Classification: Children's Folklore
Region: Summertown
Collected: Multiple periods
Status: Continuing Tradition

Visitors to Summertown have occasionally remarked upon the unusual games played by local children. Residents rarely notice anything peculiar about them. Children play hunters and beasts.They draw circles around themselves in chalk and dare other children to cross them. They hide beneath porches and imitate things scratching beneath the floorboards. A game known simply as Doors requires one child to stand with their back against a wall while the others whisper increasingly elaborate requests to be admitted.

The child must determine which requests may safely be answered. Opening the imaginary door to the wrong visitor means becoming It. Nobody appears able to explain what It is.

One counting rhyme remains particularly widespread:

One for the traveller,
Two for the crow,
Three for the thing
That nobody knows.

Four for the window,
Five for the door,
Six little footsteps
Crossing the floor.

Seven don't answer,
Eight don't look back,
Nine keep the candle,
Ten—

It's in the house.

At this point the children scatter.

The final child caught becomes the House and must stand perfectly still while the others hide. The game ends when the House finds one of them. Or, according to older rules, when the House moves without being seen.

Another game has largely disappeared.

It was called Mother's Teeth.

Surviving descriptions are inconsistent, although all involve children placing small white stones beneath leaves along the edge of the forest. When asked why, one elderly resident recalled being told as a child:

‘So the forest knows we've already got enough teeth.’

No corresponding adult tradition has been discovered. More troubling is a rhyme collected in the southern quarter approximately eighty years ago:

Grey on the hill,
Grey under snow,
Nobody lives there,
Nobody go.

Grey at the window,
Grey at the wall,

If the house asks your name—

Don't answer at all.

Researchers initially assumed the rhyme referred to the Grey House. The earliest written version so far discovered, however, appears to predate the construction of the house.

Archivist's Observation

Children are poor historians. They alter words, forget meanings and introduce nonsense wherever memory fails. Unfortunately, this also makes them exceptionally good at carrying very old things unnoticed.