Púca

The púca is one of the most widespread figures in Irish folklore, capable of taking human or animal form — most often a dark horse, but also a goat, rabbit, or dog. Encounters with it are unpredictable: it may give a wild, terrifying ride to an unwary traveler, or in gentler tellings, do useful work on a farm overnight. Like the banshee, the púca is documented mainly through oral tradition and 19th- and 20th-century folklore collection rather than medieval manuscript sources. The púca is heavily associated with Samhain, appearing most often around the turn from autumn to winter, when the boundary between the human world and the Otherworld was traditionally said to be at its thinnest. Some regional customs even involved leaving out a share of the harvest for the púca specifically, to keep it from spoiling the rest of the crop out of spite.