The tiny elf in the bedroom of my previous house was not the first nature spirit that my sister and I had seen with physical-etheric vision. Years later, after I had started compiling this book and was discussing it with a cousin who used to play with me, she said, “You saw other fairies before the elf!” Then I met an old friend of the family, who confirmed that when I was “a toddler” I used to babble to her about the pretty colours of the fairies, which I’d seen among the flowers. Unfortunately I have not retained any memory of them and must have taken them for granted, though I do remember talking to the flowers, birds, and trees, and seeing everything through eyes of wonder. It was also not until many years later that my sister told (after she thought she was safe from the reporters who had visited me!) that a fairy had appeared in front of her in the old orchard when she was a small child and I was not yet born. It stood smiling at her—a dainty little fairy dress with silvery wings. It had a pretty coronet on its head, and in its hand was a wand with a tiny, twinkling star on top. My sister said she was so thrilled that she ran up the garden path to fetch Mother, who hurried back with her, but of course, by then, as usually happens, the little creature had disappeared. But Mother knew from Dorothy’s joy and excitement that she was telling the truth. We were very lucky in having wise parents who never scoffed at us or crushed our excited outpourings, but always found time to listen understandingly to what we had to say.
The addresses of the following contributors to John O’London’s Weekly could not be traced, as many records were lost during the bombing of London in the Second World War, but the editor kindly gave me permission to use these letters on condition that I put the correspondents’ initials instead of their full names.
Letter dated 5 April 1936: “During the last summer of 1934, I stayed at the [name withheld] Hotel in Large, Ayrshire. One very hot afternoon, about 4 o’clock, I was walking in the grounds with a Kilmarnock lady, a resident, when she drew my attention to a large flowering shrub over twelve feet high. At a distance we could see small forms whirling around the blooms, and on closer inspection we saw that a host of fairy forms were at play. I was so astonished that I foolishly went to the large shrub, shook the lower branches, and stepped back to see if the forms were still there. They were, but soon disappeared among the blooms, and we did not see them again. We mentioned it to the manager who said that another resident had seen fairies in the grounds. He had suspected that his informant was ‘soft in the head’ and had paid no attention to the story. I consider myself hardheaded, but I did see things that afternoon. It was the first time such an experience had befallen me, and until that moment I should have laughed at anyone who maintained that fairies are real beings.” — J.K.
Letter dated 11 April 1936: “When I was a boy of ten, we lived in Lanarkshire beside a large park with trees and flowers. At early dawn one morning I awoke to see on a chair, which always stood beside my bed, two small old women of about eighteen inches tall. Each wore tall, conical dark hats, and dark long gowns. They looked at me for about twenty seconds and then smiled at each other before jumping in slow motion to the carpeted floor, where they passed from my line of sight. Very gently I eased myself up into a sitting position, so as not to scare them, but they had disappeared. I got out of bed, peered under all the furniture and into the cupboard, but could find no trace of them. The moon was full, and red streaks showed in the sky. They were solid beings: I noted that their busts stood out clearly against the window across the room. It all happened 40 years ago, but it has never gone from my mind. They seemed to appraise me as a horse dealer might do a horse. There was really no affection in their eyes, and the feeling I had then was that I should have liked to catch them in my hand, like birds.” — W.J.F.
Letter dated 16 May 1936: “In 1916 I was staying at a cottage in Cookham Dean, Berkshire, and one afternoon took a basket in order to gather blackberries on a common some distance away. The blackberries were fairly plentiful but small, when I suddenly noticed some particularly fine ones growing on a bush, which stood quite by itself. I was tugging at some rather out of reach, when the whole bush seemed to shiver, the sprays parted, and from out the centre of the bush parted a lean, brown man, dressed in brown with pointed cap and straggly beard. He was solid as far as the waist, but his legs were transparent and shadowy. He slid away like lightning and entirely disappeared. I regret to say that I was so surprised and startled that I dropped my basket, took to my heels, and ran all the way home. I do not doubt that he was the ‘fairy’ of the bush. I have never had the good luck to see another.” — N. V. M.
