There is good evidence of continued belief into recent times, and there are excellent examples of people asserting that belief was stronger in the past than it is "today" - and this evidence suggests that it has not been uncommon for people for several centuries to assert this. I address this in my recent book, The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation (2018). Here is an excerpt:

There is evidence that people have always thought their beliefs in the supernatural were fading and that earlier generations were more fervent in their fairy faith. Asserting that a belief in these entities was a bygone facet of English heritage features in Chaucer’s fourteenth-century introduction to ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, which the character sets ‘In the olden days of King Arthur [when] … all this land was filled with faerie’. The Wife of Bath adds, ‘This was the old belief’. It is a theme that appears to have resonated over the centuries with a repeated assertion that people regarded those from previous centuries to have possessed a stronger faith in the existence of a fairy world. Writing in 1997, Linda-May Ballard cites Jeremiah Curtin as describing the idea of a waning belief in the fairies in his 1895 publication on Irish folklore. Ballard then poses the question, ‘Might it be that the idea that fairy belief is fading and belongs to the past, is part’ of the wider tradition embracing the belief in these supernatural beings?

Although not specifically from Cornwall, Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society, Authentic Reports of Fairies in Modern Times, provides evidence of British tradition enduring into at least the mid-twentieth century. Modernism affected but did not extinguish fairy traditions.

The implications here are that people of sixteenth-century Europe believed in "pixies, ghosts and goblins," although they may have asserted that people a few generations believed in them more (even though that was likely not true).

It is worth pointing out that there can be a tremendous difference between urban and rural: I interviewed an 18 year old in Dublin, Ireland in 1982 who asserted that when she was home in the country she believed in the fairies, but when she was in Dublin attending college, she did not. She was puzzled by this difference; we can expect that her sixteenth-century predecessors saw things in much the same way: the fairy faith have always been strongest away from concentrations of people. When it comes to ghosts, however, they persist quite nicely in urban environments. Indeed, ghosts thrives in places with lots of old buildings (and belief in them remains strong to this day), so we could not expect to find this rural-urban difference with regard to those entities.