Seeing Fairies

by Marjorie T Johnson

  Mr. Willie Monks’ cousin, the late Michael Flynn of County Dublin, told him that he saw a fairy on one occasion while he was crossing some fields on his way to school (probably in the early 1900s). In a nearby field, which was separated by a small stream from the one he was in, he noticed a figure about the height of a child of eight or nine years old, but in appearance it was like a very old man clad in knee-breeches, who seemed to be carrying something in his hands. He was wearing some sort of headgear, but Mr. Monks could not remember how his cousin described it.

  Mrs. Doris Poole recalled an experience she had at the age of nine or ten, while living at Tuffley, a little village on the side of Robin’s Wood Hill in Gloucestershire. She was sitting in a field close to a tree, when about seven little people approximately eight inches tall looked over a bluebell bank, then climbed over and came quite near to her without apparently noticing her. They reminded her of harebells blowing in the wind, but they had long, flowing hair and their dresses were in pastel shades of mauves, pinks, yellows, and blues, falling softly from their shoulders to below the knees. A little fellow dressed in red came last, carrying something in front of him. They all seemed in a hurry and disappeared behind the tree.

  Other fairies were seen in Gloucestershire by this correspondent when she was in a primrose wood on the edge of Painswick Beacon. They had wings, and their hair was darker than that of the field fairies. Their dresses were of similar style, but in brown, green, and lemon shades. They were in among, and taller than, the primroses, and were looking down on them. Now and then one would touch a flower or a leaf and peep underneath, as though searching for something. “I was so entranced,” wrote Mrs. Poole, “that the last one had gone before I realised it. My niece’s teacher told her there were no such things, but I know I wasn’t dreaming, and I have never forgotten them.”

  In a little Norfolk village, at the age of seven, Miss Kate Allen was going on an errand during the August school-holidays when she encountered a little blue-eyed man about eight-inches high, wearing a green coat and a pointed hat. As he gazed up at her, she saw that his mature face was in strange contrast with his fair, youthful complexion. His appearance was only momentary, but she knew she had not imagined it, although at that time she had never heard of such beings as gnomes. One of a family of ten children, she was not encouraged by her mother to have many flights of fancy, and no fairy books were ever allowed in the house. Miss Allen was over 80 at the time she wrote to me, but her childhood experience still remained fresh in her memory.

  The following account was kindly written out for me from the notes of the late Mrs. Mary Barclay, by her friend Mrs. Hughes: “Mrs. Barclay had an unhappy childhood and was very lonely. She used to go to the woods, where she could see the elves. One day, in great distress and fear because she had spoiled a clean apron and knew that she would be punished when she arrived home, she went further into the woods and sat down weeping under a large tree. Presently she heard faint music and saw a company of small beings with musical instruments. They played and danced to amuse and cheer her. She went home happy and saw that her apron had become quite clean. In later life she could still become aware of elf land if she could get away to the woods and be quiet for a while, but the complications of wartime life in Edinburgh in 1940 made it impossible to get this release, and she missed it very much.”

  The fairies seem to be better at cleaning aprons than at sewing, according to this experience concerning Madame H. P. Blavatsky and Colonel H. S. Olcott, co-founders of the Theosophical Society in New York. They were, at the time, in the Society’s flat called the Lamasery, when a little elemental pulled Madame Blavatsky’s dress desiring to be set some small service. The Colonel made the joking suggestion that it be set to hem some new towels, and Madame Blavatsky, after first declining to act on the suggestion, at length consented. They locked the towels, needles, and thread inside a bookcase and left the elemental to do its work. In about an hour and twenty minutes the little creature was back at Madame Blavatsky’s knee and making a little piping sound, something like a mouse’s squeak, to reveal its presence. The bookcase was unlocked and the towels were taken out. They had been hemmed, but according to the Colonel, “in a fashion that would disgrace the youngest child in an infant sewing class!” I came across the account in the November 1933 issue of World Theosophy, USA, which ceased publication the following month.

  Mrs. Mary Oliver, writing from the Aeolian Islands, Sicily, said that she saw many fairies in her infancy. She had a Norwegian nurse who took this for granted and, while not encouraging it, she did not discourage it. “Then,” went on Mrs. Oliver, “after my brother was born and the nurse did not have so much time to give to me, I had an extremely ugly gnome with a beard right down to his toes, who attached himself to me. I was absolutely terrified of him and would scream every time I was left alone. I think he must have been one of the Norwegian trolls, but our Negro cook told me that he was a bogeyman and that he followed me because I had been naughty. Then one day my mother heard me having hysterics and said ‘How long has this been going on?’ She was told that it had been for some months, and although I was only two and a half years old she used shock treatment on me; she told me that no such thing existed, and she thrashed me soundly. After that, I did not see him more than once or twice in the space of ten years, but I could smell him. He had an odour like fungus.”

