons and a single eye, said to have clawed her own cavern, 'Black Annis' Bower', out of the sandstone with her bare nails. From a great pollarded oak she would spring upon stray children and lambs, devour them, and tan their skins to hang from the boughs or wear about her waist. Old cottages in the district were built with deliberately small windows so that she could not reach a clawed arm inside.

Folklorists suspect a far older figure behind the bogey: Annis may descend from a Celtic mother-goddess, Anu, or from the winter hag, the Cailleach, demonised and shrunk into a children's frightener. Into the nineteenth century a 'drag-hunt' was held each Easter Monday — a dead cat soaked in aniseed dragged from the Bower to the Mayor's house — a faint, festive echo of some older ritual long forgotten.