Like others of their inhumanoid kin, the diminutives seem to have an unwholesome interest in human children, occasionally being blamed for the disappearances of infants and youngsters. But are they merely the fanciful imaginings of creative writers, poets and bold-faced liars, or could there be something more to these tales; something tangible?
Thousands of eyewitnesses think so. They claim to have actually seen such tiny creatures with their own eyes, and their descriptions of these inexplicable beings are widely varied and diverse; from benevolent nature sprites to terrifying, hair-covered demons thirsty for blood. They cannot all be pigeon-holed into any one specific category of diminutive.
Indeed, as we have seen throughout this book, many inhumanoids defy all categorization. Some are said to be hirsute and bestial-looking, like scaled down versions of Sasquatch. Others have no hair at all and appear to be a type of ‘alien’ visitor to this world, even, at times, arriving on scene via ‘flying saucers.’ Others still have been described as looking, apart from their miniature dimensions and strange fashion sense, relatively normal; even human.
One early medieval diminutive inhumanoid account was recorded by a monk named Gervase of Tilbury and concerns a visitation in 1138 at the Brunia Monastery in the Trier region of old Prussia. Wine had begun to disappear from its storage place in the cellar of the monastery. Eventually the culprit succeeded in spilling the contents of an entire keg onto the floor, having forgotten to plug the bunghole after tapping the cask. Certain that one of the monks was imbibing on the sly, the steward complained to the abbot, who then went downstairs to anoint the cellar with holy water, lock the door securely, and place a religious relic above the entrance.
All his preparations came to naught, however, for when the abbot and some monks unlocked the door the next morning they discovered that yet another keg had been tapped and its contents spilled on the floor. A sudden movement in the shadows attracted the abbot’s attention, and the two monks moved in, grabbed hold of the intruder and dragged him into the light.
To the abbot’s great surprise the thief was a strange, dark-skinned dwarf. When asked how he had managed to sneak into the cellar, the entity remained completely quiet, ignoring all attempts at communication. A search of the room revealed at least a partial answer. A small tunnel was discovered that led deep down into the earth.
Afterwards the dwarf was allegedly kept in custody. During the weeks which followed the monks attempted to convert their strange visitor and draw him into proper Christian society, but all their attempts went unheeded, the diminutive fellow refusing to speak even a single word. He simply sat cross-legged on a bed, looking straight ahead and refusing all offers of food and sustenance.
Then one day the dwarf was shown to a visiting bishop, who jumped up in fear, shouting that the creature was a demon from hell and must be expelled at once. Gervase concludes, “the demon ran in alarm from the holy words. He went to the cellar and returned to his underworld tribe.” The tunnel was then, most likely, destroyed.
A Trip To Fairyland; The Abduction of Anne Jeffries:
Perhaps the most impressively documented encounter with the fairy folk occurred in the year 1645 in Cornwall, England. It happened to a nineteen-year-old girl named Anne Jeffries (1626-1698) and the encounter changed her life forever. The story is a steamy one, for its time, with both sexual and religious overtones, and was discussed in detail in Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman’s excellent work, The Unidentified.
Anne was described as a daring girl of high intelligence. She seemed to have a preoccupation with fairies, however, and talked about them often in her spare time, saying she would very much like to meet them. People who knew her thought she was crazy. No one in their right mind could actually want to encounter the fairies, after all. But Ann did. She would go about the trees and gardens after sundown, it was said, singing to them among the wild flowers.
Months went by. Then late one morning, as she sat knitting in her employer’s garden, she heard a rustling in the trees, as if someone was watching her. She thought it was her boyfriend at first, and pretended not to notice. Then she heard a suppressed laugh and more rustling of branches and became annoyed that he wasn’t showing himself. “You may stay there till the moss grows on the gate,” she called out, “ere I’ll come to ‘ee.” Then musical laughter erupted from the trees, and she realized that whomever her visitor was, it couldn’t be her sweetheart.
