Seeing Fairies

by Marjorie T Johnson

  In 1935, Mrs. Emma S. King, of Australia, was living in a Queen Anne villa situated in a big landscaped garden on the corner of two busy streets. She loved this home and garden, every brick and flower of it; every tree and blade of grass. The gardener came one day a week, and they worked well together, for she was willing to learn all he could teach her, and he had found someone who loved every flower he grew. Consequently his work became a joy, and often he went for two days instead of one each week. “How that garden appreciated being loved and worked for,” she told me, “and how it bloomed. Not only was it beautiful itself, but it gave such an abundance of lovely flowers for all the rooms, as well as for friends who had no gardens.” One morning, Mrs. King carried in a big flower-basket of dahlias, which she had cut to arrange for the house. They were large blooms, the size of a plate, and the head of one fell off, so she put it flat in a wide soup-plate on the kitchen table under the window. After she had arranged and carried the last vase into the drawing room, she walked back quietly down the long hall to the door of the kitchen and stopped in amazement. There, on the flower head in the soup plate was an exquisite fairy, almost a living, breathing extension of the flower and of the same lovely tints and sheen, only more radiant. Mrs. King watched it for a while and then, being alone in the house except for the big old watchdog, prepared her lunch on the end of the table and ate it while she gazed at the lovely creature. “The members of my family, when they came home, were very much interested,” she told me. The boys asked her innumerable times, “Is it still there, Mum?” The fairy stayed with the flower until it faded. On the second day it seemed to lose its sheen as the life in the flower receded. Then it disappeared.

  The next experience was in the drawing room, a big, bow-windowed room, where Mrs. King went for a quiet read and short meditation each day about 11 a.m. Her eyes were drawn to a tall, slender, pink vase on the top bracket of the mantelpiece, containing one large dahlia. There, clinging to the flower and breathing and vibrating as an extension of it, was another exquisite fairy of the same order, about nine-to-twelve-inches tall. She looked at it and admired its beauty for a few minutes, then was called away and forgot it for a time, but like the other one it disappeared as the freshness of the flower faded. Mrs. King found that grass fairies were quite different: “Almost like animated, flowing blades of grass; tiny little fellows more like gnomes than fairies.” Her attention was drawn to another order of nature spirits one morning when she was weeding a row of early bulbs before they came through the earth. There was a humming rhythm that she knew and felt came from the bulbs with the returning life of spring. “This humming rhythm ceases,” she explained, “when the first green tips of the new shoots break through the soil.” Beside the front gate was a large, white-flowering, plum tree in which lived a nature spirit of a higher order, almost four feet tall. “I loved that tree, and the being who lived in it,” she said, “but when the North gales tore at the branches, whether I could see them toss and sway or not, I ached in my body with the tree and the stress of the storm.”

  Another contributor writing from Australia was Mr. J. Boris Robertson, who had the following experience in October 1955, while staying in Cloncurry, Queensland: “When fishing recently, north of here (in the Leichhardt River), I was fortunate enough to make my first acquaintance with a fairy. I had been some hours at this rather secluded spot and was lost in thought, when something made me turn round and there, quite close to me, was a quaint little thing not six inches tall, with a Desert Pea flower for a hat, and leaves from the same plant forming the rest of its attire. I made a sudden move, which seemed to startle the gentle creature. It fled into the bush, and I now regret that in my amazement I made no attempt to follow it. I need hardly say that I have never before discussed this matter with anyone for fear of incurring adverse comment.”

  Mrs. J. Hanley related that while on a visit to Wales as a girl of about eighteen, she had been trout fishing in a mountain lake about Betws-y-Coed with a young man friend. As the light was too bright for them to hope to catch anything, they set off for home about 3 o’clock. It was a lovely afternoon of brilliant sunshine, with not a breath of wind. “Our track,” she said, “was a grassy path about the width of a farm cart and lay between banks of heather, with now and then an outcrop of rock or an old thorn tree, or some bracken and gorse, to break the outline. The mountaintop was level and one could see a good distance in all directions. As we walked along talking, I began to have that sensation most of us know at some time or another, the feeling that there was someone walking behind me. I turned instinctively and saw a little man about two feet high, who looked rather as if he had been put together out of sticks or the twisty roots of gorde. He seemed to me to be swaggering along, mocking us, I think, as a small boy might do. I turned to my companion to say ‘Look, quick!’ But even as I turned, I realised that I had seen something extraordinary, and that if I made him look and there was nothing there to see, I would feel a fool. I thought I had better take another look myself first and did so, but the little figure was no longer visible, so fearing to appear childish or silly, I decided not to say anything after all to my companion. Nevertheless, I had the feeling that there were others, still watching us, to whom we were objects of derision, and that I had just happened to be quick enough to have seen one of them, caught him unawares, in fact.”

