The setting for this next account is in a wild part of a garden of many acres in Ootacamund, Nilgiris, S. India, about 1889. The nine-year-old child Muriel (later to become Mrs. Armitage) used to lie on the rough grass by an underground water-channel—a natural outlet of a small pond between two hills, where she could hear water gurgling below. Further down, the water disappeared completely, but above this point were two peepholes in the grass. Through these could be seen miniature waterfalls, and on the mossy ledges were minute black frogs less than an inch in size. One morning, unable to ride before breakfast, she climbed on to a lichen-covered rock and sang about the frogs and insects. She did this only when alone, and the tune consisted of what she called “the four nature-notes.” Three fir trees (plump and thick-set, and hideous in her eyes because they did not belong, as did the age-old sholah with moss-covered branches) grew below the rock. In the middle of her song, she saw what she thought was a small, queer-looking, red and green bird on a lower branch of the nearest fir tree. She slid down, climbed a branch and, above her head, was a little red and green man with a long grey beard, big nose, rosy cheeks, and peaked cap, laughing down at her. He was not much larger than an English sparrow; his jacket was red, and he wriggled his legs as he sat on the branch. She climbed after him as far as the tree would allow, but then he was gone. Bitterly disappointed, she had to admit that the he-fairy was not like Oberon, whom she had seen when she was Titania in Tableaux Vivants, when four years old. She said she knew nothing of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, nor of Hans Andersen’s, being unable to learn to read or write either English or French. She thought that the four notes of the nature-song, sung on the old rock, must have enticed the he-fairy to show himself. “Could he have come with the fir trees, which may have been imported as saplings from Europe?” she wondered.
Mrs. Mary Walton, a Buddhist living in Birmingham, recounted an experience she had at the age of seven, while on holiday at a farm near Dundee. The day was lovely and warm, and she sat facing a large elder tree, running her fingers through a clump of bluebells and, childlike, “listening to hear them ring.” In the stillness, she fancied they were giving out a tiny tinkle. She stopped playing with them and rested her chin on her hands, “wool-gathering.” First she saw what looked like a patch of mist, and then she heard music. Fascinated, she sat motionless, scarcely daring to breathe, as little fairies and elves began to dance and jump about to the music of a fairy fiddler who sat astride a swaying dog-rose. Everything was in perfect miniature, “like looking at a ballroom scene through the wrong, end of a pair of opera-glasses.” After her experience she met an elderly lady and told her about it. “Yes,” came the answer, “strange things are seen round about.” When Mary remarked that the music nearly made her dance, the woman said: “It’s a good thing you did not. You are a fay child, and when you are a lot older you will understand that those are elementals and are as real as you and me. Perhaps some day…” Then she stopped, and looked at her long and earnestly: “Don’t tell anyone what you saw, but sit there again, and you may again see them or hear their music. When I was a child like you, I often heard it.” Unfortunately the young seer was unable to return to the same spot, for the school holidays ended a few days afterwards.
One of my contributors, Mr. J. H. Craigen, kindly put me in touch with Mrs. E. Niven, of Ireland, who gave me the following account. Her husband’s uncle was once crossing over some mountains outside Dublin with a friend, when they reached a fence and were suddenly accosted by a most peculiar little man who gave both of them a very uncanny feeling. He got in between them and chatted away until they came to another fence, where he mysteriously disappeared. The two men were terrified, and afterwards they could not remember one word of the conversation they had exchanged with their strange companion. Mr. Craigen was told by a Wesleyan minister, of Co. Antrim, that in one place where he was stationed, a number of people who were going to mass on a Sunday morning stood on the roadside and watched some wee folk dancing around a tree.
The aunt of a friend of Mr. Craigen’s, when young was helping her father to gather potatoes in a fields, and just as they were about to stop work they lit a fire with the potato tops. When they went into the house, her father found he required the graip and sent her back for it. On reaching the field, she was surprised to see a number of little folk dancing around the brightly burning fire. She was so frightened, she ran home without the graip. When the mother of this aunt was doing some washing at the side of a stream one day, she could hear the little folk up in a tree laughing at her.
