Mrs. Maybelle Gillespie’s son, Thomas, used to see fairies in his native Galloway, mostly near the house and in the garden. Especially he liked the “lady fairies,” as he called them; and the way the fairies helped to show the birds where to get food and berries in wintry weather. On one occasion, at the age of ten, he brought Mrs. Gillespie some flowers and explained that a fairy had said: “Give these to your Mother.”
Many years ago, when Mr. George E. Rice and his late wife lived in Middlesex, they were invited to spend an afternoon with Dr. Outram, a lady doctor of philosophy, at her home at Shenley, in Hertfordshire. Dr. Outram had been told by a well-known London medium that she had a fairy dell in her grounds, and this interested her because her lodge-keeper’s little son, aged four, kept on telling his mother that he played with the fairies. Having heard that Mr. Rice’s wife was a gifted medium, Dr. Outram was eager for her to see the fairy dell, so thither Mr. and Mrs. Rice went with their younger daughter a few weeks later, and they and their hostess sat close to an old oak tree and waited. The dell consisted of a double line of trees with grass instead of a road between, and the little party had been there about two hours when Mrs. Rice exclaimed: “I see them; they are little brownies, and they are coming out of that hollow tree over there.” She pointed to a tree on the other side of the grass-way. “They are bringing out a Maypole. They have set it up and are dancing round it, inter-twining the ribbons and shouting just as children do.” Dr. Outram sat wide-eyed, staring in amazement at Mrs. Rice, then in awed tones she said: “That is exactly what my lodge keeper’s little boy has been telling his mother.”
When Miss D. L. Voss-Bark was exercising her dogs in the woods near Minehead, in Somerset, she saw two pixies rushing away at her approach. They ran into a hole leading to a hollow oak. “But,” she said, “They are really very human. They forgot to duck their heads, and so off flew their hats and went rolling in the pathway. I was luckily able to obtain the two small hats and bring them back with me, and so I am able to convince my friends of the truth of the tale.” Miss Voss-Bark had mentioned this in an article in the Dog World Annual of 1938, and I wrote to ask her what the hats were made of. She replied that they were perfect little cones of wood.
“What a pity,” declared Mrs. Agnes Taylor of Cornwall, “that you never met Nellie Sloggett of Padstow, alias Enys Tregarthen and Nellie Cornwall. Under one or other of these names she wrote her books of Cornish fairy stories, several of which were based on the old legends, which have been handed down for many generations. Often, when I visited her, she saw fairies on my shoulders.”
A well-known children’s psychiatrist, who for professional reasons preferred to remain anonymous, told me that she had seen fairies all her life, and that she and her twin brother used to spend many hours observing the little people in the country round their home, which was in Southern Ireland and was on the verge of a great bog. “The little elves loved the peat-fires,” she said. “They would sit cross-legged on the nursery hearth, holding out their tiny hands to the blaze, and chuckling to each other when the sparks flew and the turves fell in the warmth of the flames. As far back as I can remember, there was always a baby in the heavy-hooded oak cradle by the fireside, and Sarah, our Irish nurse, sat and sewed by candlelight in the soft Irish dusk. For nursery tea we had cake one day, and jam or golden syrup the next. On golden syrup days the slices of bread were cut in the kitchen early in the day, spread with syrup and stacked on the plate so that the syrup soaked right through the bread. I remember joking with my brother at the sight of a little gnome sitting on the edge of the plate, holding his mouth open to catch the drops of syrup from an overhanging slice of bread. There were the Christmas tree fairies, the Easter grotto fairies, the fairies who guided folk through the bog, and the undines who danced in the waterfalls. They were all quite different from each other. They were busy all day, and their movements were swift and sure. They were like children in comparison with those greater beings, the angels, who moved with such dignity and light.