  Like the previous contributor, Commander T. A. Powell was trout fishing in Wales when he had a strange experience, but in his letter to me he wished to make it clear that he was not the type of man to see visions. Here is his story: “It was about 11 a.m. on a summer morning, in a place where a river flowed below a large area of wild moorland. I was fly-fishing for trout on the left bank, casting to the opposite bank, as there were streamers of mud in mid-stream, which made it difficult to land fish. I hooked a half-pound trout, and, while playing it clear of the weeds, I became aware of an excited chatter in a high-pitched voice on the far bank slightly upstream of me, i.e. some 45 degrees away from the direction in which I was fishing. It was the typical staccato speech of a Welshman talking English, and as far as I can remember the words were ‘Catch him, Tommy; I like to eat trouts, Tommy man; give him to me, Tommy.’ I glanced up (foolishly, as the trout took this opportunity of getting tied up in the weed), and saw that my visitor, though not tiny enough to be in the Little People category, was small and looked like an oldish man of, say, 65, hatless, with wisps of grey hair and a short, grizzled beard. He was in his shirtsleeves (colour forgotten) and had very bright green trousers, which came high up his waist. He was dancing about and waving his arms. I was naturally astonished and annoyed, as fishing is, for me, a solitary vice; but I said ‘All right, but I haven’t got him yet,’ or something of the sort. He paid no attention to this remark, but kept on with his gabble: ‘I like trouts, Tommy!’ I concentrated for a few seconds on extricating the fish from the weed. During that time I was delighted to notice that the gabble had ceased. As I drew the fish into the shallows, I looked up and my visitor had evaporated. This really did give me a shock, and my heart missed a beat. He had disappeared completely in open ground, as he could not have regained the stile at the end of the road-bridge some 150 yards away and uphill in the few seconds during which I had looked away. I made enquiries in the village, but nobody knew or had seen anyone in any way like the visitor I had described. How did he know my name?”

  In view of the foregoing account, it is interesting to note that in 1921 the late Dr. Thomas Wood, Mus. D., heard a clear, faintly-mocking, high-pitched voice calling “Tommy! Tommy!” and again, nearer, “Tommy!” when he was sitting in a lonely spot on Dartmoor in steamingly hot weather composing the music to Miss Clemence Dane’s Will Shakespeare. None of the other people in his camping party ever called him Tommy, and although he searched, and looked through his field-glasses, there was no sign of any human being. He received a clue to the mystery on the following day, however, for while he was sitting in the same place he heard fairy music, which he wrote down and i
ncluded in his autobiography True Thomas (Jonathan Cape, London).

  When Miss Barbara M. Pleydell-Driver was at boarding school in Bawdsey, Suffolk, there was a music mistress who told her that she always saw fairies and elves in the very early morning when the dew was on the grass, and that she watched them collecting the dewdrops. Of course the schoolgirl Barbara longed to see them and begged the mistress to allow her to go to her bedroom at 6 a.m. “This I did, full of great expectation,” she said, “only to find I could not see them, but could only listen to her wonderful description of the scene on the lawns.”

  M.B., a rector’s daughter, recalled the day at Pomeroy when she and her mother and sister decided to go to the village, and as they were setting off down the rectory avenue, laughing and talking as they went, she noticed a tiny man standing between the avenue gates. She pointed him out to her two companions, but they couldn’t see anything although she saw him quite plainly, even his little face. She said he was wearing a brown pixie cap, a red coat, and brown trousers, and he stayed there for several minutes before he disappeared.

  Miss Gladys Rowlett, of Sussex, saw fairies frequently during her childhood, and in 1949 she caught a glimpse of one about eight inches long, with large, gauzy wings, flying through the garden by harvest moonlight. It was surrounded by a radiant glow and was very lovely.

