The Klabautermann: Green-Toothed Ship Goblin Who Caulks Leaks by Night

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The Klabautermann is a water sprite of German, Dutch, and Frisian sailor lore: a figure about two feet tall with a red beard, green teeth, a red or gray jacket, a round hat or nightcap, and a caulking hammer or tobacco pipe. He is bound to the ship's timber. One tradition held that the soul of a stillborn or unbaptized child buried beneath a tree passed into the wood, and on the island of Rugen, children with broken bones were passed three times through a split oak whose healing was tied to theirs, leaving part of the child's soul in the tree. While the crew slept, he pumped the hold, plugged leaks, mended tackle, and warded off fire, illness, and pirates. Seeing him meant the ship was doomed, unless a sailor went alone to the capstan at midnight and looked backward between his legs through the capstan hole.

Friedrich Kluge traced the name to kalfatern, to caulk, while the Brothers Grimm linked it to a Low German word for knocking, the sound of a working wooden hull. The heroic helper became a demon as retired sailors spun scarier tales ashore, yet historians David Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen found no British origin and trace him to St. Phocas, patron saint of Black Sea sailors, merging with Baltic house spirits called kobolds. In Hans Fallada's novel Every Man Dies Alone, a Gestapo inspector gives the anonymous writer of anti Nazi postcards the code name Klabautermann.

• Heinrich Heine recorded a captain who kept a shrine to the Klabautermann in his cabin with offerings of the best food and drink.
• A slighted Klabautermann tangles ropes, throws firewood, breaks the carpenter's tools, and slaps lazy sailors.
• When all is lost he rampages through the ship, then leaps from the mast or bowsprit into the sea.
• His land cousins in Belgium and the Netherlands sharpen millstones overnight but leave forever if given clothes.
• He turns up in the card game Doppelkopf, the children's show Pumuckl, and as the spirit of the Going Merry in One Piece.