Bogle

The sources do not record a single mythic origin story for bogles. The available folkloric summary treats 'bogle' as a traditional regional term (derived from Middle English Bugge) applied across a range of uncanny beings in northern Britain. Rather than having a creation myth, bogles are presented as a category of local supernatural troublemakers and uncanny presences embedded in agricultural, domestic and landscape lore.

No canonical physical description is fixed across sources; appearance varies by local usage. One well-attested form, the Tattie-Bogle, is depicted as a scarecrow hiding in potato fields. In mid-20th-century lowland Scottish usage 'bogle' also functions as a general word for ghost or bogeyman, and literary references (e.g. W. D. Cocker’s poem 'The Bogle by the Boor Tree') associate bogles with wind and trees, emphasizing an atmospheric or uncanny presence rather than a single body form. The broader category is linked in source material to other regional beings (Shellycoats, Barghests, Brags, Hedley Kow, certain giants), implying that local stories may imagine bogles as anything from animated objects to trickster humanoids, depending on context.

Sources characterize bogles primarily as mischief-makers whose purpose is to perplex mankind rather than to render sustained service or to wreak wholesale destruction. Reported behaviours include hiding in potato fields (the Tattie-Bogle), causing blight in crop patches, startling or (in some accounts) attacking unwary people in fields, and in at least one 1866 newspaper account being credited with poltergeist-like activity (missiles thrown through windows and roofs). The emphasis in the sources is on puzzling, frightening or annoying human beings rather than exhibiting consistent, catalogue-able supernatural powers.