“Then came a time when my father decided to go and live in England. The hustle of moving hardly reached the nursery until the day when we all boarded the ship in Cork harbour to begin a new life among strangers. My mother was a harpist, and the great instrument, in its green baize cover, stood beside us on the deck. It was difficult to settle down in England. My mother missed the warmth of the Irish people, the rough country scenes, and the soft Irish rain. She became ill, and one day just before my seventh birthday, Sarah took us all into the room to say goodbye. Although it was a winter evening, the room was strangely light. A soft radiance flooded my mother’s face and enveloped the tiny face, which was all we could see, of the baby lying in the crook of her arm. We (the six children) waited in silence beside Sarah. My father stood as motionless as a statue by the side of the bed. My mother beckoned, and Sarah went forward and lifted the baby from her arms. She murmured ‘Goodbye,’ then held out her hands to my father, who clasped them in his own until my mother’s smile faded and she was at rest. At that moment, fifty or more fairy people, holding a shimmering blue cover, came instantly forward and drew the wonderful gauze over the bed and the still figure. The light faded and the room felt cold. Then from the corner came the clear notes of my mother’s harp. Baby Michael grew into a quiet, dream-boy. He had a love for all living things, and it was he who pointed out to us the fairies in the herb walk, and the gnomes picking the fruit off the low bushes and quarrelling with the birds for the best specimens. I do not see the fairies now as often as I did, but they do pay me a visit occasionally.”
Another instance of fairies being seen round a deathbed was related to me by Capt. Sir Quentin Craufurd, Bt., M.B.E. His wife’s grandfather was, he said, “as confirmed an old sceptic as you would want to meet,” but he had a fairy rath in his garden and would never allow anyone to interfere with it. Just before he passed away, the Wee Folk gathered at his bedside, and he said that although he knew it could not be true, he could see the little fellows quite plainly and was very glad they were there!
When Mrs. Margaret Nailard was living at Feltham in Middlesex during the Second World War, she had a very lovely flower garden in which she used to sit and watch the little flower fairies smiling at her. There were also pixies and gnomes with their pointed hats, and they would all form a circle and go dancing round and round. She said it was a beautiful sight, and she looked forward to seeing them each day when the weather was fine. A born clairvoyant—as were her mother and grandmother—she was still able to see the wee folk in her old age, and she told me that shortly after the arrival in England of the Jamaican immigrants, she had seen some delightful fairies of the same type.
I am indebted to Mr. Michael F. Kelly Mor, late of the Royal Engineers and Ordnance Survey, for sending me Mr. Colgant’s account of the fairy hurlers, or hockey players, seen in 1886 in a field adjoining the main road near the village of Mullagh in County Galway, some six miles from the farm on which Mr. Kelly Mor then lived. As they had been seen playing in that same field a few years earlier, news that they had turned up again spread like wildfire through the Galway countryside. The incident passed entirely out of his mind, as he had left the locality a year or two later and did not return to it for more than half a century. In 1940, the year he took up residence in Galway city, he received from a friend a letter mentioning that Mr. Hugh Colgan, a well-educated and prosperous farmer who was related to the friend, had had an accident and was in Galway hospital. The friend suggested that Mr. Kelly Mor might be good enough to visit the patient there and, perhaps, take him some light reading matter, so Mr. Kelly Mor duly arrived at the hospital taking with him a magazine he had purchased at random. Mr. Colgan gratefully accepted it and glanced in a casual way at its contents. On noticing that they included a ghost story, he was prompted to say that he himself could relate a curious experience. The visitor encouraged him to do so, instantly realising that this man was one of those who, in 1886, had witnessed the fairy hurlers in the field.
> “One evening,” began Mr. Colgan, “when returning home from school in company with five other youngsters, boys and girls, we stopped to watch a lively game of hurling. It was being played by a number of little men with their coats off and wearing white shirts. After a while the ball landed within a few feet of the low fence by the roadside, and I jumped over the fence into the field to throw it back to the hurlers, but, to my astonishment, there was no ball. Neither were there any hurlers to be seen. My five companions declared that they all vanished the moment I cleared the fence. I should add that I was thirteen, the oldest among us, when this happened.” He went on to say that the field in which the hurlers were playing was a large pasture, several acres in extent, devoid of any ditches, trees, or hedges, which might have concealed them. When he and the other scholars dashed home to tell parents and villagers of their experience, they were greeted on every side with the offhand observation, “It’s not the first time the fairies have been playing there.”
