#561 - Phobia - Murderous Boggarts - ladybrooke - Harry Potter

[ladybrooke]

Title: Murderous Boggarts
Fandom: Harry Potter
Prompt:#561 - Phobia
Warnings: Fantasy racism (POV character, it's pretty obvious he's a jerk)
Rating: Gen
Summary: In which a wizard expresses his views on the murderous boggart of Old London, who may or may not have been Jack the Ripper. 

Sometimes, boggarts just change into an almost amusing fear for a person, if they have no phobia or dark event in their past to make it into a blood-curdling fear.

Other times the boggart is exposed to a fear so intense that it takes a physical form that can harm a person.

That’s what happened with the boggart in Old London Town, you know. There were too many muggles around, all scared of the same thing after a murder. Next thing that happened was that the boggart itself took the form of man come to murder the prostitutes in the area. It changed shape to whatever the people around thought the murderer looked like, that’s why one person would say he was fair haired and the next claim he had dark hair.

There was a vampire around killing them too, but the boggart was the one harder to catch. At least the vampire could be killed, the boggart was only captured, who knows if it will escape and kill again – it’s rather hard to keep one locked up forever.

Back to where we were, though. The boggart killed several women. The Muggles never figured out what was really killing them, of course, to this day they apparently speculate about whether it was somebody connected to their royal family or not. Some Muggleborns have claimed it would have been beneficial to at least offer up some transfigured dead body to reassure them the killer was gone, but well, they were Muggles. If they hadn’t lived like that, they wouldn’t have had to be afraid of the boggart killing all those women – not that I think it should have been allowed to keep killing, but Wizards and Witches had far better communities at the time.

Don’t give me that look, you have to agree with me.

Fine, you don’t. All because Araminta Meliflua tried to make Muggle Hunting legal a few decades later, you think the Wizarding World doesn’t take crimes against Muggles seriously enough. If we didn’t take it seriously, we wouldn’t have bothered to catch the boggart.

And really, the boggart was the reflection of their own fears and phobias, which partially resulted from living the way –

Don’t curse me! Stop fingering your wand like that, you’ll accidently put my eye out.

Fine, it wouldn’t be accidently.

Oh, you’re Muggleborn? That explains it – no, I don’t mean that in a bad way! Just means you like Muggles, unlike most of the Wizarding World.

No, I did not agree with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. He went too far – killed too many wizards and witches, our world couldn’t survive long with just the pureblood families, they have too few children.

Fine, I’ll stop blaming every Muggle’s fate on them. Yes, the ministry probably could have done a better job of keeping track of the boggart running around London, but it’s the ministry, what do you expect.

Well, yes, I imagine it’s possible that there’s a boggart or two somewhere in the world roaming around killing people. They’re everywhere, makes sense that’d it happen again.