SEEING FAIRIES
From the Lost Archives
of the Fairy Investigation Society,
Authentic Reports of Fairies
in Modern Times
By Marjorie T. Johnson
ANOMALIST BOOKS
San Antonio * Charlottesville
SEEING FAIRIES
Copyright © 2014 by the Estate of Marjorie T. Johnson
ISBN: 9781938398285
First published in German in 2000 by Aquamarin as Naturgeister: Wahre Erlebnisse mit Elfen und Zwergen
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Book design by Seale Studios
For information, go to AnomalistBooks.com, or write to:
Anomalist Books, 5150 Broadway #108, San Antonio, TX 78209
CONTENTS
Introduction by Simon Young
Foreword by Capt. Sir Quentin C.A. Craufurd
Introduction by Marjorie T. Johnson
Chapter 1: Nature Spirits in Gardens and the Countryside
Chapter 2: The Case of the Green Wood Elves
Chapter 3: Water Fairies, Fire Fairies, Tree Spirits, and Banshees
Chapter 4: Fairies in Houses, Fairy Glamour
Chapter 5: More Fairy Experiences
Chapter 6: Fairies of Iona, Fairies Seen by Gypsies
Chapter 7: TheJohn O’London’s WeeklyLetters
Chapter 8: The Gnomes of Wollaton Park, Fairies as Imitators
Chapter 9: Animals and Fairies, and Fairies Enlisting the Help of Human Beings
Chapter 10: Transportation of Objects by the Fairies and Fairy Apports
Chapter 11: The Vesting of Psychic Power, Fairy Playmates, and Fairy Photographs
Chapter 12: A Fairy Sanctuary
Chapter 13: Mediums and Fairies, and Fairies in Dreams
Chapter 14: Fairies’ Attachment to Certain Objects
Chapter 15: Fairy Music, and Fairies Dancing to Our Music
Chapter 16: Angels and Angel Music
Chapter 17: Group Spirits
Epilogue
Introduction
by Simon Young*
Seeing Fairies and Fairy Literature
Anyone with any interest in literature will know the tortured path that many works, even works later denominated as “classics,” have had to follow to find their way into print. But very few books, good or bad, have passed through birth pangs as difficult as the ones experienced by the present volume. It all began in 1955, when the British author, Marjorie Johnson, then aged 44, began to put together the material for a book entitled Fairy Vision. She worked with the noted Scottish author and folklorist Alasdair Alpin MacGregor and got Quentin Craufurd, a man who defies easy definition but who had a long-standing interest in fairies, to write the introduction to her monograph. However, Fairy Vision matured more slowly than Marjorie had expected: first Craufurd died in 1957 (he had fortunately already written the introduction), then, in the same year, MacGregor dropped away from the project, though not before he had dedicated one of his finest volumes to Marjorie. The years passed and still the book was not completed. Marjorie, who was based in Nottingham, in the English Midlands, later referred to three major problems: health issues in her family; professional obligations (Marjorie worked full time as a lawyer’s secretary); and difficulties with her eyes. There may have been some attempts to publish the book prior to the 1990s. But it was only in 1996 that a manuscript, the manuscript that is behind the present book, was finally typed up: Marjorie was 85. By then its title had changed to Seeing Fairies: Authentic Reports of Fairies in Modern Times, A Book for Grownups.1
Marjorie sent the impressive collection of fairy sightings and fairy material that she had amassed to publishers in Britain and in Ireland, but she had no luck despite the able assistance of Leslie Shepard, a fellow fairy enthusiast and an expert on Bram Stoker.2 However, Leslie proved assiduous and the breakthrough eventually came thanks to him. He found, in fact, a home for Seeing Fairies at Aquamarin, a publisher based in, of all places, Germany. The result was that in 2000 Seeing Fairies emerged with an entirely different title. This time it was Naturgeister: Wahre Erlebnisse mit Elfen und Zwergen. One can imagine Marjorie’s pride but also bewilderment as she, at 89, finally held in her hands her life’s work in a language that she could not read. If this sounds like the universe playing a cruel joke, then the punch line had not yet been delivered. In 2004, when the author was 93, Naturgeister was translated into Italian as Il Popolo del Bosco: i luoghi dove vivono gnomi, fate, elfi e spiriti della natura, un mondo di fascino e mistero. Another book that Marjorie could not read. Marjorie died in 2011, aged 100.3 She did not live to see her book brought out in English: but with her strong beliefs in the survival of the soul, she assumed that one day she would witness this happen “from the other side.” The published version in English, with some minor changes, will doubtless make her shade smile: the final proof that the transition from imagination to the printed page is fraught with all too worldly problems.
