"...It may be that a certain detachment of mind may be a prerequisite to having what is clearly some kind of phsychic experience, and the lone traveler is well placed to be in a receptive condition. A Stowmarket (Suffolk) man walking home one moonlit night in 1842, suddenly came across a group of fairies:"

"There might be a dozen of them, the biggest about three feet high, and small ones like dolls. Their dresses sparkled as if with spangles, like the girls at shows at Stow fair. They were moving round hand in hand in a ring, no noise came from them. They seemed light and shadowy, not like solid bodies. I passed on saying, the Lord have mercy on me, but them must be the fairies, and being alone then on the path over the field could see them as plain as I do you. I looked after them when I got over the stile, and they were there, just the same moving round and round. I ran home and called three women to come back with me and see them. But when we got to the place they were all gone. I could not make out any particular things about their faces. I might be forty yards from them and I did not like to stop and stare at them. I was quite sober at the time."

"...Two accounts follow from people who were lucky enough to see nature spirits during some their brief appearances in human form. Cynthia Montefiore of Somerset wrote in 1977."

"I was in the garden with my mother at her home... when this occurred. Mother wanted to show me the correct way to take cuttings from rose trees. She stood behind the finest rose tree we had with a pair of scissors in her hand, while I stood in front of it. Thus we faced one another with the rose tree between us. Suddenly Mother put a finger to her lips to indicate silence and then pointed to one of the blooms. With astonishment I saw what she was seeing- a little figure about six inches high, in the perfect shape of a woman and with brilliantly coloured diaphanous wings resembling those of a dragonfly. The figure held a little wand and was pointing it at the heart of a rose. At the tip of the wand there was a little light, like a star. The figure's limbs were a very pale pink and visible through her clothes. She had long silvery hair which resembled an aura. She hovered near the rose for at least two minutes, her wings vibrating rapidly like those of of a hummingbird, and then she disappeared. 'You saw that, didn't you?' asked my mother. I nodded and we both went back to the house astonished and enriched by our mutual experience and having forgotten entirely our rose-cutting. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the experience was the way in which the little creature we both saw corresponded in practically every detail to the archetypal fairy of folklore and nursery stories. I know now that these descriptions are firmly founded on reality. This was proved to me once again by a second experience I had when I was alone in the same garden. I was sitting reading under a tree when my eye was caught by a sudden movement in front of me. A little figure, about 18 inches tall, ran from the lawn on my left, across a path and onto another lawn, finally disappearing under a young fir tree. The sturdily built figure seemed to be dressed in a brown one-piece suit. I was not able to see the face because it was turned away from me. I immediately jumped up to investigate the area around the fir tree but there was no longer any sign of this gnome. Not long after this episode a man friend of the family, who was obliging my mother by digging in the vegetable garden, saw the selfsame gnome and described it to me..."

"...A County Clare man told folklorist Lady Gregory:" "I saw them myself one night I was going to Ennis with a load of straw. It was when we came to Bunnahow and the moon was shining, and I was on top of the load of straw, and I saw them in a field. Just like jockeys they were, and riding horses, red clothes and caps they had like a jockey would have, but they were small. They had a screen of bushes put up in the field and some of the horses would jump over it, and more of them would baulk when they'd be put to it. The men that were with me didn't see them, they were walking in the road, but they heard the sound of horses."

This page was created by Bluepixie, Copyright © 1997, 1998 Established August 16, 1997 Excerpts from the book "Fairies: Real Encounters with the Little People"

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