Letter dated 23 May 1936: “I have followed with keen interest your letters from various readers who have seen fairies. Of course there are fairies, only one is rather backward in telling of them. As a little girl of six or seven, I would never tread upon daisies—because it was in a daisy field I saw my first fairies. There were usually seven or eight together, dancing in circles about three feet from the ground. They had long pointed caps, thin bodies tapering off to very pointed feet. I remember their puckish grins and seem to remember them as being dressed in brown. Then, just before I reached my teens, on many occasions I kept tryst with a lovely fairy in a bower of wild roses near my home. Looking back now it seems I was always aware of this fairy in that leafy nook. She was usually a few feet from the ground, in shining pink raiment, with long golden tresses, and always in a pink aura. The fairy never stayed long in my presence, but it seemed quite natural to me that she should be there.” — I. H.
Letter dated 6 June 1936: “In August, 1931, several fairies—females without wings, wearing some sort of flimsy transparent gowns—were seen by myself and my eldest daughter on eight occasions among the flowering shrubs at the bottom of our garden in Warwickshire, which was bounded by a brook. I saw the same little lady on three separate days, as she wore a pink gown, while the others wore bluish ones. She was so shy that she only peeped at me around a bush, and disappeared when I was about ten paces off. She was not afraid, I thought, so much as anxious to avoid close intimacy with mere humans. They were about a foot-and-a-half high, and looked like ‘sweet seventeens’ reduced in height, but they were simply lovely in face, form, and movement. I cannot get their loveliness out of my mind.” — H.G.
There was, of course, the usual letter from a sceptic, and this one, while not doubting our sincerity, suggested that we may have been “the innocent victims of a trick of the brain!” Needless to say, the writer of this letter hadn’t the courage to put his or her name.
Chapter 8: The Gnomes of Wollaton Park and Fairies as Imitators
On 23 September 1979, several children between the ages of eight and ten were playing together in the grounds of Wollaton Hall—an Elizabethan Mansion in Nottingham—when out of the bushes came a number of merry-faced, bearded little men in small cars—two in each car. The children who shared this experience were Angela, her sister Julie and brother Glen; Andrew and his sister Rosie; and Patrick. They were pupils of a primary school, and their head-teacher very kindly sent me a tape of his separate interviews with three of the children, Angela, Patrick, and Andrew, which he had recorded two days after the sighting. In his covering letter he said: “I think the tape reveals the wide measure of corroboration between the children, as well as the fluency with which they were able to describe the events. I remain sceptical as to the explanation of what they saw, but I am also convinced that the children were describing a real occurrence.” As these three recordings follow the same pattern of questioning, they are not here set out verbatim, but the story is as follows:
The three girls and three boys were playing near a swampy part of the grounds at dusk, when Andrew said, “Look at the little men.” Julie replied, “Don’t be stupid,” but then about thirty cars came out of the bushes and through a little gate, one after another, and Julie said “You’re right” and apologized to Andrew. The little men in the cars began to chase them, though not, as it turned out, with any intention of harming them. Naturally, the appearance
of these gnome-like creatures in such large numbers created some fear and confusion. Angela said her brother Glen was crying because he was “scared,” and Patrick said that Andrew fell over a log as he was running away and went head-first into the swampy ground. When asked afterwards how the cars crossed the logs, which lay over the swamp, he said they just leapt over them, and although there were at least thirty cars there was no sound of engines. They seemed to be of simple construction and of various colours. Angela saw red and white cars; Andrew saw green and blue ones, and said they had “a thing they could turn round, with a handle on it.” Patrick saw them in red and other shades, and he said they had triangular lights on them, and bells in place of motor horns. While he was looking at them, ten of the little men got out and walked. Although the cars had been driven close to the children, at no time had they actually touched them. Angela mentioned that she had returned to the same spot in daylight but had found no trace of car wheels on the swampy ground.
