Seeing Fairies

by Marjorie T Johnson

  “It was a lovely evening, and a glorious red sun was slowly setting over Ben More Assynt. I showed the crofters the boulder on which I rested (the small stone was still on top of it to mark it) and also the spot where I’d laid down my philibeg and jacket and shirt, etc. They spread out and quartered the hill—first east and west and then north and south; then they circled it, and finally concluded that I had taken them to the wrong hill. I must have been up Ben Buie, they said, and they would climb it tomorrow. I was most emphatic we were at the right place, and told them I was no townie to mistake one hill for another. They then split up and combed the hilltop haphazardly, jumping on top of the half-dozen big boulders to look around. One lad came down off my boulder seat just as the sun set, and I immediately replaced him and watched the last rays disappear. The crofters were already starting down the brae for home, leaving me there on my own. I gave a last look to the spot where I had laid my clothes, and there they were! With a yell I jumped and pounced on them. The other men ran back and just wouldn’t believe it. They had all searched that spot a dozen times, and there was no great growth on that hilltop—only one or two tufts of heather. We experimented then in the fast-fading light, and could see the clothes from 200 yards away, yet none of us had seen them before. Why? We couldn’t explain it one way or the other, except that it was the work of the Brownies. Anyway, I kept a fast grip on my philibeg and we lost no time in getting down off the Brownies’ hill. It was a most astounding experience.”

  Mr. Hunter concluded by giving the names of the men who could corroborate his story. Alex MacLachlan, the MacLeods, and Ross were still in Glen Oykel as far as he knew; but Jack Fleming, who belonged to Gourock was in Abadan, Persian Gulf, the last time he had heard of him.

  However, the brownies or fairies cannot always be accused of having dematerialized or hidden the various objects before returning them. They can be very helpful in finding articles that have been lost or mislaid by the owners. For instance, when my older sister Dorothy was a child, she possessed a ring that was made of blue beads, and while playing in Colwick Woods (then a private estate), in Nottingham, with the children from the farmhouse nearby, the ring slipped off her finger and was lost in the thick grass. “We all searched for it without success,” she said, “and finally we had to go home to tea. I was still very upset about my treasured ring, and silently I asked the fairies to find it and give it back to me. I told them I would go up to the woods at twilight—alone—to receive it. I was full of faith and had no doubts at all about getting the ring back. At the appointed time, without saying anything to the other children or my parents, I slipped out of the house. Just before I reached the woodland, I was able to discern in the dim light the ring moving towards me about a foot above the ground, as if floating on air or being carried by some invisible being, and, as I watched, it dropped at my feet.” On recalling this experience many years later, my sister admitted that it sounded utterly fantastic, but she said that at the time she took it all for granted and did not feel any undue surprise.

  Lost objects were restored in similar fashion to the novelist Mr. Shaw Desmond, of Middlesex, who had a lifetime’s experience of the supernatural. He said he could not see the fairies who waited on him, but he would ask them to find mislaid articles such as manuscripts, or studs, and they would oblige him by flinging them down at his feet. Incidentally, he told me that his Danish wife saw a little troll man walk around the edge of her table in daylight.

  A South Kensington correspondent wrote that at an early age after the death of his twin brother, he used to see and talk to the fairies in the garden of his home in County Armagh, Ireland. When he grew a bit older, he became more conscious of these little friends, and he saw them again later, when his parents moved to County Down, but none of them seemed to have “wings.” Very often, from 1902 until he was nearly fourteen years old, he heard fairy music at two blackthorn trees. When he was five years of age, he would find money left for him close to his bed, on a table or window ledge. This was always in silver three penny-bits—two, three, or four at a time. Later, there were sometimes sixpenny pieces, but the money never exceeded two shillings in value, no matter what coins were left. His parents laughed about it and called him a lucky boy, and his father blamed his mother until it was brought to light that when she was away from home the money still arrived. Then his parents could not understand where it came from, for they did not believe in fairies. This good luck followed him regularly until he reached manhood, “and even now,” he said in his letter, “I find small money in the strangest ways and places. There must be many beings outside our range of vision, so why not fairies? I think we can only see and sense according to our own vibrations. All I have said here is very true to me, and I believe in fairies.”

  The most remarkable account of fairy “apports” came from Mr. William Fell, of Llandudno, but first I will describe his introduction to the little people. He was living in a lovely house in Colwyn Bay, surrounded by five acres of garden and pleasure grounds, and on the east side of the estate a mountain stream flowed through a wooded ravine down to the sea. After retiring one evening, he was surprised to see a perfect little lady about two inches in height, carrying a small drum, which she placed on the window ledge. She then commenced to dance and sing. He had a long chat with her afterwards, and she told him her name was Veronica, and that she would live forever. She also taught him how to make a sound that would bring the fairies to him whenever he wanted them. Several weeks later, when a doctor and his wife and three-and-a-half-year-old son went to stay at the house, the little boy was very excited one morning. “Mummy,” he cried, “the fairies were dancing on my bed last night,” and he gave a perfect description of Mr. Fell’s fairy friends, who were never more than three inches in height and looked like dragonflies. Each of them had two large and four small wings, and when these were folded a perfect, human-like form was revealed.