  When Mary Oliver was eleven years old, she saw a little fairy man. Her family had an island in the Muskoka lakes in Canada, and on this island was a brook spanned by a bridge. Her mother used to send her to the other side of the island at sunset to fetch the evening mail, and she had to pass through the woods as it was getting dark. Always she used to feel frightened when nearing the brook, which sometimes had moonlight reflected in it. She would be seized by an inexplicable feeling of terror and would return to the camp incoherent with fright. Even in the daylight she was afraid of this wood and the brook. Then, one very hot day at noon, she was so frightened of crossing the bridge that she fell down on the path and just lay there, too weak to get up. With her head pillowed on a mossy bank, she looked up at the sky through the trees, and finding that she was very dizzy, she started to go to sleep when right in front of her nose a little man, wearing a wintergreen-berry on his head, came out of a hole in the ground. He made an effort to talk to her, but she could not understand what he said. He seemed to be very cocky and proprietary about his little hole, and she could see she was not welcome. She marked the place and went home feeling quite happy. After seeing the little man, she was no longer frightened to cross the bridge. In fact, she used to leave the camp specially to go and look for him, but although she found the hole she never saw him again.

  Nor did she see another fairy until her first night in a boarding school in Germany in 1926. Hearing a strange sound of music, she looked out of her window into the Thuringian forest, and saw a band of gnomes marching round a tree in the snow beneath the window. The next day, she told her head-mistress, Baroness von Bornburg, about it, and the Baroness was very much interested.

  “They do exist here,” she admitted. “My sister saw them and my grandmother used to see them, but no one except you has seen them since the war, although there are many people in the village who would not work here in the castle because of them. There is a tale, although I daresay it is only a tale, that in my great-grandfather’s youth the cat brought one into the kitchen once.”

  “The music was so wonderful,” Mary told her.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I have heard about that music. When a boy in the village hears it, it is supposed to mean that he is going to make a fortune!”

  About a year after her marriage, Mary Oliver and her husband were returning home late from a party and were driving through the Roehampton Gate into Richmond Park, where their home was, when Mrs. Oliver saw a deer in front of the car and shouted “Be careful!” Her husband said, “It’s all right. I saw the reflection of the headlights in the deer’s eyes.” He stopped the car, and
the deer went slowly across the road in front of them. On its back was a little man about three feet high, clad in a jerkin and hose. He had a turned-up nose, and feet that looked like potatoes.

  “What is it?” said Mrs. Oliver.

  “Ssh!” her husband replied. “He’s a leprechaun! Well, I never expected to see anything like that here, so close to the Star and Garter Hospital.”

  The next day, Mrs. Oliver mentioned the incident to a friend, who made the strange comment: “Don’t be cheap.”

  She told this to her husband, and he replied, “When we go to see James Stephens on Sunday, you can tell him, and I know he won’t consider it is cheap.” And James Stephens didn’t. He told them of many other such instances.

  After the death of her husband, Mrs. Oliver went to live in a very beautiful house in Cornwall, which was not expensive because it was reputed to be haunted. She was alone, with no electricity in the house, and one night when she needed another log for her fire, she went from the library without a lamp and passed through the kitchen to the wash-house where the logs were kept. “I got down on my knees on the tiled floor,” she said, “and reached under the wash-tub to dislodge a log, when I heard a noise like a scolding squirrel—‘Chit-chat, chit-chat’—and there, on top of the logs and surrounded by a green light, stood a furious little man who looked like an artichoke but was only as big as my thumb. His face was ugly and frog-like, and he was shaking his fists at me, ordering me off his property. I grabbed a log and tore back to my fire, which I banked with coal. I was terrified.” After this incident, Mrs. Oliver met the owner of the property and a previous tenant, both of whom told her that there were “pixies” in the house, and they laughed when she told them about the little man who had been so angry and rude to her. A few weeks later, when the weather turned very cold, Mrs. Oliver left that house and went to France, never to return to Cornwall.

  Reverting to Mrs. Oliver’s account of the old gnome with the odour like fungus, this may be typical of some of the ancient, very “earthy” gnomes, for it reminds me of a forbidding one we had in the garden of our previous house when I was young. He never actually materialized in his gnome-form, but I was fully aware of him and knew that he guarded a very large clump of semi-wild, dusky-red peonies, which grew in a shady corner of the orchard. He seemed so possessive over his precious plant that I never dared to pick or touch any of the fine blooms, and I always sensed when he was there because of his fungus smell.

  While staying in Edinburgh in 1940, Mrs. Olive Mytton Hill saw two gnomes, approximately seven inches in height. They were bearded and wore red caps, brown shoes, and green tunics with collars of a faint coffee shade. Mrs. Hill was travelling in her astral body at the time, and as soon as the speed slackened she opened her eyes and felt herself gently raised to a standing position. It was then she saw the gnomes, and she started to glide about one and a half feet above the short, velvety grass. She went slowly past these little fellows, one of whom appeared to be much older than the other and had his spade in the ground at the foot of the tree against which he and his companion were standing. They turned to stare at her, both of them making a hissing noise; and she said to herself: “Oh dear! They don’t care for me to be here.” When she told her family about this episode they thought it a huge joke, but she still remembers it very clearly after all these years.