The account of these cars may tax the credulity of some readers, but nature spirits have the power to visualize and create out of universal thought-substance a simple etheric imitation of anything that takes their fancy, and the gnomes may have seen small children trundling along in toy cars, and may also have witnessed the car rallies, which are held from time to time in Wollaton Park. To the schoolchildren, the little men’s cars would seem solid (materialized), but they could have vanished like puffs of smoke if the gnomes had turned their attention to something else. Both Angela and Patrick said the long beards of the gnomes were white, with red at the tips, whereas to Andrew they looked black. There may be a simple optical explanation for this, but fairy visions are often coloured by something in the seer’s own personality, and even two or more of the best seers, when sharing a psychic or occult experience, have been known to differ widely when trying to describe the details.
Angela, who thought the little men were “similar to a dwarf” in type, recorded that they were dressed in “yellow tights with blue thin tops,” and each of them wore a cap with “a big bobble” at the end. Patrick, in his statement, said their hats were green “with red pom-poms,” and he confirmed that their trousers were yellow and their tops blue. Andrew, when asked what he thought the little men were, replied “Gnomes, or summat,” and said there was “something green” on them. When asked to describe the shape of their headgear, he said it was “like the night caps people wore in olden days when they went to bed,” and he was reminded of “Noddy.” He agreed their tops were blue, and he thought their trousers had yellow patches. He mentioned that he had seen other little men in the bushes within the wired fence; in holes in the tree-trunks; and also up in the trees. (Angela and Patrick omitted to confirm in their tape recording that they, also, had seen these beings up in the trees, but they had mentioned this earlier, to a reporter.) When Andrew was asked why he could see the gnomes’ faces so clearly in the dusk, he said there was “a light hanging in the trees” where the gnomes were. When asked what sort of a light, he hesitated and then said: “An ordinary light because when we looked up there was a light.” This seems very improbable unless it was a streetlight shining through the trees, for the children admitted that it was a fenced-off area, which they had managed to enter by crawling through a gap. When Patrick was asked a similar question about the gnomes, which he saw on the ground, he said he thought it was their bright clothing, which enabled him to see them so plainly. “I could see ‘em in the dark—they showed up,” he told the head-teacher. Both of these boys had tried to give a practical explanation for something they did not fully understand. Neither of them knew that the materialized bodies of nature spirits are self-luminous, and this may also account for the light in the trees, which Andrew mentioned earlier.
When the children were leaving the park, they were chased round the gate, so they started to climb over it. Then, on finding it was still unlocked, they ran through the gateway as fast as they could, and the gnomes went back in the bushes inside the wired fence. They had made no attempt to follow the children, and Angela said this was because they did not like the streetlights outside. (That being so, the gnomes would surely not have been in a tree where an “ordinary light” was hanging.)
There was some difference of opinion over the time the children had entered and left the park, but Angela and Patrick thought that during the period of their stay the gnomes had played with them for about a quarter of an hour. They said they had glimpsed them before, during the school holidays, but on that occasion the little men, on seeing them, had gone back into the bushes. Andrew had heard the sound of bells, which proved on the second occasion to be the car bells. There was complete agreement that the gnomes—which Patrick said were up to his waist in height and Angela said were half her size—had old, wrinkled faces; were very friendly and happy (“joyful” was the word Angela used); and they laughed a lot while they were playing. None of the children heard them speak, but Patrick said some of the gnomes appeared to be “shouting” to others who had gone too far, though no sounds were audible.
Needless to say, this weird occurrence attracted the attention of the press, and many people flocked to the area in the hope of catching a glimpse of the fairy men. Unfortunately such an intrusion creates the wrong atmosphere and drives nature spirits deeper into their own element. One of my contributors, Mrs. I. W. Ratsey, said in her book Pioneering (Universal World Harmony), that the ray of curiosity is a cold ray and therefore repelling to the little people, so they hide away from it because it makes them feel uneasy and they do not understand it.