  Years later when Mr. Fell moved to another house, he was joined by a band of fairies together with their leader—whom he called “Princess Goldilocks”—and these were the smallest he had seen so far; they were barely half an inch in size, and were green like grasshoppers. He watched some of them running up and down on the back of the couch in front of the television set. One day he had been grumbling about rates and taxes, and happened to mention, “I must ask Princess Goldilocks about it.” Then remarkable things started to happen. He, along with two or three friends, began to find silver sixpences in all kinds of places. For the first three weeks he never missed a day without picking one up. One evening, near midnight, he said “The fairies have let me down today,” but there on the rug at the side of his bed lay a sixpence.

  He had three Pyrenean Mountain dogs that thoroughly enjoyed playing with the little people. Once, he placed the dogs’ rug on the lawn to give it an airing, and when he went to fetch it in he found a sixpence in the middle of it. On another occasion he stopped his car on the promenade to give his dogs a run, and as he stepped out he saw a sixpence lying on the ground at his feet.

  Later, he was constantly finding silver three-penny bits, shillings, two-shilling pieces, and half-crowns, and these turned up on floors, chairs, mantelpiece, television set, billiard-table, ironing board, pillow, tray, doors, an electric point, a plant on the table; on top of door in passage; on the garden path and the putting green; on a tall daisy; inside a golden rosebud, which Mr. Fell was cutting, and also in a bunch of Michaelmas daisies; in a “fairy ring” in the long grass; in moss near the summer house; in a packet of dog biscuits, a cigarette packet, the bristles of a hand brush; in slippers and shoes; on Mr. Fell’s knee; on carpets and rugs, and inside the car; in or under the dogs’ bowls, and other places too numerous to mention. One day Mr. Fell was writing a letter to me, and his first wife Dorothy was sitting in the same room with a friend, Miss W., when they heard a “plop,” and Miss W. picked up a shilling, which had fallen on the carpet. She offered it to Mr. Fell, but he said “Keep it, and if they meant it for me they will
bring me another.” In less than a minute a second shilling arrived. On another occasion the fairies told him beforehand that they were giving a coin to his guest, Miss Q. This lady was busy with her knitting, and Mr. Fell was sitting chatting to her about the little people, when a sixpenny piece dropped out of her ball of wool. I was given a detailed list of the amounts and the dates on which they were found, but it is too long for inclusion in this book.

  Mrs. Margery S. Sellors, of Belper, Derbyshire, wrote to me in 1956 about two small jugs, which she found in her garden. These jugs are seven to eight inches high, and are replicas of ordinary stoneware jugs, being stone colour at the bottom and brown-glazed at the top. She explained that her husband had dug the garden twice a year and, of course, planted out and hoed, yet one day she found the first jug amongst the pansies, and a few months later a second jug amongst a different lot of pansies. She added in her letter: “It is possible, I suppose, that the first jug was thrown up by my husband’s spade, but the second one is a different matter. You see, after the first find I used to look over the pansy beds about every week, and this jug appeared in February or March this year. I think it would be about August of last year when I found the first one. They both looked fairly fresh. The pansies were planted only two years ago, and I love them very much because they always remind me of fairies or butterflies.” One of the jugs had its handle broken, and Mrs. Sellors sent it for me to see, together with a sketch she had made of the perfect one. I suggested that the little jugs might have fallen out of a doll’s house, which some child had been playing with in the garden, for I’d had similar jugs in my childhood, but she said that apart from her daughter, who was sixteen, there had been no children there for 40 years. “In the house we were in before this one,” she said, “we firmly believed we had ‘little men’ living with us. There was the incident of my rubber hot water bottle, which I always brought down with me in the mornings. One evening I could not find it anywhere. I indignantly denied leaving it upstairs, as I distinctly remembered bringing it down. We finally ran it to earth lying slap in the middle of my bed, which, of course, was made earlier by myself. Once I found my sewing machine needle had been threaded in the short time I had been out of the room.” Mrs. Sellars told me some other very interesting experiences not germane to this subject, which prove beyond doubt that she is psychic, so perhaps one day she will see the fairy donors of those tiny jugs, which she found in the pansy beds.

