Seeing Fairies

by Marjorie T Johnson

  Mrs. Kathleen Fryatt, a teacher of elocution, was born in Northern Ireland but was living in Essex at the time of the following experience, an account of which she sent in 1952 to the Braintree & Witham Times. In the summer of 1951, she was out for a walk with her husband, in Witham, and, having decided to take a shortcut home through the fields along the Foulkbourne Road, they entered a field known as The Walk. (Mrs. Fryatt was told afterwards that this used to be a monks’ walk leading to a monastery.) The path was lined with old trees, and noticing that one of them was hollow, she stopped and looked into it. To her utter surprise, she saw in the bark the faces of three or four grotesque little men with large noses and ugly mouths, and lying on the ground inside the tree was a little old lady of seven or eight inches in size, with a sort of Welsh hat and a long, full skirt. Mrs. Fryatt told her husband, but when he looked he could see nothing. “You are imagining them,” he said, and picking up a stick he pretended to poke the old lady, but his wife called out: “Do not dare to touch them!” When he realised she was serious, he put down the stick, and they tried to continue their walk. “I say ‘tried’,” she explained, “because we found that the path was no longer a shortcut, as corn had been grown at the end of it. My husband said, ‘Now look what your fairies have done.’ We retraced our steps and, as the fairies were still there when we reached the hollow tree, I apologised to them for my husband’s behaviour, explaining that he came from Essex and did not believe in fairies. When we reached home, I decided to boil an egg each for our tea. My egg was perfect, but my husband’s egg was completely bad. I boiled another one for him, and it, too, was bad. The strange thing is that never before nor since has either of us had a bad egg. Were the fairies having their revenge on a disbeliever, or was it just coincidence? I never expected to see these little people, but I would swear in any court of law that what I say is absolutely true.”

  My thanks go to Mrs. Wm. Tait for sending the following account of an experience related to her by her cousin, Miss Elizabeth Johnston. “In 1896, when Miss Johnston was about five years old, she left her home at ‘Columbus,’ Bridge of Walls, in Shetland, one Sunday afternoon to visit a neighbouring family, who lived in a house about 100 yards away. She was in a hurry because she knew the family would shortly be leaving for church. It was a lovely summer day, and too hot to run all the way, so she walked up the steep bit past the gable of her home. A rough grunting sound suddenly directed her gaze towards the turf dyke at the back of the house and she saw clearly, lying on top of the dyke, a little man staring belligerently at her. His clothes seemed to be all dark brown, and he had a long beard of much the same colour. His gaze never left her face, and his only attempts at communication were two or three loud grunts, which seemed to convulse his whole body. She stood transfixed for a few minutes, then took to her heels.” It is interesting to note from the next account that this gnome was not the only one who grunted.

  “We have a very fat, green gnome who lives here and grunts like a pig,” wrote Mrs. Claire H. Cantlon, of London, in 1933. “He seems rather bad-tempered, as he growls at the children and runs away when they see him. I have not seen him, but I have heard the noise that he makes. Our black Persian cat plays with a fairy that teases him, and he makes bird noises to it. You can see that it flies round and round just out of reach, and puss puts up his paws and tries his best to catch it, and then looks all round to see where it is. He then has to wait until the fairy returns, and then the same thing begins all over again and will go on for 30 minutes or more. It is most entrancing to watch. One day, at tea, my eldest girl saw a fairy on the bookshelf. I could not see it, but the dog did and flew at the books and barked. All my children are able to see fairies and gnomes about the house and garden, and also in the woods and country places that we visit. They take them as a matter of course.”