Now but wait a moment, the reader might be thinking. Here is a book that took the best part of half a century to get into print (and then “only” in a foreign language). It was a book that was repeatedly refused by reputable Anglophone publishers and one that only slipped through the printing press in 2014, just shy of sixty years after its first drafting. Perhaps, the same reader may consider, this is a poor recommendation. Well, if you’ve bought this online or had the fortune to get it in wrapping paper, then, it is, to be frank, too late to protest. But just in case you are one of those twentieth-century types who actually look at books in bookshops, let’s make the case for Seeing Fairies and make it as strongly as possible.
This book is special because it brings together an unprecedented number of fairy sightings, ranging from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The fairy book market—which is not admittedly very broad—does offer rivals. Edmund Jones, in the eighteenth century, gathered a collection of fairy and ghost sightings in two volumes, best read today in a modern reissue (2003) as The Appearance of Evil. Some of Katharine Briggs works include fairy experiences, side by side with traditional fairy tales and fairy lore. Janet Bord’s fascinating Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People contains several score of the same. Then, most notably, Evans-Wentz’ classic The Fairy Faith, published just before the First World War, has a hundred plus fairy sightings from Ireland, Mann, Brittany, and the Celtic fringes of Britain. Marjorie Johnson trumps them all, however, in terms of numbers. There are here about four hundred sightings from around the world. In short, this is the biggest single collection of fairy experiences ever amassed.
If you are one of the minority who believe in fairies, then here you have the most substantial archive of accounts ever brought together: a work that does not supersede Bord’s, Briggs’, Evans-Wentz’, and Jones’ work, but that can stand proudly on the bookshelf alongside them as one of the great fairy books, with more discursive volumes like Jeremy Harte’s Exploring Fairies and Lewis Spence’s The Fairy Tradition. And what if you are one of that substantial majority who do not believe in fairies? Then you have the perfect data set to make your case against “the little people”: five hundred fairy sightings waiting to be picked apart and analyzed. Whether fairies are out there (author points to wood, hedgerow and waterfall) or in there (author points to balding head of middle aged “witness”) then they need to be explained. Marjorie gave us, in these pages, the tools to do just that. Yes, there is a lot of baggage in this book: particularly spiritualist and theosophical baggage, words we’ll return to below… And for the twenty-first-century reader, even those like Marjorie who are believers in a non-physical dimension, this baggage can be a little hard to
lift: a paragraph on bees from Venus stands out in my memory… But, particularly in the crucial early chapters (where the most interesting sightings are to be found), the baggage can be consigned to the left luggage counter and the accounts can be assessed on their own merits.
