Seeing Fairies

by Marjorie T Johnson

  Mr. and Mrs. Sinnett, of Oxford, had a similar surprise. After the evening meal, Mr. Sinnett was resting comfortably in front of the fire, talking over the affairs of the day with his wife, when he saw a little fellow about seven inches high running around on the table and finally vanishing behind a jam pot. The small creature was dressed in what seemed to be a complete suit and hat, tight fitting throughout, and the colour was best described as neutral, or greeny-brown. Mr. Sinnett asked his wife what she saw, so that no words of his would conjure up a mental picture for her, and her description tallied exactly with what he had seen. “So,” he said, “I maintain that this rules out hallucination. I have told lots of people about this, most of whom have either smiled tolerantly or openly scoffed. However, it was a very lovely experience and we hope to have more. I would swear to the truth of this before anyone.”

  During her stay in a house in Devonshire in 1925, Mrs. G. K. Evason walked to the lounge and as she opened the door she saw, to her astonishment, a circle of exquisite fairy creatures of female type—about a dozen of them—engaged in a dance on the hearth rug. There was no fire alight in the grate at the time, and the open French windows led on to a beautiful lawn and flower garden. All the little beings had wings and were from ten to twelve inches in height. They were ethereal, and their apparel was iridescent and diaphanous. “It was an entrancing sight,” she said, “and I watched them for a period long enough to take in details of their dainty forms and features. Then a lady, who also was staying in the house, came to the door of the room to borrow a book from the bookcase, and all the fairies vanished. I recounted my experience to her and she was delighted. She said that fairies were supposed to live in the garden there, but she herself had never seen them and had not heard of any coming into the house. I had known nothing of this. One day in 1931, I visited the owner of a house in Herne Bay, Kent, and we sat in a room that overlooked a lovely garden. While we were talking, I saw a radiant blue fairy perched on the shelf of the gentleman’s desk, where he was seated. She looked like a ‘Queen,’ for she had a tiny sparkling crown and a wand. My host could not see her but was very pleased to hear my account of her. I have had many similar experiences, and all were entirely spontaneous and unsought.”

  The scene of this next experience was an old military barracks in County Kilkenny, Eire, which had been converted into flats. The time was 5:45 p.m., on a day in mid-September in the year 1911, and Mrs. Isa V. Cooke had just finished laying the table in readiness for her husband’s 6 o’clock meal. Drawing her armchair nearer the fire, she took her six-week-old baby girl out of her cradle and lifted her on to her knee. Resting her child’s head in the hollow of her right arm, she talked to her and played with her fingers until she fell asleep. The “very happy experience” that followed is best described in Mrs. Cooke’s own words: “As I was gazing at her beautiful little face and wondering what the future held in store for her, I thought I saw something like a large white butterfly flutter on to my left foot, which was resting on the fender. On taking a better look, I saw it was a lovely little doll-like creature about eight inches high. She ran up my skirt and jumped off my knee on to the arm of my chair, then round the back and on to my right shoulder, down my arm, and finished standing just at the baby’s head. She was dressed in shimmering white, and held in her hand what looked like a darning needle about two inches long. My eyes were dazzled by her brilliance. Then I suddenly realised I was looking at a ‘Fairy Queen.’ I kept quite still as she stood gazing down at my baby. In a matter of seconds she jumped down on the arm of my chair, gave her wand a twist, and lo! Immediately the whole room was full of fairies, all dressed in the most magnificent hues imaginable. They danced all over the floor, caught the ends of the tablecloth, ran up on to the table, danced in and out through the dishes, swarmed up the curtains, and danced along the rail and the picture-frames. Everywhere I looked, in fact, there were dancing fairies. I watched them, entranced, for eight or ten minutes, and wished my husband would hurry so that he could see them too. Presently I heard him coming up the stone stairs and walking down the corridor. I was ready to say, ‘Hush! Look at all the lovely fairies,’ as soon as he opened the door, but alas! The moment the latch clicked, they vanished as quickly as they had come. I can see his face now, as I related my tale. He told me not to be so silly; that it was all imagination, etc. Imagination, my foot! I only know the whole scene was enchantingly lovely until my husband opened the door and broke the spell.”