  During the Second World War, Mrs. M. A. Rodliff occupied her aunt’s house in Harrow. She had many psychic experiences, but none so wonderful as that relating to the fairy vision she had there. On a night when the moon was full, she saw from the threshold of her back door what appeared to be glow-worms in the neglected wartime garden, but as she stood watching them they began to move in a manner that glow-worms never do. They had become a dozen or more gnomes, skipping merrily on the tops of the Brussels sprouts. In height they ranged from a foot to roughly twenty inches and were dressed as if for a party, some in green coats and hats, some in red coats and hats, others in mauve. “They were definitely having such fun,” she said. “Soon they left the Brussels-tops to dance on the lawn close at hand, and to run hither and thither in great elation. Though I was transfixed with surprise, I was truly delighted to see them. There was such merriment that I, too, felt happy and couldn’t tear myself away from the back door.” Mrs. Rodliff added that this vision remained with her as clearly as any experience of her life, and she could recall the sense of wellbeing and joy it instantly communicated. Her sole regret was that those to whom she related this unique experience were apt to laugh at her, “and this,” she said, “is why I’m glad to pass on my account to anybody sympathetic enough to accept it.”

  Mrs. Edna F. Wilson mentioned the following experience in a letter to Prediction magazine, and I wrote to her for details. In November 1946, she moved from Birmingham with her husband and three children to a very isolated and lovely little valley in Hertfordshire. On the estate of 43 acres was a sixteenth-century mansion and two lodges, far back from the road. Everywhere was overgrown when the family moved in, and no one else lived on the estate, the owner being abroad. The house was on a hill with a dense wood at the back, and during the hot summer of the following year Mrs. Wilson used to love to sit in this wood and was very much interested in the flowers in the grounds. “Quite suddenly, I became clairvoyant in several ways,” she said, “and the first fairy I saw was sitting in a red rose and had beautiful wings like those of a butterfly. I was amazed, of course, and after that I used to look for fairies, and they were everywhere. The wood was swarming with them, and I would watch them floating up around the trees. They were never more than four inches in size, and were always smiling. Like some of the little people in fairy tales, they were wearing long, flowing gowns with jewelled straps across the shoulders and sometimes a band around the head with a star in the centre. I liked to sit and gaze at them in the afternoon, when they were continually floating about the flowers. I watched them, too, in the peach house, floating up and down amongst the peaches, and also amongst the tomato plants in the greenhouse. They were on the cut flowers that my little girl would bring into the house, though she never could see them. When evening came, I used to sit just inside the wood, and they were all dancing in circles, quick as lightning—gnomes and fairies and pixies all together. They seemed to be floating down from everywhere to join in the fun. Though I listened for music, I was always disappointed. First I was aware of lights moving about in the grass. In fact, I always saw the lights first, and had to use a certain amount of concentration, which was why I sat in solitude. But the queer thing was that at night, when I was watching them dancing, I became so interested and absorbed in them that everything seemed to come to life, even the blades of grass, and I actually felt as if I were in Fairyland.”

  In 1951 I received permission from the Aquarian Metaphysical Institute of Colour Awareness to quote this description, written by their founder, the late Ivah Bergh Whitten, of some tiny green elementals at work perfecting clover leaves. “These tiny creatures work in squads with a sort of military precision. These squads form almost the perfect outline of a four-leafed clover and keep a perfect drill formation. Those working at the heart of the leaf (if this is the object worked upon) deliver all their force, then step back allowing fresh elementals to take the brunt of the task though they, being now in the second row, shove or pull as the case may be, then step into the third row where still less effort is required of them. In the fourth row they do nothing but work their way to the fifth row. When they reach the outer curve, they again return to th
e centre to perform their task and again drill through the next leaf of clover in like manner, repeating until the leaf is complete. At the end of the last one, if the task is not finished, they start all over again at the drill. The Green Elementals are joyful, radiant, and work with a vim and zest, tinting, polishing, dusting, toning-up, and perfecting the tree, shrub, vine or fern.”

  Mrs. Veronica Maxwell of Devonshire, an artist who painted celestial subjects, could sense, but not see, fairies. She had a friend whose mother, when a child, lived in Ireland, and one day this child was holding the pony while her own mother visited an old cottage. As she waited near a large granite boulder, two of the “little people” about fourteen inches high emerged from under the stone, smiled at her and clapped their hands, then vanished. When Mrs. Maxwell was staying on a wild island on the Bay of Donegal, she met several people who had actually seen fairies, including a General’s widow, who watched them dancing on the lonely sands in the sunset; an Archdeacon who, from his boat, saw them flitting about on the shore in the moonlight; and a friend who had an estate on Dartmoor and used to watch them down by the streams, among the bog-myrtle and cotton-grass. Mrs. Maxwell also met someone in Devonshire whose cousin was one day sitting on an old log in the dense woods of Berry Pomeroy Castle (on the edge of Dartmoor), when “out of the corner of her eye” she saw something move at the end of the log. It was a pixie, wearing a little cap and jerkin, and he looked very annoyed at seeing her there. Suddenly he sprang up, ran along the log, slapped her face, and disappeared!

