Fairies in Bedrooms
When Miss Vicky Burt, of Cornwall, was between eight and ten years old, she was going to bed one night when she saw some very beautiful fairies dancing in front of the curtains. They were about six inches tall, and ten or twelve in number. Their clothes were very bright: “fantastic” she described them—in mainly blues, greens, and reds, and they were accompanied by some form of beautiful bell-music. Some of the fairies had wings, but the others had not. All her family knew about her fairies, which appeared every evening for a week or two, and, as far as she can remember, stayed for fifteen or twenty minutes. As each night came, she was anxious to go to bed to be able to see her fairies again, but then one night they did not appear, and although for the rest of her life she had longed to see them again, she has not, alas, done so.
Mrs. P. Leopold, wrote from London to tell me that when she was a small child she saw a fairy in her bedroom, and although many years had passed the picture was still vivid in her mind’s eye. When I had time, I asked for details. But she had moved in the meantime and I was unable to trace her.
Among the fairies inhabiting Sussex is one that a teacher named Mr. George Edward Randell spoke of occasionally to his more intimate friends. He saw it from his bed when he and his parents lived in Hove. One lovely dawn in the spring of 1907, when George was just twelve, he awoke to see a figure enter by the open bedroom door. He immediately sat up in bed, and there by the bedside stood a little man about two feet in stature. The manikin had a brown, wrinkled face and wore a brown jerkin belted at the waist, and long brown hose. As George stared at him in amazement, he doffed his broad-brimmed hat and gave an enormous grin—a grin that seemed too wide for his size. Then he disappeared. The startled boy rubbed his eyes and sought to shake himself completely awake, wondering whether he had been dreaming. But no: he felt certain that he had been fully conscious when the manikin entered. All that day the incident puzzled him. The following morning exactly the same thing happened. The manikin came to his bedside, doffed his hat, and grinned broadly before disappearing. These visits continued every dawn-time for about a week, always following the same routine, and then they ceased entirely.
From another teacher, Mrs. Enid H. Paul, came the following: “This is a perfectly accurate account of what happened on the only occasion I ever saw a fairy. I do not often speak of it for fear of ridicule. It was in 1930, when I was nine years old. I had just gone to bed, but had not yet lain down. I sat with my knees drawn up and my chin resting on them, looking towards my open bedroom door, when a small man appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in dark green, with a brown buckled belt, and short brown boots. His trousers were the breeches type, buttoned down the sides. I was filled with terror and dived under the bedclothes, hardly believing my eyes. After several minutes I plucked up courage and looked out. He then stood at the foot of my bed with arms akimbo leaning on the bedrail. More scared than ever, I plunged under the bedclothes again and stayed there for a long, long time. When I finally looked out he had disappeared, and I never saw him again. I have often wished that I’d had the courage to speak to him. The incident had, however, no significance for me then, or since, so far as I know.”
In 1951, Dr. Victor Purcell, C.M.G., Litt.D., PH.D, then a lecturer at Cambridge on Far Eastern affairs, sent the following vivid description of fairy soldiers: “In the year 1900-1901, during the South African War, when I was about five years of age, I lived in Gillingham, Kent. Every night for some months, after my mother had kissed me goodnight and shut my bedroom door, there was a short interval, and then I would begin to hear distant, massed Lilliputian bands playing. The music grew louder and louder as it came nearer and nearer. There was a night light burning on the mantelpiece, and by the light of this I saw column after column of tiny soldiers marching up from the right of my bed over my eiderdown (I remember its pattern and colour clearly) and across to the other side where they disappeared over the bedside. Each soldier was about nine inches high and wore a red coat. There was battalion after battalion of them, and each was headed by a brass band. As these passed, they played minute martial music, far more exciting than any music I had ever heard in the daytime. The march-past lasted for a few minutes, and then I fell asleep. The direction was always from right to left. I never tried to touch the soldiers, but they were completely real. I actually did see them, and I should be prepared to state this on oath, if necessary, in any Court of Law.”