  Mrs. Cooke hoped the little people would return the next evening, but she never saw them again, and twelve months later she and her husband left the flat. She states as a possible explanation of the fairies’ visit that there was an old ruin across the road, which must have been a very large residence in days gone by, and the squire of the parish had sold some beautiful old trees that surrounded it. From the window of her flat she used to watch the lumbermen uprooting them with a big engine and chains, and she thought what a pity it was to destroy beauty that was centuries old. “So perhaps the fairies sensed my sympathy,” she conjectured, “and when the evening shadows were beginning to fall and the bright glow from my fire shone out through the open window, it may have enticed them to pay me a visit.” And she added, “Although I am now elderly, I often think back longingly to that enchanted evening years ago, when the little people came to entertain me and my baby daughter.”

  It was in the autumn of 1919 that Mrs. Edith F. Ellis went with her husband and her three children and their nanny to live in Ramsgate in a small, modern-built detached house on the Montifiore Estate, beneath which land she believed there were natural caves and underground passages. “What I am about to relate,” she said, “happened two weeks before Christmas 1919. I had taken my afternoon nap and was coming down the stairs in the gathering dusk, when I saw coming towards me up the stairs on my right a small fairy, flying as if she were in a great hurry. She was about five inches in length; her arms were moving as if she were swimming the crawl stroke, and her legs were keeping time with them. Her little limbs were waxen in appearance; her small head was covered with fair, close-curling hair; her wings were like silver gossamer and she wore a small skirt of the same material. Everything about her looked beautiful in the dim light. She became visible about four feet in front of me and passed me at approximately two feet six inches from the stair tread. I turned to look after her, and at another four feet behind me she disappeared into thin air. “Well,” I said to myself, “If I were a child I should say I had seen a fairy. But I did not tell anyone.

  “A few days later, I was sitting in the dining room by the fire, knitting a jumper with wool of a green heather-mixture, when, from out the side of the fireplace on my right, came the same little fairy figure. I followed her flight for about the same distance as previously, when she again disappeared into thin air. I was 41 years old at the time. It was only in that house that I ever saw a fairy, and I have often wondered why she appeared, and to me only, and why she was in such a terrible hurry, as if she were late.”

  Writing from Worthing, Sussex, to tell me of her “one and only fairy experience,” Mrs. K. Allensby, a kinswoman of the late Sir Edward German, mentioned that she had Scottish blood, and that her mother was naturally clairvoyant and clairaudient. It is not surprising, then, to know that about the year 1947, at 6 o’clock on a summer’s evening, Mrs. Allensby saw a small figure, approximately two feet high, appear in the hearth of her home at Whitchurch, Shropshire. The little creature had rosy cheeks and curly golden hair, and was clad in a bright blue dress that matched her eyes. She smiled sweetly at Mrs. Allensby, and “was gone immediately.”

  Around Christmas 1955, Mrs. Violet I. Larkworthy, of Slough, Bucks, was lying relaxed on her divan when she noticed that a bowl of tulips on a chest of drawers was whirling round, and balanced on the rim were some tiny fairy figures, holding hands. Everything else in the room was still, and when she glanced back at the bowl that, too, was motionless, but in a few seconds it was twirling round again. Another time
she saw a small figure similar to those she had watched on the tulip bowl. It was in a kind of blue gauze and was pirouetting on the top of a settee that she had then. “But the little people I saw when sitting in the sunshine at Hedgerley were different,” she said. On that occasion her son had driven her and his wife to the Buckinghamshire village, where he pulled the car on to the grass verge of the road on a hill facing some grazing fields. They all alighted, and while her son tinkered with his car she and her daughter-in-law sat down to read, but the morning was so lovely she was soon looking around her and listening dreamily to a lark, which was soaring upwards in the sunshine. It was then that she noticed some tiny figures floating down in front of her. She watched them moving about in the grass, but did not say anything about them, as she knew her son and his wife would have laughed at her.