Fantastic though the children’s story must have sounded to their disbelieving parents, there are several features that stamp it as genuine and, considering the following two accounts of experiences that took place before this adventure, I think there is a large, and possibly ancient, tribe of gnomes in Wollaton Park. Perhaps, in between their valuable work with nature, they live in a world of glamour, acting-out among themselves the numerous exciting and colourful events that take place in other parts of the grounds, especially during the Nottingham Festival.
Prior to the schoolchildren’s adventure, Mrs. Jean E. Dixon, then of Nottingham, had an equally unusual experience in Wollaton Park. She was walking there alone, in a pensive mood, when she became aware of the presence of gnomes, who seemed eager to show her some of the various scenes and objects that delighted them. Simple and commonplace though some of these things may seem, the gnomes helped her to see them in an entrancing new light. She knew that in order to be in tune with the nature spirits she had to keep very quiet and listen carefully “inside herself” while they told her which way to go, and when to stop and look. She said afterwards that at each stopping-place she had found a feather, as if the gnomes had laid a treasure-hunt trail for her to follow.
First of all, they took her to a lovely spot where she was bidden to look into a wood. There she saw a sea of green fern waving in the breeze, and she said it was “the greenest green” she had ever seen. The gnomes must have been very proud of this vista, for the woodland ferns and the roots of all plants are under their special care. Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the Anthroposophical Society, rightly called these little earth-folk “the spiritual midwives of plant reproduction,” and the green that these gnomes wished their human friend to absorb is the basic colour of Nature—peaceful, soothing, and refreshing. Corinne Heline, in her booklet Healing and Regeneration through Colour (J. F. Rowny Press, Santa Barbara, California), said that in the radiations of this magic green light the fairies perform their enchantments over field and forest. Mrs. Dixon was being led onward, and this time she thought the nature spirits were teasing her. (“They are good at this!” she said.) But no, there was a slight movement and as she watched she saw a little fawn. It raised its head and stood up, showing her its beautiful body, “all pink and beigy,” and then she saw another and another, and yet more, until the wood seemed full of these lovely creatures—some lying down, some sitting, others just moving around. Next, her a
ttention was drawn to a dead tree-trunk. She wondered what they expected her to see there for it was all rotting, yet she found three silvery spiders’ webs, each differing in shape from the other, and each with its own delicate beauty. She wondered what other treasures the gnomes had in store for her, and this time they took her to a live tree. Throughout her walk she had been very conscious of the sun, and now it was shining behind this tree, sending gleams of light through its branches. She was told to listen and not to let anything else intrude. And then she heard it. The tree was full of sound—a wonderful music, which seemed almost to consume it. Her next stopping-place was by a pool of water where a little pipe emptied its contents. Here she was introduced to another delightful sound, “a tinkling symphony—a real joy,” and she knew that the music of both tree and water was part of the eternal harmony, which sounds through all creation and can be heard by those who are spiritually attuned. Then the gnomes drew her attention to a distant view, this time to observe a dog, which was running, and the graceful, rhythmic movement it created was almost breathtaking, for she realised that the energy that activated it was the divine life, joyously expressing itself through the canine form. “I had witnessed such a scene many, many times before,” she said, “but how different when seen through the eyes of these nature spirits!” Her walk with them was almost over, but before they left her they took her to the edge of a wood and showed her a small patch of tiny white, star-shaped flowers. Even the minutest things can be doorways into the infinite, and as she gazed at them “it was as if the heavens had for a moment joined the earth.” And then she saw a small white feather waving in the breeze, and knew that her little friends were bidding her farewell. She was once again walking alone, but the memory of her wonderful experience would remain with her always. It was not until later that she realized the things she had seen represented all the different kingdoms of nature, as well as the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire (sun).
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