Most of us have had the joy of being sick once or twice in our lives.

It's part of the human experience, I suppose. We get sick and then we get better.

At least that's how it's supposed to work.

The one thing I am constantly thankful for is the fact that we live in such a modern enlightened

age of medicine. We no longer use urine as an antiseptic nor do we diagnose illness based

on our astrological signs, but that wasn't always the case. Gone are the days of bleeding ourselves

with leeches, or trying to balance our humors to make sure our sanguine fluids aren't overpowering

our melancholic fluids, and I'm probably not the only one who's happy that we no longer treat

sick people with enemas administered with metal syringes filled with bore bile. Yeah, bile.

From a bore. I could not make this stuff up. Our ancestors didn't know why certain things happened,

but they sure did their best to try. Stories were created, myths were told, and superstitions

took root. All of them were designed to explain why things happened, and these reasons,

even if they were pure fabrications, somehow helped people deal with the realities of life.

Why was my child born deformed? Why did my husband's personality change overnight? Why did my entire

family die from a plague last winter? These questions haunted people in ways we can't understand

today, and they grasped for anything that would help them cope. They found answers in their common

folklore. But right there among the countless tales and stories told, there's one superstition

from Ireland that saw more usage than most. You see, when something didn't seem right,

when things went wrong and people suffered, there was only one explanation that covered it all

in the minds of the Irish. They blamed it on changelines.

I'm Aaron Manke, and this is lore.

A changeline, according to the folklore of Europe, is a kind of fairy. Stories of them can be

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