  Miss Rosalie K. Fry lived at one time in a large house in Glydach-on-Tawe, about a mile from Swansea. It was situated in lovely grounds, surrounded by trees, and backed by a wild mountain and a bluebell-carpeted dingle complete with a little stream. One day she and her sister, aged seven and nine respectively, were standing in their nursery gazing out across a small hall to a larger hall beyond the two halls being joined by an archway. As they looked, something they could only describe as being like a piece of the finest white chiffon, about eighteen inches square, floated very slowly down into view beyond the archway, moving in an extraordinarily graceful, flowing manner, and then, as slowly, wafted away up out of sight. Neither of the sisters spoke a word; they simply dashed together into the further hall. Whatever they had seen had vanished completely, although it was moving so very slowly that they knew it should still have been floating about the hall in the fraction of time it took them to run from the nursery. They searched every inch of the stairs and also the upper landing, which was absolutely bare of furniture or pictures, but they found nothing. There was no one else about at the time. Miss Fry mentioned that it was a bright, sunny morning, but there was no question of their vision being a trick of the light. Both of them had exactly the same vivid recollection of the incident. At the time they were convinced they had seen a fairy, and although they have recalled their experience frequently in the many years since it happened, they have never been able to find any other possible explanation.

  “My mother and her two sisters were sitting on a large old sofa,” recounted Mrs. Louisa Nicholas of Bethesda, Caerns, North Wales, “when they all saw quite a regiment of fairies, dressed in bright red and brown, coming from a space in the wall. I used to take this story with a pinch of salt,” she added, “but my mother, who is nearly 80, had such a vivid memory of it that nothing will convince her that fairies do not exist. Her two sisters (now deceased) were also certain they had seen them.”

  Mrs. Nicholas told me that according to legend there are fairies in Cororion Lake, Tregarth, about two miles away, and her daughter-in-law, who came from that district, affirmed that she had seen them.

  A wee female fairy, dancing on an old oak table, was observed one evening by Miss Bessie Gill in her home at Wadeford Chard, Somerset. The little creature stood five or six inches in height and was attired in green. Miss Gill said that at the time of her appearance she was still mourning the loss of her parents, who had died a couple of years earlier, and she felt that the fairy had come to comfort her. She wished her tiny visitor would return, for she had never forgotten her. “It was like seeing beyond this world,” she wrote. “She was so perfect in form, the sweetest thing I have ever seen.”

  Mrs. Ethel N. Gardner, of Ipswich, told me that her father was “a man of no imagination; a spade was a spade, to him.” What a source of irritation it must have been, then, when he, of all people, saw what he called “the little men,” not once, but frequently! There they were—gnome-like creatures, often with hats on, always busy in the same corner of the room and seemingly unaware that anyone was looking at them. They were on a quick vibration, and their world was entirely apart from the material conditions of that room. Try as he might, the reluctant seer could never find out what they were doing. They worried him—not in themselves, but because he just did not understand them and, as his daughter said, he was far from the type who harbours thoughts of fairies or little men. Surely this account will help to dispel the idea that fairies are produced by wishful thinking!

  Each week, Mr. Frederick G. E. Wakefield joined a study group in the house of Mrs. E. M. Shilleto, of Kent, and saw there, quite frequently, a little creature about six inches high, who sat on a shelf in one corner. He wore a dark slouch hat, dark jacket, and green trousers, and his face was very brown and wrinkled, yet it had an expression of great humour. Mrs. Lilley, who also attended the group, told me that another member, Mrs. Ridge, had often seen the gnome, and so had Mrs. Shilleto’s late sister, as well as a visitor to the house.

