Knockers, Tommyknockers and the Question of Ghosts

I have been chewing on the subject of Cornish knockers and tommyknockers for more than four decades. Stories describe these supernatural miners lurking underground, pursuing their craft in old drifts, and never far from their human counterparts.

This sort of entity appears worldwide, and miners in some other places in Britain, also call them knockers – a reference to the sound of settling timbers. Those from Cornwall, however, are the most famous, and they were destined for the international stage. They traveled with Cornish emigrants throughout the global mining frontier. In the American West, knockers transformed into tommyknockers.

It is unusual for European supernatural beings to cross the Atlantic. Most often, they become little more than remnants of former beliefs: North Americans know of banshees, leprechauns, and trolls, but a living, thriving tradition taking root in new soil is rare. Not only did knockers – now tommyknockers – find homes in Western mines, but they flourished and were shared with other miners, Cornish or not. That sort of success story is unparalleled.

I researched the topic using the extensive library at the Irish folklore archive in Dublin and then by traveling to Cornwall, followed by research in the American West. In 1992, Western Folklore published what I saw as my definitive treatment of knockers and tommyknockers. Nevertheless, the ensuing decades kept giving me more to consider.

Nearly three decades later, the release of my book, The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation, represented what I hoped would be my final statement on the subject. In all, I found that knockers in Cornwall changed over time, for folklore is always in flux. The nineteenth century Cornish folklorists William Bottrell and Robert Hunt documented knocker traditions with numerous stories, but there is even earlier evidence. What sources reveal is an initial phase of belief when knockers led worthy miners to valuable ore, warned of danger, and punished those who angered them.

These core motifs then adapted with industrialization, as independent groups of self-employed miners seeking their personal bonanzas yielded to employment and wage-earning labor. At that point, the knockers’ otherworldly directions to valuable ore ceased to be as relevant, and their most important role became their ability to warn of cave-ins. The dangerous underground environment is filled with terrors, and help from the supernatural was attractive for both independent entrepreneur and employed worker.

As knockers crossed the Atlantic with migrating miners, more change occurred. The essential characteristic of a supernatural lookout for danger persisted, and knockers – and now tommyknockers resumed their earlier role of leading independent prospectors to wealth. One motif associated with knockers was impossible to apply to the New World: the Cornish often saw them as lingering spirits of Jews banished to Cornish mines by Romans. The association is too complicated to handle here, but suffice it to say that this aspect of knocker lore could not survive in the American West: circumstance did not allow for a layer of Roman history for the region’s new mines.

Instead, Western miners required a new explanation for the origin of tommyknockers. As often happens with folklore, there was a muddling of concepts. Key was the notion that spirits of miners killed underground sometimes transformed into tommyknockers. It was an idea unsatisfactory to many, particularly when they knew the names of the deceased. Ghosts of known companions did not easily assume the tommyknocker’s elfin attributes. Despite this, miners apparently understood that somehow, these entities had come to inhabit their drifts and shafts.

That was my approach to knockers and tommyknockers in my book on Cornish folklore, but something was still gnawing at me. A feeling lingered that we American folklorists had been deceiving ourselves on occasion. In the early 1940s, the esteemed Western folklorist, Wayland Hand, published an early look at California mining traditions. His discussion began with seven pages dealing with tommyknockers. It served as my first roadmap to the subject.

Not to diminish the importance of Hand, but there was a core error in his work, which in turn infected what I had written. Indeed, he influenced all subsequent considerations of Western mining traditions. Hand tended to describe any report of an eerie presence underground as a tommyknocker, sometimes including what was merely the ghostly apparition of a dead miner. “Merely” is the problem here, for folklore is in the eye of the beholder.

With my most recent book, released in September 2023, I offer what I hope is my final statement on knockers and tommyknockers. Monumental Lies: Early Nevada Folklore of the Wild West includes a minor amendment to my book on Cornish folklore: a path to evaluate and sometimes separate the entities. That is not an easy task because one miner’s ghost can become another’s tommyknocker. Categorizing what these workers believed can be subjective. That said, not all ghosts are tommyknockers, and not all tommyknockers are ghosts. There was – and is – a difference.

Some traditions clearly refer to an elf-like presence. Miners on both sides of the Atlantic were known to craft small clay images of the otherworldly miner, placing them in the mine where workers left crusts of bread as a gift. This is far removed from most European or American practices involving the dead. In addition, tommyknockers were credited with elf-like antics – behavior that again seems a step removed from typical concepts of ghosts.

With that question sorted as best as possible, we can step back and consider how folklore fits into the bigger picture of the Cornish diaspora. Popular traditions can be intimately tied with one’s identity, often serving to reinforce ethnicity. Cornish emigrants working on the global mining frontier brought renowned skills, distinct occupational tools and vocabulary, and, of course, their supernatural, underground companions. These traditions fortified the perception of the Cornish as distinct and worthy of respect. At the same time, their folklore provided cohesion as they confronted an international array of people, all seeking wealth in newly established mineral-rich districts.

In the American West, tommyknockers became a signature of Cornish miners, a reminder that they once played essential roles in the region even when they sometimes uprooted themselves and travelled to the next opportunity. The supernatural entity survives as an emblem for breweries, a name applied to stores, and as part of a shared tradition that may now be weak in belief but enduring as a concept. Folklore was, and continues to be, a powerful way for people to define themselves as they confront new environments and challenges.

Further resources:

William Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (Penzance: W. Cornish, 1870, first series).

Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (Penzance: Beare and Son, 1873, second series).

Stories and Folk-Lore of West Cornwall (Penzance: F. Rodda, 1880).

Wayland D. Hand, ‘California Miners Folklore: Below Ground’, California Folklore Quarterly, 1 (1942), pp. 127–53.

Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England or the Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall (London: Chatto and Windus, 1903, combined first and second series [1865]).

 Ronald M. James, ‘Knockers, Knackers, and Ghosts: Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines’, Western Folklore, 51:2 (April 1992), pp. 153–76. https://www.academia.edu/31849151/Knockers_Knackers_and_Ghosts_Immigrant_Folklore_in_the_Western_Mines

The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation (University of Exeter Press, 2018).

Monumental Lies: Early Nevada Folklore of the Wild West (University of Nevada Press, 2023).