Occasionally, the pixies will replace a human baby with a pixy changeling. Usually the pixy is a withered little creature who requires human ministration, and in return the pixies give the human baby a life free of care and woes. When there is no human baby present, the pixies will leave their ailing changeling in a place where someone is bound to find him, and offer good fortune to those who take the pixy as their own.

Other stories point out that the pixies also sometimes choose a human child to bring up in their way, replacing him with a changeling.

A woman who lived near Breage Church in the Isle of Man had a fine girl baby, and she thought the piskies came and took it and put a withered child in its place. The withered child lived to be twenty years old, and was no larger when it died than when the piskies brought it. It was fretful and peevish and frightfully shriveled. The parents believed that the piskies often used to come and look over a certain wall by the house to see the child. And I heard my grandmother say that the family once put the child out of doors at night to see if the piskies would take it back again.

Country people in East Cornwall sometimes put a prayer book under a child's pillow as a charm to keep away piskies. I am told that a poor woman, near Launceton, was fully persuaded that one of her children was taken away and a pisky substituted, the disaster being caused by the absence of a prayer book on one particular night.

How to discern a changeling

If the child became cross and began to waste away, fears immediately arose that it might be a "piskey changeling," and the trial by fire was put into operation. The hearth was piled with peat, and when the fire was at its strength the suspected changeling was placed in front of it and as near as possible not to be scorched, or it was suspended in a basket over the fire. If it was a "changeling child" it made its escape by the chimney throwing back word of scorn as it disappeared.

One mode of bringing back the true child was the following. An oblong basket was taken and hung over the fire from a piece of a branch of a hazel tree, and into this basket the suspected changeling was laid. Careful watch was kept till it screamed. If it screamed it was a changeling, and it was held fast to prevent its escape. When an opportunity occurred, it was carried to a place where four roads met, and a dead body was carried over it. The true child was restored.