Old Parish Clerk, Neighbour S___ is a brother of old B___ the sexton. He died at 82 — she is now near 80. Her father was a leather breeches maker, and her mother having had a baby (either herself or her sister she forgets which), was lying asleep some weeks after her confinement in bed with her husband and the infant by her side. She woke in the night, it was dimmish light, and missed the babe. Uttering an exclamation of fear, lest the fairies (or feriers) should have taken the child, she jumped out of bed, and there sure enough a number of the little sandy things had got the baby at the foot of the bed and were undressing it. They fled away through a hole in the floor, laughing as if they shrieked, and, snatching up her child, on examination she found that they had laid all the pins head to head as they took them out of the dress. For months afterwards she always slept with the child between herself and husband, and used carefully to pin it by its bed clothes to the pillow and sheets that it might not be snatched hastily away. This happened in the old house which stood where the new one now stands on the south side of the vicarage gate. A woman, as she heard tell, had a child changed, and one, a poor thing, left in his place, but she was very kind to it, and every morning on getting up she found a small piece of money in her pocket. My informant firmly believes in their existence, and wonders how it is that of late years no such things have been seen.

Hollingworth Hist of Stowmarket (1844) 248 [Guderon 36-37]