In his influential Declaration, Harsnett cautions against what he judges to be Catholic superstitions still haunting the nation. These are based upon his critique of the notoriously egregious exorcisms carried out in the 1580s by Catholic priests in Denham, Buckinghamshire. At one point, Harsnett emphasises his scepticism over the reality of things such as demons and the walking dead by contrasting this with the way that, he says, ‘our children, old women and maides [are] afraid to crosse … a three-way leet’. A ‘three-way leet’ is a Y-shaped crossroads, of the kind that has been particularly associated with ‘triple’ Hecate. Harsnett equates the fear to cross this space (especially if, for instance, one's church tithes were unpaid) with the necessity to ‘ware where you walke’ for fear of a menagerie of monsters which he helpfully lists as:

The joyful linguistic expression of this passage merely adds to the weight of Harsnett's intended mockery but at the same time it serves to emphasise the cultural reality and breadth of the fear he describes. Its hyperbolic nature may suggest to the reader the obvious vacuum of any actual evidence of such spiritual monsters, but also this vacuum may attract a confluence of narratives around the pagan divine, monstrous nature, the demonic, the restless dead and the world of faerie which seem very much to flourish in the early modern period. A Swedish tradition alludes to the same danger when it dictates that on his marriage day a bridegroom might experience a great fear of trolls and sprites and should therefore sew pungent herbs into his clothes and avoid crossroads at all costs.