The Fairy Investigation Society, Spiritualism and Theosophy
The next question is: where did Marjorie get the material for the book? And the answer to this is, in large part, to be found in one of the most curious British organizations ever to have been dreamed into existence: the Fairy Investigation Society (FIS). The history of the FIS is a fascinating topic in its own right. But for present purposes we can reduce that history to the barest of outlines. In 1927 the FIS was founded in London by, among others, Quentin Craufurd, a brilliant retired naval scientist who had had, he believed, some success communicating with the dead and fairies by radio: this is the same Quentin Craufurd who invented the first remote radio device—the precursor of the mobile phone; and who wrote the original introduction to the present volume. He was joined by Bernard Sleigh, an artist specializing in wood engravings, who had experience with fairy themes and who had penned a series of fairy short stories, published in The Gates of Horn: happy the man or woman who can, today, find a copy of this rare book. Others were included in the magic circle. There was, for example, Claire Cantlon, a London medium, who acted as secretary of the FIS for a time and who had been prosecuted for her séances in a memorable trial in which Arthur Conan Doyle appeared for the defence. (There is no proof, at least none known to me, but Doyle, a fairy believer himself, may have belonged to the FIS; he certainly knew Craufurd.) There was also Nina Alida Molesworth, a shadowy figure from the British aristocracy again with links to spiritualism, and there was Jean Michaud, a Belgian publisher resident in the capital, who encountered, from time to time, the Great Beast, Aleister Crowley.4 From 1927 to immediately before the war, the society met, discussed fairy matters, and carried out experiments. What brought these different individuals together in one room? The answer “fairies” is not enough, and a recurring theme in the biographies of the members, at least those that we can trace from this date, is an interest in spiritualism and even theosophy, an outgrowth of spiritualism associated with the notorious (or according to tastes, celebrated) Madame Blavatsky.
Say “spiritualism” to someone living in the modern west and they’ll picture a man or a woman in their grandparents or great-grandparents generation sitting in the semi-dark and trying to communicate with “the departed.” But spiritualism was more than just table rapping and knocks and “ether.” It was an attempt, honest in the case of most members of the movement, to open vistas onto a wider world beyond the physical realm. It was only natural that fairies were eventually appropriated by spiritualism as part of this wider spirit land: for all their faux modesty, spiritualists were empire builders. Traditional fairy-believing communities in the nineteenth century tended, if they thought about the meaning of fairies at all, to associate them with the dead; and it is even possible that fairies were originally born from an attempt to make sense of death. However, spiritualists rejected this approach. Spiritualists, in fact, would have seen any such idea as threatening the central beliefs of their movement, namely that the dead were in a heavenly realm, constantly bumping into Napoleon and Charles Dickens, and sending messages back to earth. Instead, fairies were recast, by spiritualists and particularly by theosophists, as nature spirits or even “elementals.” This was not an original idea—in the Renaissance Neo-Platonists had played around with similar notions, there are even hints of this in Midsummer Night’s Dream—but it was one that proved potent and went mainstream with remarkable speed. It is striking that Evans-Wentz’ Fairy Faith in Celtic Lands in 1911 uses spiritualist terminology freely for fairies, as do—and this is perhaps more significant—some of his informants. The Cottingley Fairy photographs were publicized by Arthur Conan Doyle, a spiritualist, and Edward Gardner, a theosophist. Indeed, the Cottingley Fairies, who are so often sold as being the end of English fairy belief, are nothing of the kind. They mark the transition from the dregs of medieval fairy belief, which had survived in the rural corners of the UK, to a new spiritualized fairy, who tended to be both less dangerous and harder working.5 The influence of this new model has been immense and is growing. If you take your child or a privileged nephew or niece to see fairies at the cinema today, you will find yourself watching the Tinker Bell films, in which a small community of fairies look after nature: teaching birds to fly and helping with the change of the seasons. Or you may see, if you are lucky, less well known but more powerful fairy flicks, including The Secret of Kells in which a fairy defends her forest, or Epic in which the fairies fight the boggarts to save nature from the forces of entropy. These films could never have been made in, say, the 1850s: first, because, obviously, of the lack of technology, but just as importantly because of very different nineteenth-century ideas about fairies, for fairies, then, were neither nature helpers nor even particularly nice (see further below).