Mr. Kelly Mor said there was a sequel to this. In the 1950s the same Mr. Hugh Colgan and a number of other farmers were sitting smoking and reminiscing by the turf fire in a house some miles away from Colgan’s, and in the course of the evening Colgan related his boyhood experiences with the fairy hurlers in the field near Mullagh. He was concluding with the remark that not one of those who had shared it with him was now alive, when a voice in the background contradicted him. It was that of the elderly housewife who had been listening to him while baking her bannocks. “You are mistaken,” she interposed, “for I was there also. There were six of us, you remember…”
Again through the kind help of Mr. F. Kelly Mor, I received Mr. Michael A. Nevin’s account of what occurred one Midsummer evening in the year 1917. Mr. Bernard McMahon was driving his uncle’s cows to a field beside the fox covert in Thaula, about four miles from Loughrea in Co. Galway, and Mr. Nevin was accompanying him. On reaching the gate leading into the field, they were letting the cows in when a big blaze shot up in the centre of the covert, and one of the men remarked what a terrible thing it was that someone had set it on fire, covered as it was with furze and gorse bushes and trees, which extended over three acres. The flames rose high for several minutes, then died out suddenly, and the two onlookers were just expressing their relief that the person who started the fire had extinguished it, when it blazed up again, and they watched it for another few minutes until it died down again as before. This was repeated about ten times, but each time it flared up it remained alight for a shorter period, until the final blaze just shot up and died away on the instant. Then, from the same spot, out came hundreds of little men on their hands and knees. They crawled along by the fence until they came to a point about a hundred yards further on, and as each one reached it he disappeared. The two men watched this strange procession for at least three minutes, and still it went on, so they decided to rush to McMahon’s uncle’s house, where the neighbours gathered in the evenings, and bring them all up to see this queer sight. The neighbours returned with them, running as fast as they could—the total distance being 400 yards—but when they reached the covert there was no trace of the little people, or anything unusual. Naturally, they were disappointed and rather angry, and some of the boys accused the men of playing a joke on them. The scene of the fire was revisited the next day, but not a trace of any ashes could be found, and not a blade of the long grass seemed to have been disturbed. Yet Mr. Nevin and Mr. McMahon had stood only 100 yards from the phenomenon, and had seen it quite clearly in the twilight just after sunset. Twenty years later, again at twilight, a young woman named Mary Alton, who had never heard of the previous occurrence in the covert, was returning home after visiting a friend’s house. While she was walking along a lane by the same field, she saw a similar display of shooting flames, but unlike the other witnesses she did not stay long enough to see any little people appear. She was so frightened that she fled straight back to the house she had just left and remained there until morning!
A journalist who came to interview me confessed that he himself had seen fairies. His childhood had been spent in Glamorgan, Wales, and one day, when playing with a group of boys, he hid from them in a thick shrubbery. While there, he suddenly became aware of a path leading through it, which seemed to have been trodden by little feet. Following this path, he emerged at last to find himself on a small, green, sun-drenched plateau, at the far end of which were gaily-coloured hollyhocks and delphiniums. He gazed entranced at what he believes were fairies, prancing about in the flower beds. He thought at first that he was dreaming, but eventually convinced himself that he was actually witnessing a fairy scene. To his great regret, when he grew older and developed more courage for revisiting the area, he was never again able to find the path to the green plateau, nor, despite persistent searching, any trace of the fairy people.
Miss Katie Richardson had an experience in May 1942, which was “so lovely and so wholly unexpected” that it was often in her mind. It occurred in Lippin Wood in the village of West Meon, Hampshire, when she was 43 years old, and I quote her words: “I was taking a walk in this peaceful spot when suddenly, on reaching a shallow, saucer-like depression in the ground, flanked on one side by a tree, I saw a group of very disgruntled-looking little men engaged in tidying-up. They were collecting the tiny twigs and leaves (which I could scarcely see) and after sweeping them up with little brushes they placed the rubbish in a neat pile at one point of the hollow.