  A nature spirit known to be very common in some parts of Scotland is the little brown gnome, and Capt. Sir Hugh Rhys Rankin, Bart., Hereditary Piper, Clan Maclaine, saw one standing on a wee tumulus on the edge of the Creagan-side drive at Barcaldine House, Oban, Argyle, in 1932. His wife, Lady Rankin, wrote that she, too, had seen these brown gnomes when in Scotland.

  Another account of fairies in Scotland came in 1949 from Mr. David Thurston Smith of Argyle, who began by explaining: “I am one of the lucky ones whose range of vision is above normal. I do, therefore, on occasions see not only fairies but other beings invisible to the majority. I have seen many little people about three to four inches in height, as delicate as wind-blown leaves. I catch frequent glimpses of them in the house and in the woods. Here in Scotland, as in Yorkshire, there are gnomes of about three feet in height, of a most remarkable physical activity, capable of running at amazing speed through the woodlands, which seem mainly to be their particular habitat.

  “I have oft-times wondered at the physical force of small men, but never so much as at that of a gnome I saw in a plantation near my former house in the Pickering Valley of Yorkshire. About two feet in height, and of sturdy bind, he was rummaging about among fallen leaves as though he had lost something. On perceiving that I could see him, he rushed away at a most surprising speed, leaping over fallen boughs and brambles.”

  Mr. Smith found that lamb riding was a popular game for gnomes, and he liked to watch them when dusk was falling. “The mother sheep do not seem to mind,” he said, “and I am sure the lambs enjoy it. The little people like the turnip fields. They sit on toadstools in the rows during the hot weather, and watch the partridges run by. It is cool in there, and they can generally get a shower-bath of crystal-clear water by shaking the leaves.”

  Mrs. I. Morrison, also of Scotland, recounted an experience she had in the “blackout” during the Second World War. She had alighted from a bus, feeling very anxious to be home because the air-raid sirens had sounded, and although she had not far to go she wondered how she would manage to get across the street in the pitch darkness. Just at that moment a light descended on her shoulder, moved in front of her, and spread itself out. It was a lovely little fairy dressed in silver and green, and it floated before her, lighting the way. Shouting to some nearby wayfarers to follow her, Mrs. Morrison kept her eyes on the glowing figure, and they were all taken across the road in safety. After she had been in her house for a little while, a friend, who was passing by when the bombs started falling, called in and said she thought she and Mrs. Morrison ought to go to the air-raid shelters. Mrs. Morrison said, “Well, we are quite safe,” and she related her experience with the fairy, but her friend did not believe in fairies and remained sceptical. When the time reached 11 p.m., Mrs. Morrison told her friend she thought she should be getting home, although the “all-clear” had not yet sounded and the bombs were still falling in the distance. She walked with the friend along the road, but when they had gone a good part of the way Mrs. Morrison heard a voice telling her that her friend could turn back, and the fairy appeared again and went in front of her friend. “Look!” Mrs. Morrison said. “That’s the little fairy was telling you about, and it is going to take you home.” She told her friend to follow the fairy, even if it became just a tiny light. The next morning the friend came to see her, thrilled by the experience, and she declared she would never doubt again. This same fairy seemed to attach itself to Mrs. Morrison, for after that experience it was seen by her quite often.

  Another nature spirit who acted as a guide was seen by “H” of Buckinghamshire, whose accounts of his many other experiences appear elsewhere in this book. He said: “I went out for a car ride with a young lady, and on the way home a fairy, of whose presence my friend seemed quite unaware, was fluttering just in front of the car for several miles. We were doing 45-50 miles per hour, but the fairy (in a frilly tutu, and with big butterfly wings) kept up with us without any effort. Incidentally, we weren’t sure of the way, and the young lady kept asking me which turning to take. I took my bearings from the fairy, and as soon as my companion said she knew where we were, the little creature vanished.”

  When Miss Eva Jack, of Rosshire, was asked by her cousin, Miss Annie Jack, if she had ever seen a fairy, she admitted she had not, whereupon the old lady replied: “Well, I have” and proceeded to tell the following story. One lovely summer evening in the 1940s, when she was about 70, she was returning home through a wood with her sister after attending a. Sabbath service in Culbokie School. They had just crossed the stile, which brought them into a field, when they saw a vision that remained with them all their lives. Not very far
from the knoll known as the Fairies’ Hill, which is in the wood above Culbokie Loch, they saw rows of little people dressed in brown, dancing up and down. Later, one of the sisters told Miss Eva Jack that although it was impossible to say for certain that they were fairies, she couldn’t think of anything else to call them. They were not children from the village, for it was too far away, and these little people were all of the same size, and all dressed alike.