Supernatural the book of monsters, demons, spirits and ghouls

Shapeshifters, (THE ANIMAL WIVES), part 7

"Swan maiden" is kind of a generic term for all kinds of shapeshifting creatures who are sometimes animals and sometimes gorgeous women. In Italy, it's a dove, in Croatia a wolf, in parts of Africa a buffalo. The stories have in common the theft of the skin (or robe of feathers), the swan maiden having to marry and bear children for whoever possesses the skin, the rediscovery of the skin when the children are a little older, and the swan maiden's abandoning of the children. Sometimes her husband goes after her and after great hardship brings her back. Sometimes she's just gone for good.
Anywhere there are seals, there are selkie stories, and they all follow a basic pattern. The selkie, if it's female, transforms into a human to take a human lover. She must protect her sealskin, however, because without it she can't change back. If the human lover discovers the skin and is able to hide it from the selkie, she is now in his power. However much she loves the man, a selkie always loves the sea more and will immediately return to it if she discovers her skin.
In many of the stories, the selkie bears children, and it is one of the children who discovers the skin. Typically selkies will not speak to their former lovers once they return to the sea, although they can meet and maintain contact with the children.
All very tragic, right? Well, let us tell you a story. We were in Maine one summer, and stories started to get around about two fishermen who had been attacked and killed-by seals. Our dad being who he was, he started sniffing around, and since we were bored with collecting seashells and playing Skee-Ball, we did, too. Turns out that not only had a local man taken a selkie wife, but he'd passed her down through his family. She'd been on land for more than a hundred years, always looking out at the ocean and yearning to return home.
And during that hundred years, seventeen other men from that family had disappeared at sea. The people in the town talked about curses, but they didn't know the half of it. We figured it out when we saw pictures of the selkie from 1903, then 1929, then 1960, and then 1993. All the same beautiful face, in three different towns with three different husbands. Things came to a head when her current husband decided he was going to go out with some friends and shoot some seals. We showed up at the same time, having found the sealskin just beforehand, and brokered a deal. The selkie got to go home, and the rest of her people agreed to stop their war on the men of the family.
We don't know how it's all going to turn out, though, because that kind of bad blood runs deep, and also because another thing selkies occasionally do is slip changeling children into the cribs of seaside villages. They keep the human child who knows where, and when the selkie child gets to be a certain age, poof! It changes into a seal and is never seen again.
And then there's the kitsune, a Japanese fox spirit who can act as a lover, a trickster, or a succubus, depending on the story. Kitsune can take human form, except often they have trouble hiding their tails, which can complicate the kind of deception necessary to capture a human. (Well, most humans.) Sometimes kitsune feed off the life force of the men they seduce, and sometimes they marry and settle down. The kitsune can be a devoted wife, but the marriages are always doomed because sooner or later-you guessed it-hubby notices the tail. Then the kitsune has to leave, or in other versions the man suddenly awakens from the kitsune's enchantment, far from home and destined for a very interesting conversation with the human family he left behind.
A kitsune's magical abilities and (blame Dean for this; he can't help it) foxy temperament mean that they're fierce tricksters. Some of their favorite targets are pompous men, the greedy and boastful types. This playfulness can turn dark, though, and kitsune are also known to play cruel tricks on people who don't deserve it at all. The more powerful of them have truly marvelous magical abilities, including the ability to bend time and space (as in the case of the poor tail-discovering ex-husband we just mentioned).
So how do you control a spirit that can change shape, appear in dreams, and wrap reality around its little finger? Well, some kitsune are constantly guarding a hoshi no tama, or "star ball." Like a selkie's skin, if you've got a kitsune's star ball, you can make it do whatever you want. Thing is, we're not sure what the star ball really is, or what it's supposed to do. If we ever run into a kitsune, we'll let you know.