A similar experience came from Mrs. Esther Gardner, who related that when her late husband was gardener of the extensive natural Questhaven Retreat in California, he had a little gnome friend “of grandfather age,” who adored him and wanted to be just like him. The great Angel Guardian of the area communicated this information to the leader of the retreat, the Rev. Flower A. Newhouse, author of The Kingdom of the Shining Ones, Natives of Eternity, Rediscovering the Angels, etc. The gardener never saw the gnome, but was often aware of his nearness and his helpfulness. One day he distinctly heard someone laugh at him when a root on which he had been heaving suddenly gave way and he rolled over and over. He jumped to his feet to see who had been watching him, and laughed as he chided the gnome, for no human being was in sight.
Miss Stella Watson of Surrey, an artist and modeller in clay, had seen fairies all her life but never when they were in the act of flying, “My fairies seem to come out of holes in banks,” she said, “and I believe they also live high up in the trees. I think fairies and birds have a lot in common.” During her travels she saw fairies in Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Ceylon, etc., But none in the North Island of New Zealand. She was very young when she was in Canada, but she remembered there were fairies who looked like Indians in among the birch trees on the Prairie edge, while the fairies seen in Ceylon were “small and very sweet, and they seemed to be sucking something,” though she could not see what it was. In England she had watched the nature spirits playing follow-my-leader down long blackberry sprays, and noticed that the thorns did not seem to hurt them at all. She had observed them on overhead wires and described their colours as green, grey, or blue, with an iridescent sheen. Sometimes she heard their voices “very high-pitched and chirpy.” As a child she would come upon them sitting under nettles, with their backs against the stems. They seemed to have small pipes in their mouths, for there were tiny puffs of something like smoke rising into the air. She was puzzled by the fact that she had noticed flocks of fairies on the big main roads, and the explanation she tried to give herself was that they must be living in the remote past, before such roads were made, and were therefore oblivious to the noise. Another explanation could be that they were in an entirely different dimension, to which Miss Watson was lucky enough to be able to tune into.
Once, when cycling from Oxford late in the night, she ran into a large procession of them under some beech trees. She alighted and stood among them, but they took no notice of her and seemed to pass through her when they wanted to. During the summer months, she used to sleep out in a hammock near a lake, and often when she awoke she would see the little people “all over the place.” One April afternoon in 1935, she was in the woods with a friend much younger than herself, when both of them saw groups of fairies all around. “They seemed to be going to a meeting,” she said, “but very soon my companion spoilt it all by screaming with excitement.”
When she was driving home one summer evening with a sealyham named Jenny by her side, the dog looked up suddenly and barked. A magpie was flying over the car, and in its claws was a tiny figure, which appeared to be struggling. As the bird passed, the little “captive” looked directly at Miss Watson. “I shouted and hooted,” she told me, “but the bird flew on, and the result was that my car ran up a bank and I bit my tongue, an incident that left me with a very painful memory.” Of course, the magpie would not really harm the little creature, but nature spirits love enacting these-scenes for the benefit
of certain human beings.
At intervals Miss Watson used to stay at her lonely cottage high up in Llanfrothen, Penrhyndendraeth, Merioneth, North Wales, and she said that while there she heard talking constantly at dusk and dawn. There were high voices and low, and music like a Jews-harp. The sounds always seemed to be in the ground beneath her. A few days before Midsummer Day in 1959, she heard a voice near her say “Good evening” quite clearly, then something else and the words “…very thirsty,” so she put out a bowl of milk and some water. Sometimes she thought she heard galloping horse or pony, although none had been up there for many years. It may have been a Welsh Pwca, a shape-changing sprite similar to the Irish Pooka and the English Puck. Miss Watson’s unusual account of a water fairy is included in another section of this book.