She heard the gate open behind her and, turning around, saw six little men. They were all handsome and bright-eyed, dressed in green clothing and caps. The most dashing one, who wore a red feather in his cap, stepped forward, bowed, and talked to Ann like an old friend. Completely charmed, she held out her hand to the little man, expecting him to shake it. Instead he jumped into her palm and she lifted him into her lap. The tiny chap then began taking liberties with Ann, fondling her breasts and kissing her lips. She responded favorably to his attentions, she said, and things went well until he presently called for his companions to join him. They also clambered up her dress, and began smothering her body with kisses.
Then one of the beings ran his fingers over her eyes, which felt as though they had been pricked with a pin, and she was immediately struck blind. Suddenly she felt as if she was whirling through the air at great speed. After a few moments of this she heard one of the beings say something like “Tear away!” and the movement stopped. Moreover, as quickly as it had left, her sight had returned.
She found herself in a beautiful and brilliant land, she later claimed, which appeared to be a Garden of Eden-like paradise. She saw palaces of silver and gold that rose above lush green forests. Flowers grew everywhere and their sweet fragrances filled the air as well as the songs of many brightly-colored birds. Hundreds of men and women were engaged in all manner of activities from strolling to dancing.
To her surprise, she saw that all the fairies were now normal sized, some even taller than herself and she suddenly realized that she was now dressed in beautiful, sparkling clothing. Her six companions remained at her side attending to her, though her continued preference for the one who had first spoken to her appeared to cause the others to become jealous. The two eventually sneaked away from the others to a luxurious garden filled with flowers where they made love. Afterwards, as Anne lay with her lover amid the Eden-like splendor of Fairyland, she wished she could live that way forever.
Alas, it was not meant to be. Suddenly loud noises interrupted them from their rest. They rose and saw the other five fairies at the head a large crowd, coming at them in a violent rage. Anne’s fairy lover drew his sword to protect her, but soon fell wounded to the ground, leaving Anne alone and helpless. The ‘man’ who had blinded her before again put his hands over her eyes, and again all went dark. She then felt the same whirling sensation once more as she was engulfed in a sound like “a thousand flies buzzing about her.”
While Anna was thus engulfed in her visions, a group of her friends found her in the garden, suffering in the throes of “a kind of convulsive fit.” They took her into the house and put her to bed, taking great care of her. As soon as she had recovered from the fit, she yelled; “They are just gone out the window. Do you see them?”
From that point on Anne was a changed woman. She apparently gave up her lusty, adventurous ways and became a devout Christian. She constantly went to church. She took mighty delight in devotion, and in hearing the word of God read and preached, although she herself could not read. For a time, Anne refused to reveal anything about her abduction to fairyland but she eventually confided some of it to some close friends and from there, the story spread rapidly. But that was not all. Anne’s exposure to fairyland, coupled with her extreme religious devotion, had apparently given her the power to heal the sick. In a letter to the Lord Bishop of Gloucester, the son of her employer, Moses Pitt, wrote:
“People of all distempers, sicknesses, sores, and ages came not only so far off as the Land’s End, but also from London, and were cured by her. She took
no moneys from them, nor any reward that I ever knew or heard of, yet she had moneys at all times sufficient to supply her wants. She neither made nor bought any medicines or salves that ever I saw or heard of, yet wanted them not as she had occasion. She forsook eating our victuals, and was fed by these fairies from that harvest time to the next Christmas day; upon which day she came to our table and said, because it was that day, she would eat some roast beef with us, the which she did; I myself being then at the table.’
Now Anne was, it seemed, no longer eating human food, but being fed by the fairies, who constantly waited on her and vied for her favor. Once they even gave her a cup made of silver, which she in turn gave as a gift to a young girl. Pitt continues:
“She gave me a piece of her (fairy) bread, which I did eat, and I think it was the most delicious bread that ever I did eat, either before or since. One Jonh Tregeagle, Esq., who was steward to John Earl of Radnor, being a justice of the peace in Cornwall, sent his warrant for Anne, and sent her to Bodmin jail, and there kept her a long time. (Earlier the fairies had warned her that she would be apprehended.)