  The next experience occurred to my sister and me, and I have left it until the last because it is slightly different from the others. One day we found the body of a beautiful blackbird in our garden, and we buried it with due solemnity. A few days later we found the corpse of another poor bird, and buried that, too. For the next few days the weather was too cold and wet for us to go into the garden, and one afternoon I went up to my bedroom for a book and was greeted by an awful stench, which seemed to come from underneath the bed. I pulled up the bedclothes and there, on the floor underneath, was the body of a bird in an advanced state of putrefaction. I called my sister, and when she saw it she cried out in amazement, “How could it have got there; I vacuumed all the bedrooms this morning, and you know I always vacuum under the beds. Besides that, I would have smelt it at once.” We kept the outer doors shut, so no cat could have got in, and at that time we were without a dog. Owing to the weather, the only window open in my bedroom was a small high one, and it was open no more than two inches because the rain had been coming in. I removed the dead body and hurriedly buried it in the wet garden, glad to be rid of the offensive odour. The next day my sister called me upstairs. She was standing in her bedroom, and the same nauseating smell greeted me before I walked in. “Look” she said, and there under the bed lay the decomposing body of another bird! And the windows were closed! We stared at each other, and the same thought was in both our minds. The fairies must have seen us burying the first bird in the garden and approved of our action. The second bird in the garden may have been left there by a cat, or the fairies had already decided to make use of us. When the weather was too bad for us to go out, they thought they’d attract our attention by bringing the corpses inside. The next time it might be a dead mouse or a rat; a frog, hedgehog or squirrel, or anything else they thought fit to transport, and as time and space are no objects to the fairies they could start bringing us dead birds and animals from far and wide so that we could give them a decent burial. It was too much, and I said aloud to them: “I know your intentions are good, but please stop this at once. We are not going to be your official gravediggers, and if you bring any more in we shan’t bury them.” The fairies must have heard me, for that was the end of our macabre findings!

  Chapter 11: The Vesting of Psychic Power, Fairy Playmates, and Fairy Photographs

  Sometimes it is possible for a seer to vest his power temporarily on a non-seer when in proximity or by means of touch. I am grateful to Col. K. Chodkiewicz, the writer and lecturer who delivered the Blavatsky Lecture on “Physical Forces and Spiritual Intelligences” at the annual convention of the Theosophical Society in 1958, for sending me the following translation of a letter he received from a Polish friend of his, who did not wish his name to be mentioned. “I got acquainted with a farming family, with whom I spent a few days. The farmer, scientifically minded like myself, nevertheless believed that gnomes, fairies, etc., really exist. Asked how he can believe in such fables, he answered that these are not fairy tales.

  “Next day he took me to the river for fishing, and we went with our angling rods and sat on the bank of the river. After a while he turned towards me and said, ‘Here they come.’

  “‘Who?’ I asked.

  “‘Fairies,’ was the answer. I gaped at the spot but I did not see anything. At this moment my friend grasped my hand firmly, and at once I saw two female figures floating above the ground and approaching us. I wanted to touch them to have proof that it was an illusion, and I moved towards them, releasing my hand, but when I lost contact with the hand of my friend I could not see them anymore. My friend took hold of my hand again, and once more I saw both figures. Next day my friend showed me the home elemental in his house, with whom he spoke as with a man, and who, disappearing, left a small, shining cloud, lasting for hours. I thought later about the whole problem, and considered the fact how I, a serious student of science, could fall under such spell or illusion. I must either change completely my whole scientific attitude, or I must think that it was an illusion indeed.”

  Two weeks later, the Colonel received another letter from his Polish friend, who had been unable to alter his scientific attitude and had convinced himself that it was an illusion, and that his host had “put the picture of the fairies telepathically” into his mind. As Col. Chodkewicz said in his covering letter to me: “One can never convince anybody who does not want to be convinced. Such people would rather deny the facts when they cannot explain them in their own way.” How true! And if the visions had been solely due to telepathy, the link-up would have been purely mental, and no physical contact would have been necessary! A more uncomfortable method than the mere holding of hands is described in the Rev. Robert Kirk’s book The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauna and Fairies: “For a curious person to get a transient sight,” the “Inquirer” was told to put his left foot under the seer’s right foot, and while, the seer’s hand was laid on his head he looked over the seer’s right shoulder. Another way consisted of laying ones head on the seer’s knee!

  Col. Chodkiewioz informed me that the children in Poland often see fairies, play with them, and give them various names. “Unfortunately,” he said, “the power to see them generally vanishes when the youngsters grow up, for the etheric retina is then fully coordinated with the physical eye, and the ‘etheric’ sight is lost.” Many children at one time or another have had fairy playmates, which are by no means all imaginary.

  J.R.D., of Notts., used to have four fairy playmates, and he would play games with them regularly at one end of the bedroom while his mother
bathed his baby sister in front of the fire at the other end. He called these sprites—which were quite visible to him—Bobbert, Diddett, Foggy, and Jewels.

  Mrs. Ada Amiley West, who for many years had a herbalist’s shop in Nottingham, knew a little boy at Newton Abbot, Devon, who could see fairies. He had some playmates and was very fond of them. She said he would walk along, chattering away, and one day she heard a boy ask him whom he was speaking to, and he replied: “Ssh! I’m talking to the pixies.”