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Study 167 - Changeling (Patreon)

Published:
2026-05-21 19:15:22
Imported:
2026-05
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We're investigating a weird tale by Scottish author Dorothy K. Haynes: Changeling, the story of a young girl stolen by a witch and living among the fae.

Special thanks to our reader, France Leigh Hadrysiak!

Next up: An extra credit episode on Poe featuring Andrew Leman and Sean Branney of the HPLHS (plus a bonus full reading)!

Comments

Aaron La Vene

What’s even more sad is how less than 200 years ago, people still had high belief in changelings in places like Ireland. To where they would kill babies or burn their wives alive thinking they were replaced by a changeling. When a child was born with defects or a loved one became ill and became looking or acting different because of it. People would believe they were changelings. Absolutely horrifying to think about.

Rick Hound

I’d say the lingering discontent of being constrained in adulthood is far longer than just capitalism; the idea of a species that for a majority of its existence was being in small communities of mobile hunters-gathers, then making a system where it makes them permanently rooted amongst much more people than one usually do. They get used to the relative safety it gives, but they become someone required to maintain this system. Now far more deeply rooted, their generations are forever stuck their working either passively coerced or aggressively coerced to stay there.

Mistress Frieren

Listening to this episode on my way to my desk job where I send my work off to people who may or may not even read it was a real one, two gut punch. This was a really wonder story and I'm excited to hear them do more from this author.

Henrik Arborén

I must say I really like the way Chad goes deeper than ever before into trying to deconstruct and explain the stories' psychological undercurrents in these last few episodes. That makes me appreciate this podcast, that has always been superb in so many ways, even more. Thank you so much, both of you, for always evolving instead of stagnating.

Ann Knight

Please don't take this comment the wrong way, but I miss the occasional "bad" story that Chris (it's usually Chris) doesn't like for whatever reason, which is then subject to a humor-filled takedown, firm yet gentle. There's something to be said for comic relief.

witchhousemedia

We feel it too. That's why next month, we're doing a story where space pilots are psychically linked to cats who pilot their own football-sized spaceships. (The Game of Rat and Dragon)

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

From what I understand, there is evidence that changeling legends—particularly with children—tended to target Autistic or neurodivergent family members. When you're on the spectrum, you can trundle along with your development the way your family expects until you hit a hard line and begin acting in a way they do not expect. Likewise, you can seem unnaturally precocious for your age in some ways and seriously impaired or strange in others. I shudder to think about how many kids that were like me may have been ostracized or hurt because their parents, the people they loved and depended on entirely, turned on them for simply being different.

Aaron La Vene

Yah it’s terrifying to think about how this was happening in just the late 19th century

It's a Ghost.

The steamy window at the end does make for an ambiguous ending, and I was afraid that the girl in the pink frock (Clara) was going to be the next child to be taken by the witch. But I suspect instead that Clara stopped playing the piano and ran to the doctor on the corner because Miss Moreen had just "died" now that the real Moreen has returned.

It's a Ghost.

I find it interesting that ostensibly Moreen is the main character, except the story is called Changeling, and it's the changeling Moreen that lives the full life in Moreen's house, including part of it with the real Moreen's mother.

Steven Vincent

Great show was the old Planet of the Apes. I believe I even had one or two of the MEGO action figures 😊👍

Jamie Allinson

Thank you very much for covering this author. Although, like your excellent reader, I come from Dundee, I had never heard of Dorothy Haynes before. It added something for me to hear occasional familiar words or descriptions of North East Scotland in a weird tale - like ‘clarted/ clarty’ which I grew up with. A ‘shawlie’ means a woman unable to afford a hat and so wearing a traditional shawl, so there’s a class element there. You often see them in old photos of factories and farms. I really like this kind of story that takes a familiar supernatural trope and flips it - imagine what it is like to be the child *taken* by the Fair Folk- adding an element of strange melancholy. As someone now old enough to remember when the Millennials were young, I also wholeheartedly agree with Chad’s points. PS. can confirm all Scots grow up surrounded by gargoyles all the time.

Jim Cannon

Music from "The Quest of Iranon." Nice. That story shares a lot of the same themes as this one, and is probably Lovecraft's one stab at something like "The Changeling." Moreen (is that the spelling?) ends up in a fairy mound, or sidhe. That's why the sky feels close even though its full of stars, and also why its perpetual twilight. She has gone underground into the fairy world, and apparently she's shrunken down to fairy size? Like the Cottingly Fairies or Tinkerbell, not the traditional inhabitants of a sidhe. That's another neat wrinkle. She's lucky that she doesn't end up like most others who spend too long in the fairy realm and come back, where all the years they've missed catch up to them. Moreen may still be a child, and she may be stuck in a world she never knew, but she has a chance at a normal life. Man, I gotta tell you, I can read about adults being mistreated, murdered, abused, eaten by goblins, turned into salt, or whatever all day but the casual abuse of a child really messes me up. Thinking about how much of the author's own life seems reflected in this tale is just all the more heartbreaking.

Steve

What have people from Crete ever done to Chad that he's afraid of them?

The Lonely Sand Person

My sense was that the witch represented a social worker -- an elderly woman, seen through a child's eyes, come to spirit the child away to an orphanage where she will never see her mother again while assuring her this is all for the best and that she doesn't really have a choice anyway. I read the return trip with the witch as a part of the quest to recover the lost childhood, finding the same woman and asking her "Where did I live? What was my address?"

Pete Williams

I had a weird experience recently, my wife was watching something on social media, the menu music from the Nintendo Wii was playing and I got a hit of nostalgia for my early 20s. I'm 43 now and I didn't realise or really think about how much my life and the world had changed since 06/07. Of course I knew consciously that it had. I had graduated college (I only started my degree at 22), I had met a girl, broken up, met another girl, got married. There was a recession, a pandemic etc. I knew so much had changed but it was like a river, one thing flowing into another and this took me back to an earlier time in my life where lots of things seemed possible but after just one more game of Wii sports tennis.

Rob Gillie

those British Library Tales of the Weird books are awesome, and there's several years worth of material for you in them. I have at least a dozen of them (and I'd have all of them if I had the money in the bank and the space in the apartment). I have that Haynes collection, and it might be the only book I own that I have to open immediately because the cover creeps me the hell out.

Stacy Schumacher

Chad, Jack confirms that gargoyles are all over the place in Scotland, and especially for anyone living in a tenement flat, you can't look out the window without seeing gargoyles. I was curious about this author and started looking into her biography a bit, and saw that the building that was the school at the orphanage she lived at went up for sale a year ago, and the listing noted gargoyles.

Stacy Schumacher

Also noting that if you haven't looked it up, you should search for the Paisley Abbey Gargoyle. You'll see why.

margarks

What I really enjoy about this podcast, and why I have been listening for so many years is your guys's analysis. I have listened to a lot of literary review podcasts, but very few do it the way you guys do. You get to what I think each story means (or possibly means) when most people just re-itereate what the stories say. You always give me food for though, not just about the story, but about whatever life lessons the story may be about. Thanks!

HRPrice

Any time I’m at the cool local bookstore, looking for something to read but not sure what sounds good, British Library of the Weird rolls up with some suggestions. 10/10, highly recommend!

Pagurus

So, bottom line: We are all changelings, swapped at one point for our younger and more idealistic self full of hopes and dreams and are in fact so far gone that we would not even recognize our true self if it came knocking on our door?