She asked them if she should hide herself. They answered no; she should fear nothing, but go with the constable. So she went with the constable to the justice and he sent her to Bodmin jail, and ordered the prisoner-keeper that she should be kept without victuals, and she was so kept, and yet she lived, and that without complaining. But poor Anne lay in jail for a considerable time after; and also Justice Tregeagle, who was her great prosecutor, kept her in his house some time as a prisoner, and that without victuals.
When she was finally freed, Anne took a job near Padstow and, shortly afterwards, married a man named William Warren. During this time, she and the fairies had apparently parted ways, either because church officials had convinced her that the creatures were minions of Satan or she was reluctant to risk another long stretch in prison. Later in life, she flatly refused to even speak of the subject for any amount of money.
The following is a sworn statement by a seventeenth century Swedish clergyman:
“In the year 1660, when I and my wife had gone to my farm, which is three quarters of a mile from Ragunda parsonage, and we were sitting there and talking a while, late in the evening, there came a little man in at the door, who begged my wife to go and aid his wife, who was just in the pains of labor. The fellow was of small size, of a dark complexion, and dressed in old grey clothes.
My wife and I sat awhile and wondered at the man; for we were aware that he was a troll, and we had heard tell that such like, called by the peasantry Vettar (spirits), always used to keep in the farmhouses, when people left them in harvest-time. But when he had urged his request four or five times, and we thought on what evil the country folk say that they have at times suffered from the Vettar, when they chanced to swear at them, or from uncivil words bid them to go to hell, I took the resolution to read some prayers over my wife, and to bless her, and bid her in God’s name go with him. She took in haste some old linen with her, and went along with him, and I remained sitting there.
When she returned, she told me that when she went with the man out at the gate, it seemed to her as if she was carried for a long time along in the wind, and so she came to a room, on one side of which was a little dark chamber, in which his wife lay in bed in great agony. My wife went up to her, and, after a little while, aided her till she brought forth a child after the same manner as other human beings.
The man then offered her food, and when she refused it, he thanked her, and accompanied her out, and then she was carried along, in the same way in the wind, and after a while came again to the gate, just at ten o’clock. Meanwhile, a quantity of old pieces and clippings of silver were laid on a shelf, in the sitting room, and my wife found them next day, when she was putting the room in order. It is supposed that they were laid there by the Vettar. That it in truth so happened, I witness, by inscribing my name. Ragunda, the 12th of April, 1671.” -Pet Rahm
The first systematic study of fairies was done twenty years later by the Reverand Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, Scotland. The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, was completed in 1691, and still remains one of the seminal works on the subject over 300 years later. Kirk wasted no time on debating whether or not fairies were real. He considered their reality self-evident, and set about, instead, to delineate the nature and habits of this supernatural order of beings.
Kirk concluded that fairies were an intermediate form between men and angels who had light, fluid bodies of the consistency of condensed clouds which enabled them to appear and disappear at will and fly through the air, or even solid materials such as the ground, in order to escape to their beautiful subterranean kingdoms. They were capable of stealing whatever they wished, he stated, from food to human babies and their civilization in many ways mirrored our own, even adopting or imitating local human customs. They were intelligent and curious beings, according to Kirk, ruled by a king and queen, the former being slightly more powerful than the latter.
Many people of the time were shocked at the good reverend’s audacity in writing an entire book about the secret commonwealth, of whom it was considered ill luck to even speak. Certainly, they were sure, no good could come from such a thing. And indeed, none did. Only a year later, in 1692, the reverend Kirk was struck dead while strolling across an alleged Fairy Knoll. Tradition holds that Kirk had not died but had been “taken” by the fairies in retribution for his meddling into their business, and that his coffin had contained only stones at his burial.
