A frightening creature is described in the old Deutsche Sagen of the Brothers Grimm:
"In this year (1125) we saw a fiery man walking between the two castles called Gleichen. It was right at midnight. The man walked from one castle to the other, and he burned like a bright flame." The sentries who tell this story report that he did this for three nights and no more.
George Miltenberger, who lived in the so-called Hoppelrain near Kailbach in the region of Freienstein, tells the following story. "It was on the first Sunday of Advent between eleven and twelve o'clock when I saw, not far from my house, a man who was completely enveloped in fire. One could count all the ribs in his body. He remained on the road from one milestone to the next until right after midnight, when he vanished." [1]
Folklore professor Donald Ward, in his 1981 translation of The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm, reports that the Brothers Grimm have combined two stories into one. The first takes place somewhere in northern Germany, the second in Hesse.
Harold T. Wilkins translated this fragment from the medieval chronicler Abbot Ralph of Coggeshall:
"In the time of King Richard I, of England" (1189-99), "there appeared in certain grassy, flat ground human footprints of extraordinary length; and everywhere the footprints were impressed the grass remained as if scorched by fire (herba velut igne ustulata remanserat). This was in the province of York." [2]
Philip MacLeod writes of a German bogey called the Puhu, or Fiery Man, in a 1915 article from Occult Review :
There is a curious legend of a girl who was induced to call from a window, "Come and kiss me, Fiery Man!" Presently the terrified company heard a swift foot upon the stair and a panting breath at the door, which they dared not open. Suddenly two hands were struck on the wood, and the steps retreated again, but on the door there remained the deep charred marks of two fiery hands.
A Pastor Schneider of Feldberg saw the Burning Man more than once, as he describes in a letter published in 1850:
Last year I saw a puhu again. It was in the autumn; I was returning with my children from a walk to M_____. As we came into our little vale, a puhu was hurrying to and fro on the top of the hill between this place [Felding?] and O.E. We followed the burning apparition with our eyes for a long time. When we got home, I took the telescope and very attentively observed the apparition with that instrument. It was just like the other appearance described above: round, and blazing with many pale flames, and of the size of a basket. For a long time it ran to and fro upon the hill opposite the parsonage, till at length it went down into the valley and disappeared among the houses. [3]
Perhaps the Burning Men are related to "The Fiery-Fingered Creature," a tale from Kentucky, recorded in William Montell's Ghosts Along the Cumberland:
Mammy told this tale about her stepmother. Late one Sunday evening they went to the barn to milk. One or maybe both saw a person coming across field a way off. They didn't know who it was. It kept getting closer and closer and wobblier and limper. As it got real close, it just went down to the ground. Its arms flew up and fire came out the tips of its fingers.
1. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. German Legends of the Brothers Grimm (1812-1814). New edition edited and translated by Donald Ward (London: ISHI, 1981), Vol. I, p. 231.
2. Wilkins, Harold T. Strange Mysteries of Time and Space. (New York, NY: Ace Books, 1958), p. 197.
3. MacLeod, Philip, "The Fiery Man." Occult Review Vol. 21 (1915), pp. 286-288.
4. Montell, William. Ghosts Along the Cumberland: Deathlore in the Kentucky Foothills. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), p. 55.