SKOOKY THINGS SEASON 3 EPISODE 2: IF TROTTERHEADS COULD WALK

Early Pennsylvania: A melting pot of Puritanism!!

You had the European religious influences … William Penn’s famed promise to make the Commonwealth be feature ‘religious tolerance’ helped bring in quite a few different Christian belief systems.

But, as we so often see in Pennsylvania, the Dutch Folklore especially had an influence.

Quite a few customs still featured today in our lives can be traced back to the paranormal loving German influences.. Those darned Dutch with their crazy paranoias..

Paranoia coupled with the deep dark woods..

For Episode 2 of Skooky Things, we delve even deeper into the woods and meet our friendly tree dwelling monster, the Trotterhead.

According to Patrick J. Donmoyer’s book Powwowing in Pennsylvania: Braucherei and the Ritual of Everyday Life, (a link below if you wanted to check it out on Amazon)

“One of the most celebrated of all written blessings used to protect the house and home from the influence of…an entity known as the Trotterkopf – a name that is not easily translated into English, but has been sometimes called ‘Trotterhead’…
Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, it was perceived that the Trotterkopf was either the spiritual form of a witch, or a spirit sent by a witch to cause harm (Donmoyer 178).”

Now we can remind you here, it is tough to find a lot of concrete information on this Dutch fable *(And we sure hope it is a fable!)*..

After all, we don’t hear it talked about like many modern Cryptids.. it has been replaced by modern online characters such as Momo and Sldenderman..

But a Trotterhead seems as scary as they come, and they haunt the woods that surround us in the darkness of the autumnal night..

Trotterheads are so rarely talked about in our modern age, we had to find information from a Blogspot!! Now doesn’t that sound as convincing as buying a used car from a guy in Palmerton?

A pretty cool blog, actually, is is called SEEKERS and gave us years of interesting information on paranormal and cryptids in Pennsylvania until, seemingly vanishing from updating around 2017..

In 2016, the site posted some folkore about the Trotterhead.

The site quotes “The Hex Book of the Pennsylvania Dutch,” The Long Lost Friend for its passage about Trotterheads:

“TO PREVENT WITCHES FROM BEWITCHING CATTLE. TO BE WRITTEN AND PLACED IN THE STABLE; AND AGAINST BAD MEN AND EVIL SPIRITS WHICH NIGHTLY TORMENT OLD AND YOUNG PEOPLE. TO BE WRITTEN AND PLACED ON THE BEDSTEAD.

‘Trotter Head, I forbid thee my house and premises; I forbid thee my horse and cow stable; I forbid thee my bedstead, that thou mayst not breathe upon me; breathe into some other house, until thou hast ascended every hill, until thou has counted every fencepost, and until thou hast crossed every water. And thus dear day may come again into my house, in the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

Seekers goes on to provide some other cool valuable information on the root of Trotterheads.. Bettzaierle is an Austrian term which translates to something like “bedgoblin.” A bedgoblin is, fairly plainly, a reference to a nightmare – or an entity that brings nightmares. German translations had the creature as “Trotter Kopf”

The “trot” in Trotterhead may have become a part of the name because of the monster’s ability to run through property and dark trees, or through people’s heads to give them nightmares..

From some other research we did, it would appear that the Trotterhead can sometimes be a weird tube like Sasquatch along with being a sleep demon..

Trotterheads almost made the news!

The EXPRESS in Lock Haven tan an October 31 1969 story about Trotterheads in its column SHORE LINES by Joseph Cox:

Another website showcases writings of a “Protection” prayer from Trotterheads..

From PA HERITAGE, we find this interesting image:

The document pictured here bears the following inscription: “Trotter Head, I forbid thee my house and premises. I forbid thee my horse and cow-stable, I forbid thee my bedstead, that thou mayest not breathe upon me; breathe into some other house, until thou hast ascended every hill, until thou hast counted every fencepost, and until thou hast crossed every water. And thus dear day may come again into my house, in the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”