One morning in November 1949, Miss Ruby D. Johnson of County Kildare was seated in the Dublin-bound bus that leaves Poulaphuca (a Gaelic place-name signifying Pool of the Pooka, or Puck’s Pool) at about 7:30 a.m. Just as the bus was starting off, she glanced idly through the window and was amazed to see a tiny child busily gathering something from the nettles and weeds that fringed the roadside. It was dressed entirely in whitecap, coat, and leggings. Miss Johnson’s amazement was due to the fact that the child was about the size of a seven-month-old baby, and yet was able to walk. She was also very surprised that such a small child should be allowed out in the bitterly cold semi-darkness of a wintry morning. “I clutched my companion and tried to draw her attention to the little figure,” she said, “But my companion could not see it at all, and the other passengers in the bus began to eye me strangely!”
From Captain E. A. MacKay, of London, I heard of a fairy seen from the window of a railway carriage by his Godmother, Mrs. Hyndman, of Wick, near Bournemouth. About the year 1933, Mrs. Hyndman was travelling in a train from Bournemouth to London on her way to attend the funeral of an acquaintance of hers. She was sitting in a corner seat, idly watching the scenery when, a short while before reaching Basingstoke, the train drew to a standstill in a cutting, and a slight movement in the grass on the embankment caught her attention. There, literally within a few feet of the window, she saw a small being sitting on the grass with its knees drawn up and its elbows resting on them. Its face was cupped in its hands. Dressed in a non-descript drab costume and wearing a sort of cap on its head, it seemed to her to be scarcely interested in the train, and she had the impression that it was just tolerating its being there. So surprised was she at seeing this minute creature that she couldn’t say a word. She just sat and stared at it during the short interval before the train moved off again, and then she turned her head and watched the little being receding from sight. Although Mrs. Hyndman had had one or two psychic experiences of another kind, she told her godson that she had never seen a fairy before, and had not seen one since.
When Capt. MacKay sent me his godmother’s experience, he told me he had some of his own to relate. At the age of eleven he used to do a lot of bicycling around the Wiltshire countryside, and on a lovely day in spring one of his trips took him to Bratton in the Downs. He was wheeling his bicycle up a steep lane bordered by hedges, which were covered with fresh green buds, when he came to a small field on his left and was suddenly aware of activity—not of rabbits or other small animals—in the near corner just beyond the hedge. Stopping to peer through, he saw several faint little figures, who seemed to be running round and round and frolicking. As he laid his bicycle down on the grass verge and peered closer, the movement suddenly ceased, and although he waited for several minutes all was quiet and deserted.
On the next occasion, he was using a hazel twig to locate a reputed buried treasure in the garden of an old house outside Reading, when his search took him up to a thick shrubbery of laurels and other bushes. He was just wondering if he would have to search this too, when, from between the leaves, he saw a small, rather naughty looking little face peeping at him. “I could hardly believe my eyes,” he said, “but as I looked, the face withdrew.” For many years, when Capt. MacKay was sitting in his chair, he used sometimes to feel a definite pressure and warmth on his left knee, as if a child were sitting there. Several independent sensitives mentioned to him that a gnome had attached itself to him and favoured his knee as a resting-place, though he himself was never able to see the little fellow. When he and his sister were very young (she being about five years old), they lived in Wiltshire in an ancient house, which was reputed to be haunted. His sister repeatedly saw fairies there, and one, for whom she had an extraordinary name, often used to come to her early in the morning and talk to her.
When Mrs. E. Heath was living in County Antrim, Ireland, she saw a fairy dressed in a red peaked cap and a green jacket. Her hair was flaxen and curly, and she wore shoes with pointed toes. Another fairy, which appeared in a farmhouse a short distance away, was also dressed in red and green, with pointed shoes, which had silver buckles. She sat on a “creepy stool,” but did not stay long. “There was a fairy glen at my uncle’s farm in County Monaghan, and a fairy tunnel below one of his fields,” said Mrs. Heath. “He often talked about the lovely music he used to hear at a late hour of the night.”