Marjorie Johnson and Her Book
But what does Marjorie Johnson have to do with theosophy, the Fairy Investigation Society, or, for that matter, modern children’s films? Here we have to trace, as best we can, the fairy beliefs of a Nottingham girl born in 1911, who was already seeing fairies in her infancy. Her first publication, when she was 25, was a letter in 1936, in John O’London’s Weekly magazine describing how she had, aged seven or eight, seen an elf in her bedroom (John O’London’s Weekly ran several letters at this date on the topic of fairies, all of which are collected together in chapter seven of the present volume). Many children see fairies, of course, something that is explained by sceptics in terms of imagination and by believers in term of innocence. But what is fascinating about Marjorie is that she continued to see fairies throughout her life, becoming, to use her own words, a “fairy seer.” Indeed, she had what I can only describe as a series of fairy “familiars,” as well as occasional contact with a “radiant being” who gave her, Marjorie believed, permission to write this book. Reading, in fact, Marjorie’s biography, as it emerges in Seeing Fairies, I can’t help thinking that had she been born in prehistoric Britain she would have been a “shaman,” a tribal visionary. It goes without saying, meanwhile, that had she been born in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century England she would have attracted the attention of the local ecclesiastical court and any enthusiastic witch-finders in the area. She was born in the wrong time, though her time proved a safer one.
We have no proof that Marjorie belonged to the Fairy Investigation Society before the war and some hints that she did not. At this date the FIS was difficult to join for those outside a charmed upper middle class, bohemian circle in London: Marjorie, lived all her life in Nottingham and collected fairy accounts on her own in the 1920s and the 1930s. We do know though that, after a brief intermission in the Second World War, the society revved back to life, under the leadership of Craufurd. Perhaps already by 1947, when the FIS was certainly up and running again, Marjorie was a member. Certainly, she was secretary of the organization by 1950 and remained secretary into the early 1960s. The word “secretary” can, of course, cover many different roles, and its real meaning is dependent on a given organization. But, in the case of the FIS, the secretary was, at least by the 1950s, the organizer and administrator and, in all but title, the head. Marjorie fielded questions from new and potential members, and she also brought out an occasional newsletter, some examples of which survive. She received, too, questions about fairies from members of the general public—one little girl, for example, wrote in to ask what proof there was for the existence of the fey. She received as well accounts of fairy sightings from Britain, Ireland, and, indeed, from Africa, the United States, and the British Dominions (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa). Most of these accounts came from FIS members: to give some sense of how important these contacts were consider that of the 120 members in the 1950s, over half are thanked in this book for accounts and op
inions.6
At some point in the mid-1950s, Marjorie got or was given the idea of widening her sample outside the rather narrow limits of the FIS. It was one thing to concentrate on accounts of believers, but if fairies existed then presumably members of the general public had seen them as well. Why not reach out to the general public and try and bring in these accounts that would otherwise be lost? Marjorie may have remembered her letter, twenty years previously, to John O’London’s Weekly where she had been one of a rash of “Joe Publics” keen to share their fairy experiences. Alternatively, the idea may have come in conversation with the Scottish folklorist Alasdair Alpin MacGregor, another member of the FIS, who was not only a talented author but also a talented self-publicist. Certainly, in 1955, it was Alasdair Alpin MacGregor who took the lead on behalf of the duo in writing to The Listener (the major BBC magazine of the time) and Folk-lore, asking for fairy accounts for inclusion in a soon-to-be-published collection: “If any reader would care to submit an authentic account of his or her having seen, or been aware of the presence of, a fairy or fairies, we would certainly give it sympathetic consideration.” The pair wrote, as well, to other publications, though I have been unable to track down any of these letters.7
The result was that Marjorie Johnson had two major sources for her collection of fairy encounters: (1) experiences of FIS members, hence the tweaked subtitle of the book; and (2) experiences of those who wrote in answer to her and MacGregor’s press campaign in 1955. To this must be added two further sources that salted the collection: (3) accounts she came across in other publications or transmissions (there are some scattered references to radio programmes); and (4) some very few accounts she was given or that she came across herself after her resignation as secretary of the FIS (mid-1960s?), but before the final drafting of the book in 1996. Then, finally, we must remember (5) that Marjorie was herself a passionate fairy believer and regularly saw fairies: a gift she shared with other family members, particularly her sister, Dorothy, with whom she was extraordinarily close, and her mother, who was once scandalised when an elf looked through her bathroom window during her ablutions.
Seeing Fairies Page 1