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Braided Manes & Horse Plaits

That curly horse is super cute.

However. I'm quite positive that fairies were held responsible for plaiting horses' manes in Ireland, maybe Wales. As GNC hints. I can't find a reference. I'll keep looking.

I wish my hair would get plaited. The tangles are definitely nothing like plaits.
 
I worked with horses for about 15 years and never came across or heard about anything
like this, not to say it doesnt happen just that I never came across it
 
That snarl has happened to my own long hair on many MANY occasions!
 
It's ghosts I say, ghosts....
"ghunt:
Or possibly, a gnome.
:gnome:
 
Not horses but a friend lived on a farm near Preston, they would often get up
only to find the cows brought in and milked, everything in it's place nothing missing,
they never got to the bottom of it he was convinced it was a Poltergeist.
 
Not horses but a friend lived on a farm near Preston, they would often get up only to find the cows brought in and milked, everything in it's place nothing missing, they never got to the bottom of it he was convinced it was a Poltergeist.
Did that happen every morning?
 
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The cows probably did it themselves. Picked up the knack after years of experience.
 
No but he said it was often the farm was a fair distance from the town they never found out
why or who.
I have a theory.
Someone living nearby needed milk and didn't want to pay for it. So they did all that work, thinking it was fair exchange.
 
I have a theory.
Someone living nearby needed milk and didn't want to pay for it. So they did all that work, thinking it was fair exchange.

And that person was... our old friend Bigfoot.
 
They did not think anything was missing but would hardly miss a few pints of milk,
so I honestly don't know.
Only places round the place were other farms but you never know.
 
This happens in Russia and is blamed on the almasty. The ones i looked at look like nauralyl occuring tangles.
 
Wasn't Bigfoot a fan of horse tail plaiting?

It's not clear when - or with what evidence - mane braiding / plaiting became associated with Bigfoot / Sasquatch in North America.

There's a South American wild hairy dwarf being called a duende that's reputed to braid horse's manes so as to improvise stirrups, and lore about the duende supposedly dates back a long way.

The earliest documented mention of Bigfoot and mane braiding I've found is in Lisa Shiel's 2006 book Backyard Bigfoot:

https://books.google.com/books?id=ybXgAAAACAAJ&q=braid#v=onepage&q=braid&f=false

... in which she describes 2005 incidents involving her own horse(s).

The earliest reference I've found to a big relict hominin braiding / plaiting horses' manes is in relation to the almasty / almas in central and western Eurasia.

This archived 2011 edition of a yeti / almasty reports webpage from a defunct website:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110303060841/http://www.stgr-primates.de/reports.html

... mentions two sightings of an almasty apparently braiding a horse's mane.

One is a report from a Kabardinian man named Mukhadin Kliynshev, who claimed to have witnessed such a thing in 1978.

The other (and most often cited one ... ) is the sighting by cryptozoologist Gregory Panchenko in the same area in 1991.

I wonder whether (a) mane braiding has a history in North American relict hominin lore farther back than 2006 or (b) Shiel - or perhaps other North American Bigfoot / Sasquatch investigators - adopted the idea from either South American folklore or Eurasian almasty reports.
 
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Seeing as how there's no real Bigfoot tradition in Europe, not historically, anyway, I think we can discount a manbeast and point the finger at a human mischief maker.
 
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