A household spirit of the hobgoblin kind, who only seems to appear in the ballads. His speciality was giving good advice, but in 'Young Bekie' (No.53 of the Child collection of ballads), which is a variant of the story of a Becket's father, Burd Isabel, the French princess who has helped young Bekie to escape and plighted her troth with him, is warned by the billy blind that young Bekie is on the point of marrying someone else, and assists in a magical journey to England in time to prevent the celebration of the nuptials, hailing a magic ship which the billy blind himself steered across the sea.

Another ballad in which he appears is No.6 in the Child collection, 'Willie's Lady', in which Willie's mother, a rank witch, is preventing the birth of his child by various cantrips. The billy blind advises them to announce the birth of a child and summon the mother-in-law to the christening of a dummy. The mother-in-law expresses her surprise in a soliloquy which gives away the methods by which she has been preventing the birth and enables them to counteract them, as, for instance, by killing the master kid beneath her bed. It is rather strange that this spirit only occurs in the ballads. 'Billy' means a companion or a warrior.

[Motif: F482.5.4]