“A slimy, fiery-eyed lurker beneath the canal bridges that drags careless children down by their ankles.”
Amsterdam's Jordaan grew up along water — the Brouwersgracht, the Bloemgracht, the Lijnbaansgracht under the old city wall — and where there was water there were children, and where there were children there was the Bullebak. Big, green and slimy in most tellings, half-transparent in others, it waited beneath bridges and sluice gates with fiery eyes, and it took hold of the careless by the ankles and hauled them down into the murk.
The creature is a textbook kinderschrik — a child-scare figure conjured by parents in an age when few children could swim and the canals claimed lives every year. Yet Amsterdam took its bogeyman seriously enough to name real infrastructure after it: by the seventeenth century two of the city's sluices carried its name, and the word bullebak survives in modern Dutch as the term for a browbeating bully. The monster faded; the insult stayed.
The Legend
The Bullebak kept to the water and was heard more often than seen. It lay submerged in the canal and roared, loudest during storms; on dark evenings people claimed to hear the water churning with its movements, and some swore they had seen a grim head with fiery eyes rise above a sluice door. Its business was children: any child who strayed too close to the edge could be seized by the legs, dragged under and drowned in the deep dark water.
No two tellings dress it identically — a green creature with yellow eyes and big teeth in one account; something large, slimy and see-through in another. Amsterdam's specimen was a creature of the Jordaan, lurking by the Lijnbaansgracht along the old city wall, but the species ranged wider: bullebak stories attach to lakes, rivers and canals across Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland, Gelderland, Overijssel and Drenthe, with West-Friesland a particular stronghold.
The Record
The word was on the Amsterdam stage by 1618, when Bredero's comedy De Spaanse Brabander has a character swear he thought he had met 'the devil, or the bullebak!' — proof the fright-figure was already proverbial. The creature had haunts as well as a name: two of the city's water-gates carried it, the Bullebaksluis at the end of the Bloemgracht near the Raampoort, and the Bullebak at the end of the Brouwersgracht.
The paperwork survives. Tobias van Domselaer's 1665 description of Amsterdam records the Bloemgracht sluice as the 'Bulbak-sluys', fixing the monster in the city's official topography three and a half centuries ago. Folklorists who have gathered the tales classify the Bullebak as a kinderschrik — a child-scare figure, kin to the bogeyman — an intimidation device deployed by parents who had no fences to put between their children and the water.
The Lore
Behind the monster stood a plain civic terror. The canals of a working city were unfenced, cold and deep; few children could swim, and the crowded quays of the Jordaan put the water a step from every front door. The Bullebak did the work of a railing that did not exist. Even its etymology matches the job: scholars derive the name from the archaic verb bullen, to roar or thunder, joined to bak, a mouth or mug — a roaring maw, purpose-built for warning.
The creature has since retired, but its name does daily duty in Dutch as the word for an unpleasant, intimidating person — the monster survives inside the insult. It kept company, while it worked, with a whole guild of regional water-scares, the krolleman, the boesjeude and the boezehappert among them; and Amsterdam has not entirely let go: when the old Bullebak bridge was demolished, the artist Martie van der Loo carved the creature's scowling face from one of its brick blocks.
Field Notes
- ✦ Two 17th-century Amsterdam water-gates bore its name — the Bullebaksluis on the Bloemgracht and the Bullebak on the Brouwersgracht.
- ✦ Described as big, green or see-through, slimy, with fiery eyes and a roar heard loudest in storms.
- ✦ In print by 1618: Bredero's De Spaanse Brabander invokes 'the devil, or the bullebak!'
- ✦ A classic kinderschrik — invented to keep non-swimming children back from unfenced canal edges.
- ✦ In modern Dutch a bullebak is simply a bully; the water monster survives inside the insult.
Case File
- Classification
- Water bogeyman
- Category
- Other
- Territory
- Amsterdam (Jordaan)
- First Sighted
- In print by 1618 (Bredero's De Spaanse Brabander)
- Habitat
- Canals, ditches, lakes and rivers
- Reported Size
- Large and hulking
- Also Known As
- The Bully · Water bogeyman