When Madame Paula Forné, of Dieppe, was a child of nine, she was sleeping in a bed between her mother’s and her Eurasian nurse’s bed in a dak bungalow at Allahabad in India, when she was awakened at late dawn by a faint squeals—barely audible, yet high and piercing—and was very surprised and not at all frightened to see on the punkah above the beds, and also on the end of the beds, hundreds of little figures running and jumping, and playing leap-frog. Their colouring was beige or sepia against the whitewashed wall of the bungalow. She was very interested,and even sat up and watched them for a long time, till the sun came through the window and they seemed to run away. “The next day,” wrote Madame Forné, “the local doctor, who was an old friend, came to see us and asked my mother if the dak bungalow ghosts had prevented her sleeping. This intrigued me, and I asked her what ‘ghosts’ were, and she replied that Dr. Sutcliffe was joking and meant the noises from the trains at the station nearby. I told them about my experience and they thought it was a dream, but it was so real and so amusing that, as we stayed on for another week, I awoke each morning hoping to see them again. They came only once more, and this time they were even more friendly, as they ran over my bed quite near to me. I saw the like years later in England, when someone gave me my first copy of Punch. The figures I had seen were exactly like the figures on the front page.”
Mrs. Betty Lambert, a classical dancer, actress, and pianist who used to run concert parties such as “The Black and White,” “The Blue Moths,” and “The Westcliff Miles,” told me she saw a fairy many years ago at a house in a tree-lined road at Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex. She was sharing with her friend, the landlady, a large front bedroom and, owing to the heat of that particular September night, the door, which led to a balcony, had been left open. She had been in bed about ten minutes when she heard a loud buzzing in the room, and, peeping over the sheets, she saw a lovely pair of wings like mother-o’-pearl, fourteen to sixteen inches across, in the middle of which was a little being like a gnome about nine inches long. It floated across the room to the square bay-window, and then into an alcove by the mantel shelf. Mrs. Lambert confessed she was rather frightened, but she felt excited, too. Rousing her companion, who was nearly asleep, she begged her to shut the balcony door as she wanted to keep the fairy in the room, but her friend, whom she described as “a very-matter-of-fact person,” refused to do this, saying “it wouldn’t be right.” She did, however, sit up in bed to watch the fairy, whose outstretched wings seemed motionless as it floated out into the night, never to be seen again. “Of course, people wouldn’t believe me when I told them about it,” said Mrs. Lambert, “but my companion had to acknowledge that it was true.”
“I have had many sudden and vivid visions of gnomes,” recounted Mrs. Georgina K. Evason of Tunbridge Wells, Kent. “The first time was in the early hours of the morning. I was then living in a house near Queen’s Park, in Brondesbury, London, and my room overlooked a very nice garden. On opening my eyes, I was thrilled and very surprised to see on the top of my bed-covers a group of gnomes, all of the same height and proportions. They wore tight-fitting suits of various woodland shades, shoes that turned up at the toes, and tasselled stocking-style caps. All of them had long, grey beards, and faces like little old men. There were six or seven of them, between fifteen and eighteen inches high, and with hands clasped to form a circle they were dancing merrily in perfect rhythm. I watched, entranced, for a few minutes, and then they disappeared. One of these gnomes has often appeared to me, quite alone, since then, and he always stands at the foot of my bed looking at m
e very intently, in a friendly way.”
Mrs. Dorothea Eastwood of London sent a description of an experience that she had when she was nine years old. Her home was then on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and stood in a clearing in some pine woods. At about 8 o’clock, one summer evening, she was lying in bed on the ground floor of the house, in a room that was quite light as it had only thin curtains across the windows, when she saw “three tiny men run across the floor and disappear, apparently into a chest that stood under the window at the end of the room. They were about three inches high, looked brown in colour, had bandy little legs and wore peaked caps. In fact, they looked exactly like the traditional gnomes of the fairy stories. I had only a few minutes to take them in but I have no doubt that I was wide awake and actually saw them.” Some years later Mrs. Eastwood happened to describe these gnomes to a Welsh lady, Mrs. Philip Carnons-Williams, who told her that she herself had quite often seen the same type of beings on trees and around toadstools when she was a child in Monmouthshire. There seemed to be males and females, and although the prevailing colour was brown, it varied with the tree or toadstool that they frequented. After the age of eleven, the faculty for seeing them left her. Mrs. Eastwood declared that she could vouch for this lady’s absolute sincerity.