“Just as the landscape and the overhanging clouds change from county to county in these small but varied islands, so the fairies of each district very subtly in mood and emphasis and color; but, everywhere the characteristics are broadly the same, the same stories are told about them; danger and beauty stream out of all of them.” -Katherine Briggs, folklorist.
Consider the writings of the Reverend S. Baring Gould, a well-known and highly respected intellect from Victorian England:
“In the year 1838, when I was a small boy of four years old, we were driving to Montpelier on a hot summer day over the long straight road that traverses the pebble and rubble-strewn plain, on which grows nothing save a few aromatic herbs. I was sitting on the box with my father when, to my great surprise, I saw legions of dwarfs of about two feet high running along beside the horse; some sat laughing on the pole, some were scrambling up the harness to get on the backs of the horses. I remarked to my father what I saw, when he abruptly stopped the carriage and put me inside beside my mother, where, the conveyance being closed, I was out of the sun. The effect was that, little by little, the host of imps diminished in number till they disappeared altogether.”
Was the young Gould suffering from hallucinations brought on by sun-stroke? The Reverend continues.
“When my wife was a girl of fifteen, she was walking down a lane in Yorkshire, between green hedges, when she saw seated in one of the privet hedges a little green man, perfectly well made, who looked at her with his beady black eyes. She was so frightened that she ran home.
“One day a son of mine was sent into the garden to pick pea pods for the cook to shell for dinner. Presently he rushed into the house as white as chalk to say that while he was thus engaged, and standing between the rows of peas, he saw a little man wearing a red cap, a green jacket, and brown knee-breeches, whose face was old and wan, and who had a grey beard and eyes as black and hard as sloes. He stared so intently at the boy that the latter took to his heels.”
The following account, said to have occurred in 1842, was recorded by Hollingworth in his History of Stowmarket:
“S-------, living for thirty years at the cottages in the hop ground on the Bury road, coming home one night twenty years since, in the meadow now a hop ground, not far from three ashen trees, in very bright moonlight, saw the fairies.
“There might be dozens of them, the biggest about three feet high, and small ones like dolls. There dresses sparkled as if with ba
ngles, like the girls at shows at Stow fair. They were moving round hand in hand in a ring, no noise came from them. They seemed light and shadowy, not like solid bodies. I passed on, saying, the Lord have mercy on me but them must be the fairies, and being alone then on the path over the field could see them as plain as I do you.
I looked after them when I got over the style, and they were there, just the same moving round and round. I ran home and called three women to come back with me and see them. But when we got to the place they were all gone. I could not make out any particular things about their faces. I might be forty yards from them and I did not like to stop and stare at them. I was quite sober at the time.”
Most often, fairies and their kind do not like being seen or surprised, and they absolutely hate being disturbed at their revelries. If a human accidentally disturbs a fairy dance, for example, and actually survives the ordeal, he might tell stories like the following recorded by psychic researcher Elliot O’Donnell. The incident, he said in ‘Ghostland,’ had happened to one of his relatives as he was driving his buggy down a road near Ballynanty in Limerick, Ireland:
“The horse had come to a dead stop, and was standing still, shivering, whilst the roadside was crowded with a number of tiny shadowy figures that were surging round the car trying to drag the unfortunate driver, who was quite frantic with terror, from his seat. Mr. B., however, concluding that what he saw could only be the fairies; of whose existence he had hitherto been very skeptical, seized the reins and urged the horse forward.
Meanwhile his servant seemed to be still paralyzed with fright, and it was not until they were well out of sight that the man found himself once again in possession of his tongue and normal faculties. Then he described what had befallen him. He was driving along quite all right, till the horse suddenly stopped, and when he looked down to see what was the cause of it, he perceived a crowd of fairies, who rushed at him, and tried to drag him off the car. He said their touch was so cold it benumbed him. But by praying hard he held on. The cause of the attack was apparent.
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