My next contributor, Mrs. Jane Dowie, was a district nurse, and after her retirement was county councillor for the Earlston Division of Berwickshire. Her account is also of a little red and green creature. In August 1934 or 1935, she and her two sons were on a hiking holiday in Skye, staying at Youth Hostels. They had reached Dig—she cycling while the boys walked—and after visiting Flora MacDonald’s monument Mrs. Dowie set off ahead of her two sons for Duntulm Castle, where they all proposed to meet and have lunch, which they carried in their knapsacks. It was a pleasant, sunny day, and she was cycling along enjoying the scenery and idly wondering how far the boys were behind her and how long she would have to await their coming. She was, perhaps, two miles short of Duntulm Castle when quite suddenly, to her startled gaze, a little creature, which might have been two inches high, ran across the road in front of her. She had a momentary vision of green and red, and thought at first that it must be some rare bird but, when she jumped off her cycle to see where it had gone, there was nothing but sheer rock, with not a crevice visible where it could be hiding. She went to Duntulm Castle feeling very much disturbed and fervently wishing her sons had been with her to have beheld the creature, but they had visited the Tweed Factory and then returned to the Youth Hostel, so never came that way. Mrs. Dowie cycled back by Staffin and was not again on that road, but neither at Dunvegan nor Glen Brittle—where she met many other hikers—had anyone seen this small creature, although they had passed that way.
A similar being was seen in the spring of 1947 by D. Saunders, who wrote as follows: “While walking in the oak wood at Ballathie, Stanley, Perthshire, I saw under one of the trees a tiny figure. Treading softly on the mossy path, I approached it cautiously, and even as I drew nearer this figure became smaller and smaller, till by the time I reached the spot where it had stood, it had vanished, leaving no trace of its presence. I returned to the same spot at the same time week after week, but never saw it again.”
Max Heindel, in his book Nature Spirits and Nature Forces (Rosicrucian Fellowship, Oceanside, California), tells us that at the summer solstice, which falls on 21 or 22 June, the veil between the human and the fairy kingdom grows very thin; and that on this night the fairies hold a great festival at which they bake and brew their etheric foods and dance with joy at having served their important purpose in the economy of Nature. Many people look on Midsummer Day as the 24 June, the date of the Quarter Day, and claim to have had experiences then instead of at the summer solstice, but it is quite possible that the fairies continue to hold celebrations in their own territories for several days during that period.
I was privileged to attend one of these celebrations and was taken to stand outside a wood to await the fairy procession. I could see it coming when it was some distance away, as all the figures were self-luminous. As they drew near, they smiled and
greeted me, and I was aware that I was the same size as they were—or they had become the same size as myself. It was an Alice in Wonderland situation that has been experienced by “H” of Buckinghamshire and other seers. I noticed that most of the pixies were in smart tunics, and their hats were of the same shape as toadstools. Strange though as it may seem, I can’t remember what the fairies wore. A gate leading into the wood was opened and they all passed through. One of the fairies, who had been talking to me, invited me in, but I’m ashamed to say I suddenly felt afraid and refused the invitation. I think I was worried about the etheric food, which they would have offered me, and which it would have been unwise of me to accept. Some years later I had the same fear when I was “pixie-led”—but that comes further on in this book.
Mrs. Constance Carpenter, of Ryde, Isle of Wight, told her daughter Judith, who was four years old and very interested in fairy stories, that the fairies always came out to dance on Midsummer Eve, and for this purpose they liked the circles made by toadstools. Imagine the delight and surprise of both mother and child when they went into the garden on the morning of Midsummer Day and found there two complete circles of toadstools. The late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said that, although these “fairy rings” are produced by fungi such as agaricus gambosus or marasmius oreades, he had to admit that they have always been associated with the little people and make a charming course for a circular dance.
Seeing Fairies Page 9