“If this surprised me, it was nothing to what followed, which made me almost afraid to breathe, for from the proximity of the tree there appeared a number of fairies dancing about out of sheer happiness. They were from eighteen to twenty inches in height,and were dressed in varied shades of pink. One of them made a sign to the little men, who were standing apart from them, and a tiny round table and some chairs were brought and placed where the fairies directed. Next, the fairies produced a delightfully lacy tablecloth, and after shaking it out they spread it over the table. They then disappeared, and I wondered what was going to happen next, but in no time at all they appeared again, carrying between them a perfectly lovely-looking cake, a two-tier affair, with a most artistic decoration in icing. (As a professional cook, I’ve often longed to reproduce the design, but it’s beyond me and, I think, anyone else except the fairies.) When it was placed and, with a great deal of fuss, all was arranged to their liking, they disappeared once more, and this time when they reappeared it was as maids of honour and train-bearers to the Queen herself. She was taller than the others, and her dress was of a deeper shade of pink than theirs. The skirt of it was full, like a miniature crinoline, and covered her feet. She had a crown on her head and carried what I can only describe as a wand. On reaching the table they all curtsied to her before taking their places. The cake seemed to me to be in the nature of a surprise for her, and she showed great pleasure at seeing it. When she cut it, I saw that it was yet another shade of pink throughout. Two pieces had been cut out, and I found myself wondering whether the little men would be given any, when I heard a very faint sound, at least, it was faint to my very acute hearing, but it was enough to send the fairies hurrying away and out of sight. In no time at all, the little men had whisked away the table and chairs, and then they, too, had gone. Later on I saw the fairies again, but this time they were without their Queen.
“Before my experience in Lippin Wood, I’d had great doubts about the existence of fairies, but I’ve never doubted since. My next sighting was at Warnford, a tiny hamlet next to West Meon. There was a small horse-chestnut tree growing on the roadside, and while I was looking up, admiring the flowers, I noticed a little fairy balancing on one of them. My thought ‘Oh, fancy a fairy in a tree’ was answered with ‘I am a tree fairy;’ and then when I showed surprise she added ‘Only the ones with flowers on.’ She seemed more solid than the other fairies I had seen and was quite bold in comparison. I think the method of communication was mental.
“I saw fairies again in the village of West Meon in late Ju
ne 1943. I had offered to help pick fruit in a garden attached to a large house there. I did not know the lady of the house and had only seen her once or twice. After we had finished fruit-picking, she said, ‘I’d like you to see my special garden, one I made in memory of my son after he had passed over.’ We entered it by a wrought iron gate, and I found myself standing in a very lovely walled garden, which was peaceful and secluded, and ablaze with colour. The atmosphere was so wonderful that I often recapture it. Soon I became aware of numbers of fairies tending the flowers and moving swiftly amongst them, and also some little men who were paying special attention to the roots. My companion turned to me and said ‘Ah, you can see them; I knew you would. That was why I brought you in.’”
At the age of about 28, Miss Dorothy Townsend saw fairies and gnomes in a little larch-wood at Coldash, Newbury, in Berkshire. She went there after tea and was not thinking about them or expecting to see them, but there they were about half a dozen of each. The fairies were playing about, and the gnomes were sawing and chopping wood. “I stood quite still,” she said, “but they went in a flash. I am psychic and can, now and then, get into touch with the angels. I love the Unseen World.”
Prior to the 1914-1918 war, Mrs. C. Graddol saw a fairy in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester. Ranged along the side of a wall was a row of poppies, and near them appeared a “young girl” about twelve inches high, whose golden hair hung loosely down her back. Her dress, of a beautiful light mauve shade, reached to her feet, and its short puffed sleeves revealed her lovely arms and hands. Gently, she touched about six of the poppies and then vanished. “I can tell you, she made me very happy,” said Mrs. Graddol.
Seeing Fairies Page 11