  At the age of six, the journalist Miss Rosemary Meynell stayed for a few weeks at a cottage in Worsley, near Manchester, with her aunt and uncle and a young cousin of her own age. While she was there, another guest in the house (the late Mr. A. A. Naylor) said that he would show them some fairies. A great many preparations were made, including the carrying of a concave mirror into the garden and the burning of incense, and Mr. Naylor indicated the exact spot where the children, and the grown-ups with them, ought to see the fairies. They saw nothing. Later, when the cousin had gone to bed, Mr. Naylor suggested that Rosemary should go and look in the copper-beech trees at the edge of the garden, which he claimed were great favourites with fairies. It was there she saw them: “small people (some coloured green and others the colour of copper-beech leaves) sitting on the leaves and twigs quite high up in the branches.” She had the impression that they were scrambling about busily, intent on their own business. She had no idea how many there were; perhaps a dozen seen indistinctly and one or two quite recognisable little men, their clothes, faces, hands, etc., all the same colour. “I had been looking,” she said, “for the more picture-book conception of a fairy (with gauze wings, etc.) and these little people were a surprise to me. I tried very hard to see them the next day, with Mr. Naylor and my cousin, but I never saw them again.”

  Miss Meynell’s aunt, Mrs. Iris Strick, told me that when living in Devon her younger son, Arthur, saw a little man in a tree there once. “Arthur was in his pram and pointed it out to me,” she said, “but I could not see anything. I believe he did see it because his eyes had changed focus in just the same odd way that Mr. A. A. Naylor’s did when he was looking at something on another plane. We lived at one time in part of the old Governor’s House, Edinburgh Castle, and when my son John was a very small child he pointed suddenly to something invisible to me moving across the drawing-room floor. ‘Ook, ook,’ he cried, ‘tiny baby, tiny baby!’ and followed it with his finger pointing. Questions were very little good; he was too young. Mr. Naylor thought it might have been a gnome out of the great rock on which the Castle is built.” The clearest thing that Mrs. Strick herself had seen in Scotland was a small brown creature peeping over a tree-stump. She and others were sheltering from the rain, and Mr. Naylor had burned some incense to attract nature spirits, but without immediate results. Then, when they were not trying to see anything, Mrs. Strick saw this prick-eared elf, eighteen inches or more high, stalking them from the tree-stump.

  From Rugby, Mr. J. D. Watkins-Pitchford, A.R.C.A., F.R.S.A., (also known to many as “B.B.”) wrote that a friend of his, while motoring along a Devon lane at night when the snow was on the ground, was startled to see in the light of his headlamps six little people about eight inches high, carrying a ladder across the lane. “They seemed very perturbed, and there was a bit of a scramble when they reached the other side, as the bank was steep. But two of the little men clambered to the top of the bank and hauled away until they managed to pull the ladder out of sight through the hedge.”

  During the Second World War, there happened to Mrs. Dorothy Mayo what she referred to as “just one of those unforgettable things in one’s life.” Living then at Gillingham, she and a friend went walking in the Darland locality of that Kentish borough. They had not travelled far along the Darland Banks when, owing to the excessive heat of the day, they sat down to rest. It was a particularly still day; not a breath of wind disturbed the hot, summer air. As the two of them tarried there in relaxation and contentment, gazing across the intervening country towards the village of Luton, Mrs. Mayo noticed a little brown, fluffy ball, about the size of a tennis ball, speedily ascending the steep banks towards them. When it reached her left side (her friend, by the way, was seated to her right), it popped open, affording her a very brief glimpse of a gnome or pixie within.

  “Did you see that?” she asked her friend, turning round sharply towards her in amazement.

  “See what?”

  Mrs. Mayo pointed with some urgency to the spot at which she had seen the fluffy ball open to disclose its tiny occupant, but no longer was anything of the kind visible. “I had never heard at this time of the Deva Kingdom or anything of that sort,” she declared, “and so what I did see was not imagination in my case. It all happened so quickly, but it happened!”

  One very still evening, about the year 1921, while sitting on a seat in Westcliff, Essex, with her two sons, aged nine and eleven years respectively, Mrs. F. M. A. Southwell could hardly believe her eyes when she saw a number of gnomes in a large tree. They were about seven inches high and were very busy gesticulating and pointing to each other, completely unaware of the human trio in their vicinity. The little creatures and their clothes were colourless, yet the jackets appeared darker than the trousers. The latter seemed in one piece with the soft-looking shoes that they wore. They had also some kind of headgear. The tree was very old with many branches, but the gnomes seemed to be treading on air between, underneath, and above the branches. Mrs. Southwell did not fear them at all, yet did not find them attractive. “I kept opening and shutting my eyes,” she said, “in case it was all illusion. But there they were, absolutely distinct.” During this time, she had been sitting in amazed silence. Then the nine-year-old child said, “Let us get away from here.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  He replied: “I seem to see little people in that tree.”

