“A spiteful little night-thing that creeps into the room to sit on your chest and steal your sleep.”
The linchetto is the night-imp of the Lucca country — Lucchesia, Versilia, the Garfagnana — and unlike his cousin the buffardello he is never mistaken for a little man. The accounts make him wholly animal or wholly invisible: a something between dog, cat and bird, once described by a witness as a black beast wrapped in a cloud of fire, that enters bedrooms at night to uncover sleepers and sit on their chests.
He is the local answer to the universal nightmare-presser, and his very name confesses it: scholars derive linchetto from the Latin incubus, worn down through l'incubetto by generations of Lucchese speech. One theory, advanced by the scholar Felice Del Beccaro, goes further and sees in him a last remnant of the woodland god Faunus in his Incubus aspect — a classical night-demon gone rustic, surviving on pranks.
The Legend
By night he throws bedclothes off sleepers, presses the breath out of chests, undoes women's hair and pinches girls; newlyweds could expect him at the wedding bed, pinching and mocking. In the stable he braids the manes and tails of horses into plaits that cannot be safely untied — undoing them is said to harm the animal. He knocks at doors, hides objects, unsettles the cattle, and was blamed, at the darkest edge of the tradition, for carrying off children.
Giovanni Giannini, who documented the sprite, noted a telling asymmetry: affectionate with children, the linchetto was merciless to the old women of the household, earning the nickname Caccavecchia — the old-woman-chaser. He kept to the countryside and the village margins, and was once reported near a metato, one of the chestnut-drying huts that dot the Lucchese hills — as local a haunt as an imp could choose.
The Record
Idelfonso Nieri's Vocabolario lucchese gives the creature his official definition: a spirit not evil but mischievous, that goes at night, enters rooms and uncovers people. A century later the folklorist Oscar Guidi gathered linchetto testimony across the communes of the Garfagnana between 1984 and 1987, and the sprite holds his place in Matteo Cosimo Cresti's survey Fate e folletti della Toscana (2012).
The scholarly interest has a reason: the linchetto preserves, in living dialect, the mechanics of the ancient incubus — the crushing night visitor that medicine now files under sleep paralysis. The Lucchese material shows the folk system entire: the symptom, the culprit, the etymology and the cure, all handed down together, and all still collectable from living informants within recent memory.
The Lore
The cures are exercises in applied psychology. A blessed candle frightens him off; a juniper branch behind the door condemns him to count its leaves until dawn; a bowl of rice on the nightstand works the same trick grain by grain. For wedding nights there was a coarser remedy: command the linchetto to straighten the bride's curls before sunrise — an impossible task, and impossible tasks are the one thing he cannot walk away from.
He shares his mountains with the buffardello, and the two are easily confused — Nieri himself defined one in terms of the other — but tradition keeps them distinct: the buffardello may look like a tiny man, the linchetto never. Together they make the Lucca country one of Italy's best-documented pockets of folletto belief, a nuisance-haunting so domesticated that juniper by the door was as ordinary as salt in the kitchen.
Field Notes
- ✦ The traditional culprit for sleep paralysis and bad dreams in the Lucca country.
- ✦ A juniper branch hung behind the door condemns him to count leaves until dawn.
- ✦ Mischievous rather than evil — Nieri called him 'a spirit not evil but mischievous'.
- ✦ His name likely descends from the Latin incubus, via l'incubetto in Lucchese speech.
- ✦ Nicknamed Caccavecchia, 'old-woman-chaser', for tormenting the elderly while sparing children.
Case File
- Classification
- Nightmare sprite
- Category
- Little People/Fae
- Territory
- Province of Lucca, Tuscany
- First Sighted
- Lucchese oral tradition
- Habitat
- Bedrooms and stables at night
- Reported Size
- Small, animalistic
- Also Known As
- Lucchese sprite