  “It is often said that the fairies do not appear in cities,” wrote Mrs. B. E. Rushton, a Theosophist living in Birmingham. “My experience in the spring of 1961 has disproved that idea for me. We have a minute spot of garden behind a four-foot wall on one of the busiest roads in the city. Buses pass every few seconds and it is difficult to cross at all during the day. I planted a couple of dozen bulbs, most of them tulips, and passing them out or in would carefully count each one. I would talk and laugh and recount and put my hands gently around the smaller ones. They were very real to me as I have poor health and they are a glimpse of the country. One day, I was very depressed and had a bit of a headache, so I lay down in one of the noisiest rooms in the house as we had a guest in my room. I lay on my back, listening to the traffic, when I felt an electric charge in the air. This always means I am to have a ‘visitor’ or become ‘projected.’ It was a ‘visitor.’ A ‘presence’ wafted in at the door and there was laughter all around me. It went to my feet and followed the line of my body to my head. I felt a bulb ‘kiss’ my mouth several times and a voice in my head said ‘Because you love them so.’ There was much happy chatter in the air and I was re-energised. I can feel the soft touch of the dry skin of that bulb whenever I think of it. The voices were not bell-like or chirpy as those I had heard before in the country. There seemed a greater intelligence and the ability to communicate. I have felt in the country that the beings were examining me rather like the Lilliputians did when they found Gulliver. This was different. I felt their personal feeling for me.”

  One morning Mrs. Rushton saw a gnome, or elf, on a hill at Clent, in Worcestershire. As soon as she had formulated the words “Well, he’s real” and turned to look directly at him, he had disappeared. It was at Clent, too, that she and her daughter heard strange music approaching, and saw leaves and dust gyrating in the air swiftly towards them. According to tradition, these eddies of wind and dust are occasioned by hosts of fairies travelling to a new dwelling-place. “We were caught up in a real singing whirlwind,” she said, “and our skirts and scarves went with it till it continued over the edge of the hill. There it met an uprush of air from below, and died to our ear on the instant. It was a wonderful experience, and one which I was thrilled to share with my daughter, who was then about eighteen. She said afterwards, ‘It is fun going out with you, Mummy. Unusual things seem to happen.’ Clent Hills are full of magic. Once, I lay down to bask in the sun, and dozed off. A voice in my ear said firmly, ‘Time to go down now,’ and when I opened my eyes there was not a soul in sight. The sky had darkened, and just as I reached a bus shelter over a mile away, a storm broke. But for the warning I should have been drenched to the skin, at the very least.”

  An incident that occurred when she was about five and a half, and living in Kent, was recalled by Miss B. M. Berens. She and her older sisters had been out to tea and were proceeding to collect their pet goat, which was tethered in a field. Their way lay along a path between a garden and an orchard, and her sisters, seeing that she was lagging behind, told her to wait by the gate while they fetched the goat. Dusk was falling, and she was feeling rather frightened. Glancing up at a tree, which seemed rather light, she noticed several fairies sitting on the branches and looking down at her; nine to twelve inches high, they were dressed in blue, pink, and green, had long fair hair and wings like gossamer. As she watched them, all her fears left her. Then she saw her sisters coming along with the goat, and when she looked up again at the tree, the fairies had vanished.

  At the age of eight or nine, she lived in Worcestershire, and she was pushing her dolls’ pram down a lane near her home when she met a man who was obviously the worse for drink. This frightened her, and she walked quickly with her pram to a gateway, where she knew she could open the gate easily. She went through into a field, and there, just inside it on a big, moss-covered stone, sat a sad-looking fairy with folded wings and clad in greyish clothes. The child looked round to see if the drunkard had followed her, but he had not, and when she turned to speak to the fairy it had disappeared. Miss Berens pointed out that on both occasions she had been frightened until she saw the fairies, and they had dispelled her fears and brought her comfort.