  A little creature named Peto lived on the canopy over Miss Hannah Jackson’s dining-room fireplace at her house in Manchester. She was a retired astrologer, and she told me in 1955 that for 30 years Peto had given her messages and warnings to pass on to the clients whose horoscopes she was engaged upon, and she affirmed that anyone in the room could see him. In 1957, I heard from this lady—then over 80 years old—that she was bedridden and no longer able to see Peto, who apparently did not wish to leave his familiar quarters above the fireplace downstairs for the atmosphere of the sickroom! A friend of hers, Mr. J. Broderick, wrote confirming the existence of the elf, or gnome, as follows: “I can verify all that Miss Jackson says about Peto. I have seen him scores of times.”

  During her childhood Mrs. Clara M. A. Clayton lived in North Wales, and “One afternoon,” she said, “I was alone in a room, playing with my doll, when I heard laughter. On looking up, I saw a little gnome with a white beard, bushy eyebrows, and sparkling eyes. He was dressed in red from his pointed cap and belted coat to the leggings, which covered his rather long, pointed feet. He smiled and beckoned to me, so I got up from the mat and went towards him. Immediately he ran along the passage and disappeared through the closed front door, and being unable to follow him I thumped and thumped on it and called for my mother, who came running in to see what all the noise was about. ‘Open it quickly!’ I pleaded, ‘I want to catch my little red man.’ I told her about him, and she drew me away from the door. ‘It must have been one of the Tylwyth Teg,’ she said, for both she and my father had come from the Isle of Anglesey, and their belief in the Little People was strong.

  Mrs. Iris Strick, of Devon, said: “The following incident happened to me in one of the last places in the world that one would expect to make contact with nature spirits. At that time I was living in the centre of a large town, in an old house built on the site of an ancient fortress. There was no garden, only a small lawn, rough grass, and an outcrop of rock; otherwise it was surrounded by stone paving and buildings. My husband used to go fishing to a river about thirty miles away, and one day he brought home a great bough of yellow broom that he had picked on the way back. On a subsequent evening when he was away again on a fishing expedition, I was sitting alone in the drawing room after dinner and had not drawn the curtains; the room was dimly lit by the afterglow from the sunset. There seemed to be a strange tremor in the air near the branch of golden broom where it stood in its deep blue vase. I wondered if it could be caused by a bee or large fly, but the curious thing was that no flies or bees or wasps ever entered that house, as the barren height on which it stood did not attract them, so I was interested at once and watched closely to see what it could be. Again that quiver or vibration of the air near the flowers, a little higher up this time, and then something that was not quite visible flickered across the room to a beautiful pink rhododendron that was growing in a pot near the door. The rhododendron was as near perfection as anything can been be on this plane, and the little elemental—for such I imagined it to be—flew round and round the plant as if entranced with its loveliness. There were still movements round the broom, however; it looked as if two or three small beings were attending t
o it in some way. I am sure they were troubled about it, knowing that it was slowly dying; but the Pink Pearl rhododendron was sheer rapture to them. They did not seem to be aware of me, only of the flowers and plants. The most thrilling moment of all was when something passed swiftly across the room close to my face; a tiny puff of vapour it seemed to be, perhaps four inches across either way. I felt the wind of its passing and observed the slightly increased density of the air somewhat resembling steam, but could make out no actual form. How long the experience lasted it is difficult to say, but the end was sudden, for my husband returned and turned on the light.”

  Mrs. Nancy Norris, a natural psychic who has had many strange experiences, recounted a disturbing one that she had at the age of two. She was playing by herself after tea one evening in the corridor outside her nursery, in a house at Sevenoaks, Kent, when suddenly she saw a small brown man of about her own size sitting at the top of the stairs looking at her. She was terrified, and at the time of writing to me she could still recall the awful panic she felt. She rushed into the nursery, screaming that there was a man on the stairs. Her mother was out, but the nurse called for a housemaid and, each armed with a poker, they went to look for the “man” while she sat huddled in the nursery. When her mother returned home, she was most sympathetic and talked to her about the fairy folk, and although she was no longer frightened she would not go along that corridor alone again for a long while. Nevertheless, she hoped she might catch another glimpse of the little man, but she never did.