I remember reading, a long time ago, a piece that put forth the idea that 'the monster in the woods' served a number of social functions. One of these as I recall was to offer families with too many mouths to feed a narrative to explain the abandonment of their children when times were hard - stories such as changelings, faeries, witches (Hansel and Gretel, for instance), bogeymen, wendigos, Baba Yaga and Qallupilluit. My understanding is that although everyone in the community will have had a sense of what actually happened, stories such as these served as a socially acceptable obfuscation of the painful truth.
I'm currently thinking of writing a reflective piece within my own field on how the medicalisation of distress can serve a similar function in modernity, but I'm mindful that a patchy memory of an article I read once won't make much of a literature review.
Could one of you brilliant people let me know if the claims above have any serious scholarship attached to them? I'm a great lover of folklore and its role in societies across time and place, so would love to read your thoughts and any kind of analysis.
These sorts of functional explanation about why some supernatural entity exists are usually based entirely on speculation - unproveable speculation at that.
I doubt that there is evidence of even one example of a family murdering offspring and then blaming a supernatural entity. Of course, according to the speculation, everything would remain in secret so that lack of evidence could be explained away. But after we have explained it away, we still have no evidence and are left with only speculation.
The famous example of the late-nineteenth-century burning of Bridget Cleary in Ireland was caused by a husband who believed his near-catatonic wife was a "stock" - an object magically imbued with the features of his wife, who had been abducted by the fairies. In this case, he murdered his wife (i.e., the stock) in an effort to secure his wife's return. He was tried and convicted by a British-based court system, but that doesn't negate the fact that he almost certainly believed that his actions were necessary to bring his wife back - so this does not fit the functional approach proposed, that people would use an aspect of folklore to eliminate a family member.
Sorry, but I just don't see this explanation as being plausible. Even as unprovable speculation, it doesn't fit.
I suggest that you, if you have not done so already, crosspost this to r/AskAnthropology and, with some substantial reformulation, r/askpsychology.
Can I add a question here?
Could superstitions have originated through undiagnosed mental illness? Apart from schizophrenia obviously, there is also the OCD symptom of intrusive thoughts where even a word can trigger a cascade of unwanted overactive imaginations. Did the belief in spells come about due to this? Like, the belief that speaking about something could bring that hypothesis to life, that giving word to a thought is equivalent to acting out the thought?