I find it so fascinating the way folklore cycles. I hadn't heard about the Dirt Man in years. Since I was a kid and my great grandmother was around to tell me the stories.
The Dirt Man is one of those figures that pops up in multiple cultures, the way vampires or the boogyman or mermaids exist in the folklore of several different countries. The way my great grandmother told me, it seems that the Dirt Man as he exists now is a mix of folktales from slave communities and native communities, but just doing a little digging I found that there are different versions of a similar figure in Asian and Eastern European folklore.
In the version I grew up hearing, he didn't live under the mountains, necessarily. He favored cemeteries (I think this might have been my family trying to make him extra creepy, though. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else, but I just started looking). The one thing that remains fairly consistent is the fact that his victims are men. That isn't true across the board. I found one version of the story from Sweden where he took misbehaving children, regardless of gender, and another version from Pakistan where he took people based on drunkenness, but generally, in most stories that I've seen so far, he takes men. In some versions, he eats them. In others he keeps them as slaves in his mines. In my great grandmother's stories, he steals their souls because he's trying to work off a debt to the devil. This version, where keeping dirt under your pillow to ward him off seems to be newer, but I don't know for sure.
Anyway, the fact that this song is bringing back this figure into public conscious makes me wonder who else grew up hearing these stories. If you know another version of this story, reblog and let me know. I think the birth and global spread of myths is fascinating.