  “I never fail,” wrote Mrs. Frances E. Cotton, of Tasmania, “to marvel at the variety of forms that spirit builds about itself.” And she went on to tell me that a friend of hers, Mr. J. Green, Senr., of Hobart, saw a gnome-like manikin sitting cross-legged under a bush in open heathland, busy over something in its hands. Its clothes were dull red, green, and brown.

  Another friend, Mrs. Britta Adams, told her that in October 1925, when she was a child in Wellington, New Zealand, she saw on some rhododendron blossom several semi-transparent, long-robed creatures, each wearing a sort of narrow, trailing stole, back to front. With her were her young sister and a cousin, but they could not see the fairies, although their attention was drawn to them; and the fairies themselves seemed busy and quite uninterested in the children.

  In 1922, when Miss Penelope C. Storey was seven years of age, she was living with her people in an old cottage in the Buckinghamshire village of Great Missenden, and it was there she saw her first fairy. She had been put to bed on a summer evening and was lying awake with the curtains undrawn, gazing out at the gathering twilight. “Quite suddenly and entirely unexpectedly,” she said, “I saw, floating down slowly past the window, a perfectly proportioned miniature female form, so far as I could judge between twelve and thirteen inches high, with long hair, and clad in some filmy drapery. Her arms were outstretched sideways, and her feet gracefully together. In the dusk, she looked colourless-grey and white in effect. No wings were visible—and this is worth noting, as all the childhood fairy books on which I had been nurtured depicted fairies with wings. She simply floated, quite slowly, vertically downwards through the air. I felt a certain sense of excitement, but no great surprise, and did not even think of getting out of bed to see if I could see anything more.

  “Shortly afterwards, my Mother came in to see if I was still awake, and eagerly I told her what I had seen. Of course she refused to believe me and said it must have been an owl. But it was no owl that I watched, and I remember telling myself solemnly that I must never forget that on that night I had seen a fairy. The episode has indeed remained imprinted on my mind with far more vividness than most childhood memories.”

  Another reader who cherished an unforgettable experience was in her thirties at the time. Miss Dorothy M. Tomkins was wa
lking down the garden path when, for no reason at all, she turned her head to the left, towards the lawn, and there, at a distance of several feet from her, was a brightly coloured fairy two- to two-and-a-half inches in height. She could see the tiny being’s head and its wings, which were folded down. “I remember distinctly,” she said, “standing absolutely still and saying to myself, ‘This is not a butterfly or anything else, it is a fairy. I am absolutely sure, and nothing and nobody must ever make me doubt it.’”

  The fairy that Miss Christine Hutchinson saw was also very small. When she was eight years old, she had a fairy house at the bottom of the garden at her home in Leeds, and every morning on the table in the little house she found a sweet, together with a note wishing her a happy day. She believed they came from the fairies until she discovered that her mother put them there.

  Then one morning her faith in fairies was truly rewarded. As she was walking down the garden path, she saw something that she thought at first was a kind of fly, though not a moth or a butterfly. She was surprised at its extraordinary brilliance, and then, to her great delight, she saw that it was, in fact, a tiny, bright yellow fairy. When relating this in 1957, Christine told me that, although she had reached “the sobering age of sixteen,” she still believed firmly in the existence of fairies after that childhood experience of hers.

  Miss Towen, of Monmouthshire, saw her first fairy in that county about the year 1945 on a very hot day in June, while the bees were humming amid the fragrant blossom of the lime trees. She and two young friends, David and Margaret, were quietly admiring a group of very large, scarlet antirrhinum flowers when suddenly one dropped forward, opened, and out came some twirling tissue veiling, which passed close to Miss Towen’s head. Rising gently into the air was a bright blue fairy, with arms outstretched her beautiful face clearly visible. “A fairy!” said Margaret. “A blue fairy!”