Hollowmoth

What it looks like, and what it does

Wide, ash-pale wings with an eye-spot on each that reads as a hole rather than a pupil. A body like a rolled umbrella. Wings that flex with a papery sound. Below it, a lit floor with no shadow under any piece of furniture.

Feeds at night, singly. Moves toward the brightest lamp in the largest unshaded room. Rests all day behind curtains. Leaves a fine grey powder on the sills.

What is known

Reported in tall old houses where lamps are left burning overnight. The moth is seen at the top of a shade, wings slowly folding. In the morning the room is evenly lit and everything in it has lost its shadow.

The shadows come back in a day or two, but not always the same. Owners have returned to find a chair's shadow slightly longer than the chair, or the shadow of someone standing in a doorway facing the wrong way.

What it can do

• Removes the shadows of everything in a room
• Returns them altered

Where it stops

• Cannot feed in daylight
• Avoids candle flame, which gives it nothing to drink

An encounter

Brandt found the library lit like a surgery and her own feet without shadows. She opened every curtain and found the powder. Three days later the household cat came home with a shadow slightly too large for it. She had the cat photographed. In the photographs the shadow is a different animal.

Ottilie Brandt, housekeeper, Upper drawing room, Marchmont House, A week in January

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Photographs of affected rooms show uniform illumination and no cast shadows; control photographs of the same rooms show normal shadows.
• rumor: That a shadow returned wrong can be traded for the right one by leaving a lamp lit in an empty room.
• incomplete: Eight returned shadows have been photographed. None has been reliably identified.

Still unresolved

Where do the shadows go between being taken and being returned, and why do they come back with something added?

Where it has been recorded

• Marchmont House (confirmed) — Recorded by Ottilie Brandt, housekeeper.

Stories about it

• Hollowmoth at the Tavernier (Grotesque encounter, 4 min) — A barman at the Tavernier sees a moth the size of an overcoat settle on the lampshade above the bar, and by closing time every shadow in the room has been eaten and the lamps burn brighter and emptier than they should.
• Lit Like a Surgery (Grotesque encounter, 2 min) — A housekeeper finds her feet without shadows, and then finds what has been drinking them.