Imagine you’re picking up your kid from school, and something feels off. But nothing looks different, your child sounds the same and the only thing that might be different is that she smiles a bit more than usual. But that exact smile keeps giving you chills and you don’t know why.

It might just be that you’re dealing with a changeling. The only way to be able to tell is looking at the creature’s reflection. Changelings are capable of emulating human children into precise detail in our favorite show. The only difference being their malicious, evil character change. The changelings take existing children and trap them with the changeling mother for her to feed on. In return, one of the changeling kids takes the form of the stolen child to be able to feed itself on the human mother.

Aside from their horrific reflection, featuring pale skin, a round mouth with many pointy teeth and giant, hollow eyes, there is another telltale sign you might be dealing with a fake copy: the changelings tend to say childish sentences, show very little emotion and generally come across as somewhat robotic and creepy.

The second episode of Supernatural’s season three featured a whole family of changelings. The boys were in Indiana to visit Dean’s old lover Lisa Braeden. This is her first introduction to the show, along with her son Ben who is hinted to possibly be Dean’s ACDC-loving kid. When he went missing, the Winchesters stepped in to find him and take down the changeling-nest.

Eventually, our heroic duo discovered the changeling mother along with her victims in the basement of an abandoned building. Ben was holding up bravely among the other children, once again inspiring the same vibe as his suspected father Winchester. Eventually the creature was defeated by them with the use of a flamethrower - talking about a family of badasses. So far, fire appears to be the only confirmed way to defeat changelings on the show, and taking down the mother of the changelings takes out her children as well.

Many European mythologies have some form of changelings woven into their tales. These tend to be different from the versions portrayed in the TV-show Supernatural and feature more fae-like qualities. Often hiding in forests with fairy-circles they are hard to find and can be described as fairies (most often in Scotland and Ireland) or trolls (more common in Scandinavian lore). Particularly in Scandinavia, the best form of protection against these trolls is by baptizing a baby, making it immune to the changeling abduction.

Historically, the changelings taking the place of human children were referred to as “auf” or “oaf”, resulting in our modern day curse. It is theorized that children that “looked different” or “acted different” (most likely children and babies with autism, Down Syndrome or birth defects) were seen by parents as such changelings, reasoning that they must have replaced their “good” child with such a fae or troll. In many cases, these children were brought to the forest in the hope that they would trade the children back. The result was that babies were left in dire circumstances to die. According to some sources, the more religious people that did not believe in this practice still let pagans continue, knowing that it gave them hope that even if the “changeling child” died out there, their own “real” child would still get to live a happy life with the fae.

---

Ray Robinson
text

---

Callahan Monroe
coding & design