No. 279 - Tattie Bogle

I opened an e-mail today from a local ski mountain that transforms itself for Halloween and promises "lots of fun and lots of screams!" They mentioned three such spooky activities: a Haunted Hayride, a Haunted Ski Lodge and a Tattie Bogle.

Huh. I never heard of a tattie bogle. They described that part of the attraction as "Children will listen to Tattie Bogle tell stories about the little hobgoblins who hid her great grandmothers treasures and then help her find them!"

I learned that a tattie bogle is the Scottish word for scarecrow. A tattie is a potato and a bogle is an evil or mischievous spirit, so a tattie bogle is a scarecrow set up to keep birds away from the potato field.

I came across a weird/interesting connection in researching this. Another spelling of tattie bogle is tatty bogle. And there's a night club called Tatty Bogle in Bethnal Green, London, which is the setting of the novel I'm reading called The Report by Jessica Francis Kane, mentioned in Post No. 276.