Spirits of my youth in the Alps

When I was a kid growing up in Montriond near Morzine, in the French Alps, the paranormal and the ensuing fear it generated was front and center during my young life. There were two bad actors, or maybe just one, sharing ominous names for me, the “Servan” and the “Chaufaton”. 

Those were either malevolent or malicious elves or sprites that were haunting the lives of villagers living in the remote as well as backwards Alpine valleys and villages of my youth, accomplishing all kind of unexplainable feats and acts that, the way they were represented to me by my parents were more devilish than mischievous and called more for some exorcism than any other remedy. 

The stories I heard were along the lines of the chaufaton “braiding a mare's tail or fitting two cows' heads inside the same manger halter”. Another story, also from Montriond, my hometown, was that of “a man resting on his bed, hearing the mare, outfitted with her bell, that had left the stable to amble into the kitchen, and was producing very melodious music by shaking her bell behind the door of the bedroom. The man had never heard anything so pleasant and so musical. 

Once the concert was over, he got up to go to the kitchen and see what was going on, but the mare wasn’t in the kitchen. Instead, she was tied up in the stable and quietly eating. He had been tricked by the chaufaton!” 

One last story, still in Montriond, “the chaufaton, always invisible, amused himself one day by inspecting a series of lined up wooden buckets. The homeowner, who was in the room, heard him stating in front of each wooden utensil: "This one is clean, this one isn’t." After a while, irritated by the comments, the man pulled off his pants and literally mooned in the direction the voice came from, exclaiming: "And is that one clean?" The chaufaton responded by butt-slapping the man with the manure shovel. 

As the mid-sixties and early seventies advanced with the rise of tourism and modernity the chaufaton went into eternal hibernation. My going through puberty and growing up chased my fears forever and all these legends became part of the past… until now!