The Rev. Chas. A. Hall of Storrington, Sussex, a minister of the New Church founded on the doctrines given through the agency of Emanuel Swedenberg, told me that often he had a sense of unseen presences as the shadows lengthened in his woodland garden, and when he was very young he had an experience, the memory of which was still vivid. A coal fire was burning brightly in his bedroom, and on a table nearby was a nightlight (a squat cylinder of wax surrounded with stiff paper) in a saucer of water. There seemed to be infinite mystery in its feeble flame, and while he was gazing at it there appeared a dozen or more daintily clad fairies, none of them more than three inches tall. Forming a circle with joined hands, they danced in brilliant splendour around the light.
Mr. Hall mentioned this among his other experiences in a BBC programme called “Indian Summer,” in 1961. “The vision was brief,” he said, “but so deeply impressive that although I am now in my ninetieth year, I am still able to recall it in minute detail. Prosaic education is fast destroying many picturesque beliefs, but it will never rob me of my one glorious experience in fairyland.”
When Mrs. Clara M. A. Clayton’s eider son was very small, she went up to his bedroom and he was pointing to something and saying in his baby language “’ickle fairies, ’ickle fairies-pink-blue…” and then he asked her to open the window because the fairies had gone out that way and he wanted to follow them.
This next experience occurred early one morning in a country vicarage in Berkshire. Ursula—later to become Mrs. Turner, of Oxford—was a child of seven at the time, and she had just awakened and was lying alone in the nursery, staring at the top of the high wardrobe on which was a big box. “Brilliant sunbeams pointed to one corner of the room,” she said, “and gradually there formed, as if drawn from Fairyland by this compelling light, a tiny black man with an enormous, perfectly round head of a rich red colour with silvery sparkles all over it. He had no eyes, nose, mouth, ears, or hair, but, as this engaging creature danced a jig, his great head wobbled and shimmered and he appeared to beam at me, for the sparkling of his silvery ‘frosting’ gave a complete illusion of a broad grin and twinkling eyes. Time was not, while I watched, fascinated. Then he dissolved into the sunbeam, slowly, as he had come.”
Mrs. P. M. Teage, of Devon, had a Welsh father and an English mother, and spent a happy childhood in a large house three miles out of Cardiff. It had a good-sized garden, parts of which were semi-wild, with large trees and sloping banks of daffodils in spring. She loved every stick and stone of the place with an intense passion. One summer evening, when she was between nine and eleven years old, she was in her bedroom in the front of the house and remembers sitting up in bed, not in the least ready for sleep. There were green hanging blinds over the windows, but they let in beams of sunlight, and she saw an elf sliding down a sunbeam into the room. Her memory suggests it had very small wings and a pointed cap, and it was in a sitting position with knees drawn up. She can’t recall its expression at all, but she does remember feeling full of joy and excitement. It was only in later years that she began to doubt the reality of the little creature—especially as it had been seen indoors and not in the garden.
“It was summertime, and our house is very near the fields,” explained Mrs. Mary Findley, of Derbyshire. “My daughter was then only a baby, and I awoke in the night and lay for a while listening to a kind of rustling on her cot, which was at the side of my bed. I felt puzzled, as I could hear her peaceful breathing and knew she was still asleep, so I felt very quietly for some matches and lit a candle at the side of the bed. I had to wait, of course, for the candle to burn up, but when it had done so I leaned towards the cot and saw a little shape dart towards the curtains. It was a tiny man with a pointed beard, a tunic with a belt, and a little hat turned over on one side. He wore tiny boots and striped stockings—the stripes going round his legs. He appeared startled as he grasped the curtains, and he turned his bright little eyes and looked at me, then scrambled up the curtains and out of the window like quicksilver. I wanted to call to him: ‘Come back; I won’t hurt you,’ but he was gone, I have always remembered him.”
