The meaning and origins of the word pixillated

To doodle is to sketch meaningless designs on a scrap of paper while supposedly paying attention to something else, and this verb was first heard in the film Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1937). It is now a respectable member of the vocabulary for the excellent reason that this verb neatly describes an action for which there was previously no name (…) Pixillated — also launched by that same film - meaning ‘slightly crazy’, still survives to some slight extent and has found its way into the dictionaries. It has been pointed out to me, however, by Mrs Morwenna Broadbent of Padstow, Cornwall, that people were being pixillated (pixyladen, pixyled or piskeyladen) in the West of England long before Mr Deeds went to town. In about 1925 she was told by a local man how he was ‘piskeyladen’, or led astray by pixies, and had to turn his coat inside out and say the Lord’s Prayer backwards before he could find his way out of a field. A little book called Devonshire and other original poems (1873), written by Elias Tozer, editor of the Devon Weekly Times and the Evening Express, recounts on page 81 how a nurse had ‘often been pixyled’ on her way home at night, and heard the little rogues clap their hands and cry out for joy at seeing her plight. ‘It was only after she had turned her pockets inside out that she got into the right road to her anxious husband and family.’ In Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary the forms are given as pixy-laid and pixyladen ‘led astray, lost, bewildered’.