Brag

The brag is a shape-shifting goblin of the Northern Counties of England, one of that region's rich crop of roadside hobgoblins, and the compendia compare it naturally to the Irish phooka: its favorite disguise is a horse, met in fields, on moorland, and on lonely roads. The trick at the center of its character is misplaced trust — a traveler takes it for the ordinary farm animal it appears to be, and the brag then misleads its rider into trouble, ending the joke with a triumphant horse-laugh.

The best-recorded individual is the Picktree Brag of County Durham, whose catalogue of forms was set down from local informants in the nineteenth century. It appeared variously as a calf wearing a white handkerchief around its neck, as a coach-horse trotting the lane ahead of people, as a donkey, as four men carrying a white sheet, and once as a headless naked man. One family story has an uncle whose white suit was unlucky: wearing it he twice met the brag, and, being bold, he mounted it — whereupon it jolted him mercilessly to the crossroads, pitched him into the middle of the pond, and ran off laughing, the tellers insisted, for all the world like a human being.

The brag sits in a recognizable family of northern shape-shifters. The Hedley Kow played the same game with a truss of straw that grew heavy, came alive, and shuffled off laughing; the Dunnie behaved the same way; and the Manx buggane is reckoned the vicious end of the same kind. Within that family the brag is the mid-tempered case: mischievous, humiliating, fond of throwing riders into ponds, but stopping well short of real harm.

The paragraphs below are extrapolated; no source supports them.

The brag reads as a comedian with an audience of one — itself. Every recorded episode is staged for the laugh at the end, and the laugh is described as disturbingly human, which suggests a personality that wants recognition from the species it mocks. Vain of its own invention, harmless at the core, and endlessly theatrical, it is less a predator than a prankster whose stage happens to be the night road. Inferred from the shape of its pranks, and marked as speculation.