  Mrs. Southwell then turned to the other boy. “Do you see anything?”

  “No,” he answered.

  She told me: “So far I had not said that I had seen the gnomes. I found it curious that one, and not the other, of my boys had seen them.”

  The ceaseless activity of these beings, which were observed by Mrs. Southwell and one of her sons, tallies with the perpetual motion of some brown elves that my sister and I saw in Pannett’s Park during a holiday at Whitby, Yorkshire, in July 1956. We were relaxing peacefully on a seat after an enjoyable but rather strenuous walk, when I noticed some considerable movement in a tree that grew at the foot of a wooded slope facing us. It was swarming with elves, and when I drew my sister’s attention to it, she could see them too, but neither of us had any idea what they were doing so busily. In common with Mrs. Southwell’s gnomes, these elves seemed to be moving quite easily above, below, and between the branches. This strange feature was confirmed by a trained seer, who said that tree manikins seem quite unaffected by the law of gravity.

  A contributor who described herself as “a lover of nature” was walking through a lane in Lancashire when she saw something blue flashing into a bank in the distance, but on reaching the spot she could find nothing. A few weeks later she was in the same lan
e and a little figure came running from the opposite side at the same spot, this time within a few yards of her. It was about one foot in height, and in its left hand it held something white, like a mushroom or an egg. Its wings, which were a lovely shade of blue and silver, seemed to reach the ground. On seeing her, it paused, and then continued running across the road. She could not find out where it went but concluded it had run through to a field a short distance away, where there was an old tree-trunk.

  A strange adventure befell the late Mr. Hugh Sheridan in the first week of February 1953, and Mr. Willie Monks has kindly sent me this summary of his friend’s statement: “I was going home as usual across the fields from where I work at Messrs. J. McColloch & Sons, Gerrardstown, to my home at Bettyville. Both these places are in Ballyboughal, and the distance between them is about a half mile. I was alone. It was duskish—about 6:30 p.m.—and when nearing the corner of one of the fields I heard a tittering noise ‘like the titter of someone going to play a joke on you.’ At first I thought it was some of the other men who had gone on before me and who might be intending to play some prank. However, I noticed immediately afterwards what looked like a large, greenish tarpaulin on the ground, with ‘thousands of fairies’ on it. I then found there were a lot more around me. They were of two sizes, some about four feet high, and others about eighteen or twenty inches high. Except for size, both kinds were exactly alike. They wore dark, bluish-grey coats, tight at the waist and flared at the hips, with a sort of shoulder cape. As all the fairies kept facing me, I could not be sure if the cape went around them, but the ends stuck out over the shoulders. The covering of their legs was tight, rather like puttees, and they appeared to be wearing shoes. I started on the path towards home, and the fairies went with me in front and all around. The larger fairies kept the nearest to me. The ones in front kept skipping backwards as they went, and their feet appeared to be touching the ground. They seemed to be wearing hats rather like a raised beret in shape, with a jutting-out top edge. There were males and females, all seemingly in their early twenties. They had very pleasant faces, with plumper cheeks than those of humans, and the men’s faces were devoid of hair or whiskers. I did not specially notice their hands. As I moved along the path, one tall fairy kept before me all the time. This was a girl, and a man kept near her. They seemed to have partly fair, wavy or curly hair. None of the fairies had wings. They tried to get me off the path towards a gateway leading from the field, but just before I reached it I realized they were trying to take me away, so I resisted and turned towards the path again. At about 40 yards from the gateway, I was going along by the ditch when I fell or got into it, but I do not know very clearly how this happened. While I was in it, the fairies remained around, and I could see others coming out of the bushes and briars. I got out of the ditch and continued towards the path until I reached it again. I moved on towards home with the fairies around me, and they kept up the tittering noise all the time. In the end I got to a plank leading across a ditch from one field to another, and suddenly all the fairies went away. They seemed to go back, with the noise gradually fading. At one time I had reached out my arms to try to catch them, but I cannot be sure whether they skipped back just out of reach, or whether my hands passed through them without feeling anything. They were smiling and pleasant all the time, and I could see their eyes watching me. When I got home, I found I was about three-quarters of an hour late, but I thought I had been delayed only a few minutes. While the fairies were with me, I had a rather exciting feeling ‘like being on a great height,’ but I was in no way afraid. I would very much like to meet them again.”