A creature of places, not of books — that’s how we should understand Jenny Greenteeth. She once belonged to specific, forgotten, sites: the cold, dark, moorland Black Pool on the way to Butterdon Hill. Places of genuine hazard were Jenny’s home: the abandoned pits beside the mill dam at Moston, Lancashire, or Shooter’s Brook near Sandford and Green’s Cotton Mill, long since covered over by the sprawl of urban Manchester.

The repetition of Jenny Greenteeth’s story, in memoir, in folk stories, in speech and in print has tended to domesticate her. With each repetition, her claws have become more allegorical. But there must have been, at the beginning of her myth, some moments of genuine tragedy: the parents whose prodigal died, the brothers and sisters left bereft. They suffered the worst that anyone could imagine. Others saw their sadness and determined to avoid it.

Those who warned of the hazard posed by some specific stretch of abandoned water were making predictions. They were telling those who came later to prepare for and, in that way avoid, the worst. They were seeking to prevent what families knew could happen from happening. They were trying to protect the future through a means not so different from a magical spell. Speak Jenny’s name with fear on your face, and death might be avoided. They were reminding people of deaths in the past, comparing the living now to those who had died before, in the desperate belief that the comparison would be proven wrong.

Her reputation grew — this was her first transformation. She acquired sisters and cousins. Mid-nineteenth-century sources speak of a family of water creatures: not Jenny alone but also “Peg Powler” and “the Grindylow”. Now, Jenny’s name could be heard in many parts of industrial England, all across Lancashire and Cheshire, in town where industry was still flourishing. “A sore terror,” she was, “to rambling children.” Victorian mothers filled the heads of the young with fears that Jenny was living in the water, would eat them up. According to one 1852 memoir,

[m]any an old country dame, when nursing a boisterous fretful child or grandchild, has endeavoured to frighten it into quietness or obedience by repeating loudly, with a somewhat mysterious and vacant look, some such phrase as “Will wit’ whisp, Jack weet lanturn, un Peg weet iron teeth.”

Notice that Jenny had become generalised compared to her origin in specific places. She was a creature now who might be encountered anywhere. Jenny and her cousins had become the duckweed growing on the surface of industrial diggings, a warning to thoughtless boys made negligent by the assumed invulnerability of youth.

“Some lurk[ed] in the streams and pools, like ‘Green-Teeth,’ and ‘Jenny Long Arms,’” another source records, “waiting, with skinny claws and secret dart, for an opportunity to clutch the unwary wanderer upon the bank into the water.” Jenny was, by any standards a monster: her arms longer than the human, with sharpened nails, her hair green, her teeth waiting. Water dripped off her when she stood. In relation to the thoughtlessness of her victims, who played in dangerous spots without thinking of their own safety, her punishment was excessive. At the very least she drowned them, in some versions she “devour[ed]” them first.

Did Jenny intend to kill? In the nineteenth-century monster story, the inhuman was rarely, if ever, truly evil. We have, at one end of the scale, Dr Frankenstein’s unnamed creation — who saves a woman from destruction, refuses to retaliate when struck, and insists that he could live at peace if only the doctor created a companion for him. At the far end is Dracula, who kills joyously before surrendering to his own death. Mina Parker records “a look of peace” at his destruction “such as I never could have imagined might have rested there”.

Jenny was closer to the former model. Yes, she was capable of acts of great harm. But she did so in service of a wiser, safer, humanity paying more attention to the risks of its industrial environment. She was best seen as a reluctant terror.  

Even as England deindustrialised, a memory remained of the risks posed by water. Fifty years ago, Britain’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents produced a public safety film entitled. The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water. In it, a male version of Jenny, voiced by Donald Pleasance, explores a world of scrapyards and playing children, grey mists, slippery banks and rotten branches. The Spirit, who is Jenny and is Death, exults at the risks to which the young expose themselves: “the unwary, the show-off, the fool”.

A name once whispered across the industrial north, Jenny Greenteeth has declined into print, into kitsch. Several of her appearances in the former have been recent. She appears in Terry Pratchett’s comic novel, The Wee Free Men. There, she is a minor character — a water spirit, created from people’s own fears. The heroine defeats her by hitting her with an iron pan. In Molly O’Neill’s children’s story Greenteeth, published this year, the creature is a resourceful philanthropist, a route into other English folk-legends, principally the story of Arthur. The story domesticates and tames Jenny for a younger audience.

The fear of accidents has not diminished in the last few years, only our collective ability to allocate resources so as to minimise them. Jenny is a declining part of our repertoire of threat. On Substack, Short-story writer Rabid Dog describes a sewage pipe, exposed on the fields of his native Crewe. Property developers leave it abandoned, save for a sheet fence on which one sprayed Danger of Death. The threat in, all likelihood, is exaggerated — it serves very little function save to scare the people who live there. “From a young age,” he writes

the kids of the town heath are told that death is a means of discipline. Never mind what your parents will say, if you cross this border and trespass, you’ll be dead.

Jenny Greenteeth has changed, in other words, more than once. More than a century ago, she must have been the memory of a genuine terror. Then, afterwards, she was for many years abstracted — diminished by repeated invocation, no longer the expression of the particular threat posed by individual places, but all abandoned and threatening water. More recently, still, she has been separated even from her liquid context, becoming something vaguer still — a phenomenon of a world in which we dare not be free. Discipline without any specific threat at all, the most general of the landowners’ and the capitalists’ instructions to behave. She, the one-time patron of de-industrialising places, of parental fear and children’s suffering — points, even in her present incarnation, to the world we have made and could yet unmake.

Image: Adrian Grzegorz