In 1956, Mrs. Barbara Logan, of Forest Hall, Newcastle-on-Tyne, awoke in the dense blankness of her bedroom at three in the morning and saw a wonderful silver form, about six inches high, on her bed rail. Feeling rather fearful, she closed her eyes, and when she opened them again the figure had vanished, leaving behind it the lovely perfume of scented geraniums. She recalled her childhood in the country, when she often sensed light beings dancing on her dress as she sat in the fields among the stocks of hay. “Even now,” she said, “I am aware of their presence in my home and can feel their movements as they dance in my hair, and their gentle kisses on my cheeks.”
“When I was a child of seven,” said Mrs. Mary E. Burt, “I lived at Swanage, in Dorset, near a wood that had so much undergrowth that no one could really walk in it under the trees. I slept in a bedroom with my baby brother, who was just being trained to sleep in a small bed on his own instead of a cot. My mother used to light a little night lamp and leave it on the mantelpiece, but it was always turned very low and gave only a dim light in the room. One night, I was trying to go to sleep when to my horror (I say horror as I was terrified at the time) I saw seven little men in red clothing (just as one sees them in children’s books) dancing in circles in and around the leg of my little brother’s bed. I hid under the bedclothes, but every time I looked out they were still there, weaving circles and patterns and all the time dancing. They stayed some little while, then went out of the door, which was always left ajar. I never told a soul of this, but I dreaded the thought of bedtime for they came constantly for about two weeks, and then came no more. I was not asleep when I saw them, and I know I did not imagine it. I can still picture the red of their clothes. They could not have been more than four inches high.”
Mrs. Jane K. Jacob, of County Wexford, wrote that on a winter’s night in 1933, when she was nine years old, she was sharing a bedroom with her mother. The bed was drawn across the fireplace directly opposite the door, which was partly open, and the light of a lamp illumined the bedroom floor. She had been awake for some time and was aware of everything about her, when suddenly she saw “a little figure, roughly twelve inches high, enter the room through the doorway, wearing what appeared to be twisted rags of different colours around its body and head.” She could see its face distinctly as, looking very young and piquant, it walked with downcast eyes towards the bed.
“Holding in its hand a smallish piece of newspaper,” recounted Mrs. Jacob, “it walked under my bed, and I heard the rustling of paper for a few moments. Then there was silence, and out from under the bed came the little person without the newspaper. It walked towards the
door, and when halfway there, turned and looked back to where it had been. Then it continued on its way, passed through the doorway, and was gone. I remained still, hoping it might return, but it did not. The next morning, on investigation, I found many small pieces of newspaper in the fireplace. My father said someone had told him that the house (in which we no longer live) was built on a Fairy Pass.”
At the time of the following experience, Miss Lattice M. Mathias was living in Somerset. She was almost six years of age, and didn’t really believe in fairies any more than she did in Father Christmas. At dawn on a lovely June morning, she awoke to find sunbeams right across the “mountains” formed by her knees in the fluffy white blankets. She remembered noting clearly that various colours seemed to glisten through the woolly surface, and then, to her amazement, she was caught up in which seemed like a great adventure. The spectrum of light on the miniature mountain suddenly came to life, transformed into tiny people dressed like elves, each in his own distinctive colouring. “So it is true,” she thought at this juncture, and she watched them as in groups they caught hands and raced up and down the slopes. She was filled with joyful awe and held her breath for fear she might blow them away. She recalled how wonderfully happy they seemed: “Their laughter was like music, so that neither could be separated—their happiness and those silver, bell-like sounds were one and the same thing. Maybe the whole spell lasted but a few moments.”
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